Celebrating MIT’s 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions (Part 7)

Sramana: Are there no other companies out there that take your same philosophical approach to visualization?

Ian Clemens: Contextualized visualization for companies like Tableau is an afterthought. What they are doing is rapid visualization, which remains technical and is very much a power user function. It is not very contextual. Mapping is often a product feature that our competitors decide to add once they are at the end of their development.

Our systems allow you to connect to heterogeneous systems, both internal to your enterprise as well as third-party data or live data that is coming into your enterprise, and combine all of that data together. A lot of visualization interfaces focus on working on a specific data warehouse or singular data source and various attempts to visualize it. Our systems focus on what makes sense in order to help you drive value and make a compelling picture of your data for your business. That can include weather and traffic conditions. It can include crisis events such as riots around the globe and how they affect assets such as a company’s supply chain.

It can help you to evaluate physical security such as a building floor plan and all the cameras mounted in the building, where the doors are, and which people have access to which portions of the building. There can be safety aspects such as where the fire extinguishers are located in a building, and then you can quickly overlay an evacuation plan on the building. Then you could intermingle the security and safety aspects to see how security guards can facilitate with the evacuation of the building.

Those are the kinds of questions that we answer. Standard business intelligence visualization software products do not answer those types of questions. It can be difficult to intermingle data inputs from various sources, and that is something that we are able to do very well.

Sramana: Would you say that visualization of geographic information is your primary differentiator?

Ian Clemens: Not so much. Geographic information is important within context. We also do a lot with time-based data, although I have not talked much about that yet. We have a timeline view that allows you to bring in data as it happens and also see how other factors can affect that data. There is a saying that says there is a season for all things. Retail sales rise for Christmas. Hurricane season has a definite date range. Global nautical piracy has peaks and valleys based on how hot it is outside. Time is a big element.

It is all about context and the ability to bring in data throughout your enterprise. You need to be able to bring in data from your data warehouse, from third parties, from real-time data sources, and fuse them together for a business worker. This all needs to be done by the business user, not a research scientist. That is where we differentiate ourselves.

Sramana: What are your primary customer bases?

Ian Clemens: In terms of vertical industries we are all over the place to include pharma, insurance, oil and gas, government and manufacturing. Functionally we see our largest use cases around physical security. Business continuity management is another key area. We are seeing a lot of growth right now within finance.

Sramana: That you for taking the time to discuss your company, and good luck going forward.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Celebrating MIT's 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions
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