Ashburn-based Keeper Technology Wins Data Challenge
Published in Loudon Times-Mirror
Ashburn-based data storage company Keeper Technology was honored as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Disparate Data Challenge, the company announced in a statement Oct. 31.
During NGA’s “highly competitive” multi-stage Disparate Data Challenge, 36 entities were tasked with coming up with finding “innovative and cost-effective” ways of retrieving and analyzing data through in its different formats, schemas, interfaces and locations.
The goal of the challenge was to identify solutions “capable of innovative data-access capabilities” with minimal integration hurdles, and for a price lower than traditional government acquisition.
“The sheer volume of new data generated each day brings in the risk of data overflow, creating the need for better data management and processing. The real value of data can only be harnessed if it’s understandable and relevant, and delivers insight for an organization competitive gain,” Dave Donald, founder and CEO of Keeper Technology, said. “Our enterprise-class, hyper-converged storage solutions are designed for extreme scalability, flexibility and the continual evolution of technology.”
In stage 1 of the Challenge, participants were asked to implement their own working solution to demonstrate access, retrieval and analysis of datasets NGA provided.
Participants had to identify the difficulties with accessing and using NGA’s “wildly disparate” restricted-access data types.
Keeper Technology presented an application embedded within keeperSAFE with IDMT—a distributed data management platform for managing and exploiting any type of data at any size.
The Ashburn-based company moved on through stage 1 and won a $10,000 first round prize, which allowed them to advance to stage 2 of the competition comprised of a qualitative and quantitative judgment from technical experts and end users.
A panel of technical experts was then given access to Keepersolution, during the “Demo-thon” to access, retrieve and examine the datasets NGA provided in stage 1.
The solution was judged on a number of user-centric criteria including the ability to simplify day-to-day work, intuitiveness and ease of use, the speed in returning results with high precision and relevance, the ability to simultaneously query multiple disparate data sets and more.
Keeper Technology was awarded an additional $10,000 prize and honored as a top three rated solution during an awards ceremony following the stage 2 competition on Oct. 21.
