Decoding the voter genome
Stuart GarfieldPaul Davis, left, CEO of IISi and CTO Richard Zimmerman, helped the DNC decipher its electorate using genomic software.
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A technology developed to map the human genome years ago was recently used by the Democratic National Committee to profile something nearly as complicated: the American voter.
Boston-based startup Intelligent Integration Systems Inc. (IISi), and Framingham's well-funded Netezza Corp. began working with the DNC over a year ago to help bring the party greater insight into its constituency. The goal was to create a system to enable the Democratic party and its state affiliates to clean and analyze data on some 200 million voters in order to better target prospective voters.
The result is a customized database computing system designed by Intelligent Integration Systems and run by Netezza's data-warehouse appliance. It is capable of processing 200 million files -- each with 900 fields of data -- 20 times faster than the ad-hoc system the DNC used in 2004, according to Ben Self, director of IT for the DNC in Washington, D.C.
The application was not the first use of IISi's platform on a high-profile national project -- nor do executives expect it to be the last.
"The first implementation of this technology was the mapping of genomic patterns," said IISi co-founder and CEO Paul Davis, who also founded Cambridge's Predictive Networks Inc. in 1999. "It provides the ability to look at an enormous amount of data by distributing the processing power across a large array of machines."
The company is now targeting several new areas: tracking Internet and electronic media usage, pharmaceutical testing and retail applications.
Davis founded IISi in 2005 with his former chief technology officer from Predictive Networks, Richard Zimmerman, and company chairman Marshall Peterson, who developed the company's technology as vice president for infrastructure technology at Celera Genomics Group, a private company that was able to map the human genome in the data center (as opposed to the lab) in 2000.
Davis wouldn't discuss revenue from the project. But major elections happen just once every two years, and IISi has already begun exploring new projects. Executives at both Intelligent Integration Systems and Netezza see a future in the technology beyond politics.
"The DNC application is unique, but the characteristics are common to other applications, such as retail," said Jit Saxena, co-founder and CEO of Netezza. "They have similar needs. They need to clean data and they correlate many things about their customers and their buying habits."
The technology itself is similar to high-performance computing, but on a more data-centric level. Where high-performance computing throws a great amount of computing power at one problem, or "job," the Netezza server and Intelligent Integration Systems engine allocates processing power to a large amount of data, dealing with a large number of small jobs.
With 215 employees and $68 million in venture funding since its inception in 2000, Netezza boasts 86 customers, according to Saxena.
Grocery giant Ahold Inc., for example, represents what executives believe could be the future of terabyte-level data. The company operates 800 retail stores under brands including local supermarket chain Stop & Shop, and is using the Netezza technology to track the buying patterns of its customers. Aggregation of this data can lead to better supply-chain management as well as the ability to predict buying trends.
"We believe we are in the very early stages of this phenomenon, and we think it will become more commonplace to use this kind of solution to gain access to customers in all kinds of industries," said Saxena.
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