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October 22, 2014

Cognitive Scale Introduces Cognitive Cloud Platform

AUSTIN, Tex., Oct. 22 — After 18 months focused on product and technology development, Cognitive Scale today emerged from stealth with the industry’s first technology independent cognitive cloud platform, four vertical industry applications, new customers, partnerships with technology titans, and 22 patents filed. The company is on track to close 2014 with multi-million dollars in revenue resulting from several high-value customer contracts.

Cognitive Scale is led by a team of serial entrepreneurs and technologists with in-depth enterprise software expertise in cognitive computing, Big Data, analytics, and service oriented architectures. Cognitive Scale was founded by Chief Technology Officer Matt Sanchez, formerly the leader of IBM Watson Labs. The team’s collective experience and formal education includes leadership and technology roles at Dell, IBM, Oracle, Perot Systems, and MIT. The company is privately funded by The Entrepreneurs’ Fund, a venture fund for early stage cognitive computing companies started by Manoj Saxena, former general manager of IBM Watson and chairman of Cognitive Scale.

“There are three jaw-dropping facts that limit the capabilities of Big Data. First is 55 percent of big data initiatives fail. Second is 70 to 80 percent of the world’s data is trapped in silos within and outside company walls with no secure and reliable way to access it. Third, valuable insights are lost because 80 percent of data is not machine readable; this is commonly referred to as “dark data,” said Matt Sanchez, founder and chief technology officer, Cognitive Scale. “We address these gaps through cognitive computing to help customers improve decision making, personalize consumer experiences and create more profitable relationships.”

According to Deloitte, the cognitive computing market in the U.S. will continue to grow, expanding from its current $1B to more than $50B by 2018.

Industry’s First Cognitive Clouds Accelerate Value from Big Data Investments

Available today, Cognitive Scale’s “Insights Fabric” is a portable, open, standards-based cognitive cloud platform that accelerates value from a company’s existing investments in Big Data. It does this by extracting patterns and insights from dark data sources that are almost totally opaque today. This includes information found in databases, devices, blogs, reviews, emails, social media, images, and other unstructured data sources.

Three critical differentiators of the cognitive cloud platform are its ability to extract insights from data while enforcing security and sovereignty policies. Second, its ability to understand natural language and generate personalized insights that learn with every user interaction. Third, the ability to create a cognitive cloud in 10 seconds, deliver your cognitive app in 10 hours, and customize it with your data within 10 days using any infrastructure including IBM Bluemix, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

“Given the massive amounts of data that accumulate every day, especially unstructured data, it’s clear that the ability to go beyond traditional Big Data analytics to solve real business issues remains both a challenge and a top priority for organizations today,” said Sue Feldman, CEO of industry analyst firm Synthexis. “We need better methods to address complex problems that draw on multiple types of data at scale from both inside and outside the organization. But the combination of advanced technology and industry knowledge that is necessary is scarce. If we are to solve the most critical problems in customer care, healthcare, in finance, in fraud or intelligence, we need platforms that can do the heavy lifting for the rest of us without having to develop them ourselves. That’s what Cognitive Scale has done. For this reason, we see Cognitive Scale as a front-runner in the emerging cognitive computing marketplace.“

Industry Specific Cognitive Applications

Also available today are Cognitive Scale’s first vertical industry clouds for the travel, healthcare, retail, and financial services industries. Examples include consumers looking for inspired travel or shopping advice or healthcare providers looking to manage high-risk populations by combining clinical, social and lifecycle data.

These industry-optimized clouds contain billions of curated data points and contextual facts and help accelerate the creation of industry specific cognitive applications that deliver insights-as-a-service.

Building a Cognitive Ecosystem

Cognitive Scale is enabling and extending the growing cognitive computing ecosystem through partnerships with content, technology and systems integrators including Avention, IBM Watson, IBM Bluemix, IBM SoftLayer, Amazon Web Services, and Deloitte.

“Cognitive Scale is helping advance and accelerate the adoption of IBM Watson’s cognitive capabilities and delivering a highly differentiated and valued offerings via its cognitive cloud platform,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group. “Their innovative approach to providing access to next generation technologies like Watson will benefit the growing number of businesses that are turning to cognitive computing to derive even greater value from Big Data.”

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