Our History
IKANOW was created in 2011 as a result of the observations and lessons learned by its founders working hand in hand with the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community over the past several decades. These observations were related to experiences with the challenges of information unification, where new ways of thought were required to solve the problems at hand. We believe that analysis solutions require a new way of thinking that focuses on processes and tools, specifically open source tools, which will become the primary means for businesses to solve their structured and unstructured document analysis challenges.
IKANOW is here to help solve the underlying issues of synthesizing structured and unstructured data for analytical consumption. Our goal is to enable mission agility by reducing the time required for analytical business value. In addition, we provide our customers the ability to openly consume, expand, and implement solutions to the technology in a non-proprietary model.
The motivation in forming IKANOW was to create an independent entity that could focus development efforts on an open analytics data processing platform. At IKANOW, we are focused on removing the gaps between technology and knowledge to help open source approaches gain mass appeal and adoption among enterprises and technology vendors alike.
Our Mission
It’s simple: Our goal is to make the most scalable, flexible, extensible, and user-friendly open source document-centric analytics platform available. The concept for Infinit.e was created around the need for an extremely open, extremely scalable, socially aware knowledge discovery and analytics platform built for today’s web.
It wasn’t designed in a lab, it was designed and built based on our on experiences in the analytics community. We took a very pragmatic approach and decided that building from scratch was not the best idea; instead looking at the problem holistically by using tools and techniques that allow real people to solve problems more easily and quickly.
What Motivates Us
Enabling Agile Intelligence – We believe a change is required in the way we think about solving document-centric analysis questions, specifically in regards to the process, technology, and delivery. We have invested our blood, sweat, and tears developing a methodology using open source software that redefines how we approach these questions, and we take a great amount of pride in our ability to help shape the future of this approach.
Solving Real – World Business Challenges – While working with our government’s most difficult data challenges, the IKANOW team gained extensive experience in applying technology to solve structured and unstructured data analysis challenges that delivered critical mission and business value. We would like to share this knowledge and experience with other organizations, large and small.
Open Source – We believe that open source licensing is the best way to deliver business value to today’s businesses. Open source allows the largest possible user community to consume Infinit.e, to validate that our code does what we say it does and to know that our work will have longevity beyond that of any one company or contributor.
Our Core Values
We believe every organization starts with shared values. Values are what shape everything you do and every decision you make. At IKANOW, we are:
- Committed and passionate about our mission, clients, and community. We believe whole-heartedly in the work we are doing and the impact it will have on the world.
- Transparent in our actions and behavior. We believe in honesty and integrity in every endeavor we undertake.
- Business value focused. We focus on building amazing business solutions that solve real problems.
- Positive in our actions. Positive behavior yields positive outcomes.
- We listen first, then bring solutions. Listening to our clients and users first to understand their needs before we jump off the bridge offering solutions.
- Team Players. We understand that we are always part of a larger community and team.
- Always on the lookout for good ideas. Ideas can come from anywhere and that is what’s wonderful about innovation.
- Willing to change. Understanding the world is not static, especially technology.
- Balanced – There is more to life than work. We believe work should always be fun, but we all need to have fun outside of work.
Our Commitment of Open Source
IKANOW is committed and passionate about open source. We believe that businesses and individuals today have much to gain, learn, and share by utilizing and contributing to the wonderful reference architectures and products being produced in the open source community. We feel it is our role to give back and share knowledge. Our development mantra is always releasing early and often.
Our commitment will always be that our core platform and code remain open source, even if in the future we build certain applications or tools only for paying customers.
Our Technology
Infinit.e is the first Open Source document analytics cloud platform, using production proven OSS projects like Lucene, elasticsearch, Hadoop, MongoDB, Tomcat, and many others. Our objectives are:
- To provide, maintain, and enhance an “internet-scale” document analytics platform incorporating the most innovative and mature Open Source projects on the market.
- To continue to develop the functionality based on analyzing and abstracting real users’ requirements.
- To make the platform’s source available to everyone under standard Open Source licenses.
- To provide a simple but powerful front end to enable and demonstrate the platform’s most important capabilities.
- To help organizations customize the tool to align to their existing processes/tradecraft, as well as to take advantage of new opportunities afforded by the tool’s functionality.
- To build more focused, smaller scale, applications using modified versions of the platform (e.g. for performance/scale vs. functionality).
Our Long Term Objectives
We are dedicated to continuing to innovate and extend the current and future generations of the Infinit.e platform, as well as to continue inventing business value driven tools and cutting-edge applications to further document-oriented analytics. We will always work closely with the community and continue to deliver an array of analytical and software services focused on improving the document-oriented analysis experience for our customers and partners.
Now that you know about IKANOW, find out how we can help you:
