Celebrating MIT’s 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions (Part 6)

Sramana: Your company started in 2004. How have you grown throughout the years?

Ian Clemens: Through 2007 growth was very rapid. We went from two people to 50 people in three years. We rapidly grew to the $3 million to $4 million dollar range. We had flat years in 2008 and 2009 due to the economic downturn. In 2010, we made a big decision to achieve faster growth. We had noticed a lot of opportunity that we had not seized on because we could not build up our sales teams fast enough to meet the opportunity.

As a result we took a round of funding from Plymouth Venture Partners here in Michigan in 2010. That has been a fantastic move, especially after bootstrapping for so many years. That allowed us to quickly hire five new sales people and invest in a new mobile product called Fetch, which we just launched.

Sramana: What is your competitive landscape? Who do you see in deals and who do you see as your competition?

Ian Clemens: Our competitive advantage goes back to a few things. One, we focus on data visualization for the business user. To do that and create a quality user experience your user experience has to be compelling and interactive. We like to say that our technology does not require training for a business user to start benefiting from it, just some orientation. We do a lot of training for developers who want to extend our product or power users who want to have applications based on our Digital Fusion software.

In terms of the visualization, we are big proponents of contextualized visualization. If you think of the classic dashboard in business intelligence and you will imagine an array of charts, gages, and dials in your browser. They are not really related to one another, and when you think about it you are using a big gauge to show a couple of numbers, as if taking a huge piece of real estate to show off that number makes it more valuable.

What really makes data valuable, and what we believe leads to insight, is placing data into context. The two primary context that we work in are location and time. We can put your data in the context of location on a map and tie that with time to illustrate relationships that you have never thought of. That helps you realize how many things you don’t even know. A dashboard requires you to know what you want to see before you build the interfaces to show you those numbers.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Celebrating MIT's 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions
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