Chiliad - The Leader in Virtual Information Sharing

Chiliad, Inc., is a privately-held company based in Washington, D.C., focused on enabling our customers to share information across technical and organizational boundaries. Our Discovery/Alert platform is the first software to overcome the information "stovepipe" problem, which prevents corporations and governments from seizing full competitive advantage from information distributed across their enterprises and beyond.

Chiliad enables large organizations to connect, search and analyze their distributed information resources with the same precision and thoroughness as if those resources were in a single centralized repository. Chiliad solves the information "stovepipe” problem by creating a distributed network of cooperating nodes that tap into each application or data source and extract both structured and unstructured information without disrupting existing systems. Each node contains an instance of the Chiliad software, and the nodes work cooperatively and efficiently in a true peer-to-peer grid to reliably deliver the best information across all available resources to any authorized user. The Chiliad approach is unique among vendors in the search, database, information access, and business intelligence fields in its ability to empower users to “connect the dots” across widely distributed systems.

The evolution of Chiliad’s software platform has been influenced by several “information disasters” that have occurred over the last 25 years, most notably the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Investigations into both events concluded that information stored in incompatible databases and documents maintained by different departments and organizations could have enabled managers and officials to avert disasters. But there simply was no existing technology to “connect the dots” across so many incompatible systems and organizations.

Efforts to solve this problem provided some of the early funding behind Chiliad’s core technology, and later drove the first deployment of Chiliad’s software within the U.S. intelligence community to create a virtual knowledge sharing environment across distributed information stovepipes, databases and applications.

The rapid deployment of Chiliad's cross-stovepipe software for cooperative, proactive knowledge fusion has improved national security, according to Congressional testimony by agency directors. Chiliad's achievement of virtual search and dynamic global knowledge fusion via massively parallel cooperative processing represents a sea change in the use of computers to share knowledge and enhance intelligence. Chiliad is at the cutting edge in enabling large-scale virtual information sharing across secure and public components of the electronic grid. Pervasive deployments of Chiliad's capabilities for business intelligence could change the competitive landscape in information-intensive industries.

US Government Customer Testimonials

Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI is the lead US government agency for domestic counterterrorism.

The FBI has purchased a worldwide enterprise license to Chiliad's software. The agency is rapidly expanding its use of Chiliad's software. The results in increased user productivity and reduced response time have been as dramatic as any in the history of computing:

• FBI reported a reduction in the time needed to process a counterterrorism task from 32,000 hours to one-half hour
• Productivity savings of 170,000 analyst hours ($ 3 mil) in first four months of use 
• 300% return on investment in productivity savings in first four months of use 
• Contributing role helping to earn only 'A' score on "counterterrorism report card" issued to the US Government by the bipartisan members of the 9/11 Commission, for interdicting terrorist financing, as amplified in Congressional testimony

In a CBS Evening News story, the FBI CIO described the system driven by Chiliad's software as "the central database in the FBI's information-sharing approach in the post-9/11 world." The FBI Investigative Data Warehouse supports over 8,000 active multi-agency user accounts running one million queries/analyses per month across more than 50 multi-agency data sources, including over one billion documents and database records - with an average query/analysis response time of about four seconds.

In a CNN interview, one intelligence agency user called this software "uber-Google" (super-Google).

The FBI has referred to Chiliad's software in the Washington Post as "one of the most powerful data analysis tools available to law enforcement and counterterrorism agents." The agency has described the capability of this software as "connecting the dots in its fight in the war on terrorism."

Users access Chiliad software over secure networks from FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, DHS, CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon to connect the dots across hundreds of indexes in parallel, representing close to one billion structured database records and unstructured documents from multiple US intelligence agencies.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is responsible for creating a new Information Sharing Environment to connect US intelligence agencies. Both agencies have turned to Chiliad's software to take advantage of advanced scalable software for information sharing and real-time knowledge fusion across decentralized electronic information stovepipes and silos.

Selected and funded by ODNI, Chiliad's software was used to create the first operational pilot to achieve and demonstrate effective, secure decentralized information sharing across US intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Intelligence and Law Enforcement

Chiliad has become the recognized commercial software leader in cooperative distributed search, analysis, knowledge fusion, and alerts across the full content of decentralized collections of heterogeneous classified information within the intelligence community. The performance of Chiliad's software has generated commendations, awards, accolades, and positive Congressional testimony, delivering timely new intelligence necessary to anticipate and interdict.

Law enforcement officials have used Chiliad Discovery/Alert successfully in large scale to perform analysis across enormous repositories of electronic data to find information and discover knowledge. These efforts have dramatically improved timelinesss and quality of results over legacy systems in which analysts had to wait for database administrators to extract data from different systems and lose context in the process. Chiliad Discovery/Alert helps personnel across multiple agencies to make connections and find information to solve cases faster, instead of trying to piece together data across different systems in a slow manual process.

Industry Impact

The unique value of Chiliad Discovery/Alert can be realized in any industry in which large organizations must manage widely distributed systems and information repositories. The same advanced technology that transformed many activities with the intelligence and law enforcement fields can provide strategic advantages to corporations seeking competitive advantage from enhanced corporate intelligence through distributed analysis.

Pharmaceutical/Life Sciences

Pharmaceutical/Life Sciences companies face a daunting regulatory burden, which requires diligence at all levels of information input, storage, retrieval, and analysis. FDA regulations and monitoring mandate that this informaton be available before, during and after the drug approval process. Researchers can use Chiliad Discovery/Alert to locate and share existing research across a multi-location organization, with partners, and across the Web. In addition, employees can use real-time alerts to track product mentions, competitive information, news about regulatory changes and possible product liability events.

Fraud in the form of counterfit drugs has emerged in recent years as an illegal activity totalling $30 billion annually. Because of the toll in human suffering and lost sales, forward-looking pharmaceutical companies are implementing aggressive fraud-prevention and investigative programs targeting this activity. The same capabilities that assist law enforcement and intelligence agents are being deployed in this private sector activity.

Aerospace

Aircraft and other large systems produce training and maintenance manuals that can often include thousands of pages. Chiliad Discovery/Alert can help employees to pinpoint the information needed to do a particular job. As more employees follow a certain research track, it makes it easier for subsequent employees to locate and contact those employees who have already researched and solved a problem or filled a knowledge need. The software will help decision makers to better and sooner understand which aircraft and which systems are having which production or maintenance issues by making connections visible across different distributed systems.

Healthcare

The typical hospital environment maintains information across a variety of computer systems and faces pressure to conform to HIPAA regulations. It is often difficult to connect data across these disparate systems. Chiliad Discovery provides a way to create unified views across distributed collections securely, wherever they are located, assisting with patient care, regulatory compliance, financial analysis, disease tracking, customer service, research and more.

Legal

The legal discovery process often generates truckloads of data, which must be processed very quickly. The first phase engine underlying Chiliad's software, licensed to West Publishing, made the Westlaw full-text legal retrieval service the most profitable legal service in history. Chiliad Discovery/Alert enables attorneys to easily locate exactly what they need and to discover relationships and associations, which were hidden in the volumes of data. This additional intelligence and speed and ease with which it can be discovered can be the difference in making or breaking a case.

Financial Services

Financial services organizations have vast amounts of data and much of it has to be monitored for compliance with regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley in the US. Financial services companies can use Chiliad Discovery/Alert to continuously monitor all sources of information from within and outside the company, including industry news, in order to discover new strategic intelligence, receive alerts for violations, and provide the logging, tracking, and audit reports necessary to assure compliance with laws and regulations.