Large corporations have been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in data warehouses that size up to hundreds of terabytes. However, very few companies really exploit such massive sets of data to ease their decision making process.
Roger Haddad, founder and Chairman of the board of KXEN, and his team of software development and statistics high flyers, had spotted an opportunity in helping companies handle terabytes of data at a rather low cost. Founded in 1998, the company recently launched the 4th major release of its flagship software component: KXEN Analytic framework (available on Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX; and in six languages including French, English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian). KXEN has truly turned the tables in the datamining industry: whereas the traditional datamining approach cost an average of US$ 30K per model and between 4 and 6 weeks to calculate, KXEN computes a model in 3 hours for an average of $ 500 – and, although powerful and complex, their engine is very light (something like 3 megabytes only, written in C++). The out-of-the-box approach embraced by KXEN urged the Gartner Group to award KXEN a “Cool Vendor in analytics, business intelligence and corporate performance management”. In 2007, KXEN should generate US$ 10m+ in revenues and its cash flows will be positive.
By the way, KXEN is a truly global software company: headquartered in San Francisco, the bulk of its R&D engineers are located in Paris. Operations run from the US, the UK and France. On top of this, KXEN benefits from channel partners spread all over the world. It goes without saying that KXEN is backed by crème-de-la-crème venture capitalists: Sofinnova (bi-HQed in Paris and SF), XAnge (the VC arm of La Poste), Innovacom (the VC arm of France Telecom / Orange) and Motorola Ventures.
Microsoft has contributed a lot, with the release of SQL Server 2005 business intelligence modules Analyses and Reporting Services, in the democratization ("BI for all") of datamining predictive modeling and data analysis. Microsoft's [database + spreadsheet] -led approach (versus, although value-creating, more 'expensive' approaches of market leaders Oracle, Business Objects, SAS and Cognos) has been in a way disruptive. Yet, KXEN goes the extra mile and offers a simple, economical, seamless-to-deploy piece of software that doesn’t impact information systems architectures at its clients. Microsoft, KXEN and a number of other datamining challengers including French SaaS startup Lokad, which solution was devised for the SME market, have embraced a common cause: bring datamining to the mainstream.
