Where Neuroscience meets Data Science: Saffron Technologies

Saffron’s patented technology mimics our natural ability to learn, remember and reason in real-time.’

Saffron Technology Inc. is an Intel company that combines the methods of the human brain with the power of computing to enable more informed decisions in every data-intensive field. The company essentially develops cognitive computing systems that use incremental learning to understand and unify by entity (person, place or thing) the connections between an entity and other “things” in data, along with the context of their connections and their raw frequency counts. This approach provides a semantic and statistical representation of knowledge. Headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, Saffron Technology was founded in 1999.

Saffron learns from all sources of data including structured and unstructured data to support knowledge-based decision making. Its patented technology captures the connections between data points at the entity level and stores these connections in an associative memory. Similarity algorithms and predictive analytics are then combined with the associative index to identify patterns in the data. Saffron’s Natural Intelligence platform is utilized by Global 1000 companies across industries including manufacturing, energy, defense and healthcare, to help decision-makers manage risks, identify opportunities and anticipate future outcomes, thus reducing cost and increasing productivity.

Leveraging the unique cognitive abilities of the Natural Intelligence Platform, Saffron offers two easy-to-use, comprehensive applications to learn and reveal information about your data you would never even know to look for.

SaffronStreamline™: Speeding Time-To-Market With High Quality For Smart Products
Providing end-to-end knowledge about issues and defects, SaffronStreamline™ fuses customer experience and product lifecycle intelligence to deliver higher quality products to market faster with less risk. Built on top of Saffron’s Natural Intelligence Platform, Streamline provides the industry’s first cognitive solution for the often siloed and disparate information of the application and manufacturing lifecycle. Streamline provides real-time knowledge to those who need it at the time of need.

Leveraging the power of Saffron’s Natural Intelligence Platform™, SaffronStreamline™, for issues and defect resolution, is a product lifecycle intelligence solution that sits above a customer’s existing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems. Without disruption, it unifies multi-sourced data with enterprise data into a single layer of intelligence that enables organizations to share knowledge from one to many experts across their various ecosystems. Companies solve problems quickly and shorten time to market via access to information about multi-discipline issues, expertise and the shared causes of problems. End-users from developers to project and product managers to executives can quickly access and assess areas of risk, duplicate issues being addressed, workforce redundancies and gaps, as well as predicted deadline risk. By leveraging Saffron’s unique ability to recognize patterns, anomalies and similarity – SaffronStreamline illuminates possible issue resolutions, expertise to assist from across the globe both internally and externally, and feedback from consumers. The need for these capabilities is rapidly growing given the fusion of sensors, embedded software and product engineering. This end-to-end knowledge layer helps manufacturers shorten time to market and manage potential risks in the lifecycle.

SaffronAdvantage™: On-The-Fly Entity Identification and Learning. No Technology Background Required
A visual analytics tool for business development and strategic sales professionals, corporate leadership, and analysts, that provides an interactive visual platform for exploiting Saffron’s “analytic reasoning” methods. SaffronAdvantage™ is designed to give you connected knowledge and decision experience from multiple data sources – internal and external – with speed and flexibility, giving you a wide range of solution capabilities to help you gain a competitive advantage in your industry.

SaffronAdvantage enables you to quickly form a reliable contextual awareness of key entities – such as who, what, when, where – that are relevant to a given situation. All source material – structured and unstructured – is automatically represented in SaffronMemoryBase as a massive network of memories for every entity – every person, place, and thing in your data. Each entity memory is an analytical starting point of its own, and allows the user to quickly “fly through” the entity network – discovering the associations between entities in context of who, what, when, where, how, and why they are associated.

The data source evidence is also indexed to these associative memories, enabling clear “down to the sentence or snippet” level traceability for unstructured sources, and to the record level and field level for structured sources. Context-dependent, these associations allow the user to focus on what’s relevant to the search or query, rather than having to read documents or navigate the usual “balls of yarn” produced by conventional data analytics and business intelligence tools.

Client Speak
“SaffronStreamline leverages this technology to help organizations deliver quality products to market and respond quickly to issues and defects. With the proliferation of embedded software in products of all types, cognitive systems such as SaffronStreamline will play an important role in Product Lifecycle Management and Quality Assurance.” – Dave Schubmehl, IDC Research.

Meet the Key Executive

Gayle Sheppard, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman: As CEO and Chairman, Sheppard is responsible for Saffron’s corporate vision and fundamental company direction.

Prior to joining Saffron as CEO, Sheppard worked with Saffron’s founders and customers as it’s Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. Prior to Saffron, Sheppard was Vice President and Managing Director at PeopleSoft, Inc. where she successfully turned around an underperforming business unit and developed new market strategies, CEO and President with MarketMile, LLC (now part of Rearden Commerce) where she led the development and launch of an application service business focused on serving American Express’ Corporate Purchasing Card Customers, and Vice President, Worldwide Sales, J.D.Edwards & Company, President and General Manager, J.D. Edwards Japan, K.K., and Vice President Sales and Marketing, J.D.Edwards Asia Pacific Ltd. where she was responsible for defining new market strategies and establishing and leading new business units to accelerate J.D. Edwards revenue growth in global markets.

Sheppard is a graduate of the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, where she received a B.S., Business Administration.

“Streamline is the ONLY analytics tools that handles data from every aspect of the product lifecycle to provide actionable intelligence.”