Master of visual data

Space-Time Research was a small Australian software company with a vision: to present complex or large data in a visual fashion. But it wasn’t until new owners changed the product, injected money and vision that it went global.

Today, we’re talking to Don McDougall, CEO of Space-Time Research which has won a large contract with Lockheed Martin. Don will tell us how they landed the contract, how trends are changing in business intelligence and how they built a global business.

Amanda: Hi Don, so who started the company?

Jack Massey started it, over 15 years ago. Jack’s a very, very interesting person and the name Space-Time Research comes somewhat from the work of the man called Edward Tufte, who’s an American and has written several books. In fact, two of his books are sitting in front of me. One is called Visual Explanations and the other, Envisioning Information. Tufte and Jack Massey really had a belief in presenting data in a visual fashion and that’s what Jack tried to do, build a company that did that particularly with public data, like for example, census data.

Now this would have been something that would have soaked up a lot of money in the early days. Tell us how he took the business from the early days to where it is now.

Jack focussed on particular customers and almost built “custom” software for those customers, which was a really valuable way to learn the market, to learn the requirements and to learn what needed to be in the software.

What that didn’t do was build the basis for really growing the business because you don’t have scalability in custom software. You have scalability in standard software. So a couple of years ago new investors came and saw what was here and were excited about it and were willing to incrementally invest, so the software could be sold repeatedly around the world.

How did you get the investors in and what potential did they see?

Well, the two investors are Starfish and Macquarie. Both of them I think have really good strong visions and really liked the vision of being able to take a small Australian company and scale it by selling in Europe, selling in Russia, selling particularly in the United States.

They also saw some changes in the market and in technology and those changes were really simple. There is an incredible amount of bandwidth available today through the whole internet and incredibly cheap storage, so people aren’t afraid of accumulating large amounts of data. Those things made a huge difference to the attitude towards whether you could scale this kind of business.

So what are the new trends in this data and presenting of data?

I had come from one of the large business intelligence companies and the thing that’s really interesting about this company is it’s self-serviced. I don’t need a programmer to write reports for me. I can go to the system and get the information myself through a self-service approach and that was incredibly valuable.

But the thing that’s happened since then is tools and experiences like Google, the incredible growth of Google, that causes people to think differently about the way they get data. So now we look at the concept of public intelligence as opposed to business intelligence and I think that’s a huge change.

Our focus has always been the government and we’ve always talked about business intelligence in government, certainly with the current demand for transparency in government. In the US, President Obama has been very vocal about data transparency and government transparency.

In Australia it’s been the same thing, willingness and enthusiasm for government 2.0, which means providing information to the public. Now we can aggregate the wisdom of crowds. You can provide data to people so that they can use that data to collectively influence public decision, and that’s incredibly exciting.

Lockheed Martin for example is a $1 million contract for you. How did you get it?

It’s a big major contract, including the services and it’s a multi-year. This contract is part of the US Census that happens every 10 years by law within the constitution in fact and one of the really, really important parts of doing a census is the data quality.

You have to ensure that nothing goes wrong with somebody making an error somewhere along the lines, a piece of equipment making an error or even a computer glitch of any kind. So our software is very good at dealing with incredibly large amounts of data and at dealing with the whole issue of quality, and more importantly not just quality but confidentiality. The US Census through IBM uses our software for the tabulation and dissemination, and because of that very positive relation with US Census, Lockheed selected us along with our technology for the data quality part. They have a very, very critical part of the census, they have 100 days to collect all the data and ensure that it’s accurate.

What sort of new technology are you seeing coming through in this space?

Well, I think the new technology is around things like cloud computing. One of the things that we’re doing is providing our software in the cloud. That means that somewhere in the US, probably on the Columbia River in Oregon where there’s lots of power and lots of cooling, there’s thousands of computers and we don’t know which ones of those we’re using when we use our software but we don’t have to have a room full of computers here and our customers don’t have to have a room full of computers.

So unlimited amounts of storage, unlimited amounts of computing power, make that a lot different. The other kinds of things is the Java technology that allows for what’s called RESTful. And you don’t want me to get carried away, but RESTful technology means I can get very, very high performance!

If I’m looking at a graph of all people and I want to get rid of the males so I can only see female population or if I’m looking at a graph for cancer and I want to look at a couple of particular kinds of cancer rather than the graphs for all of the cancers at the same time, I want that to happen instantaneously. When I click the button for lung cancer, I want the lung cancer bar graph to show up right then and there. So this RESTful State technology makes a whole difference to that and allows what’s called rich internet applications and richness is all part of this data experience that this public intelligence really requires.