The journey to the patent office

“Since its Purple Yogi days, Stratify has filed technology patents for several pieces of its overall technology. A total of six patents have been filed, and four were granted by 2002. Owing to the niche nature of Stratify’s technology, obtaining the patents was straightforward,” recalls Gopalan. The importance of these patents has been more in terms of protecting Stratify’s own interpretation of generic technology approaches. “Right from developing specific flavours of the Naïve Bayes, k-means and k-nearest-neighbours technologies for data mining and artificial intelligence, Stratify’s dedicated research team has been working continuously to adapt these generic approaches to specific text-mining problems. When Stratify products are installed across a large customer base, these patents will discourage any subversive attempt to reverse-engineer these products,” quips Gopalan.

Gearing for the future technologies

Yet newer modes of communication have come in of late, like IMs and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Is Stratify addressing this challenge to archive and process such digital exchanges too?

“Yes,” says Gopalan as he explains, “Convergence of communication has opened up immense opportunities and challenges. It will not be too far-fetched to say that a voice-to-text conversion of a phone conversation that happened over VoIP can be analysed and produced as evidence. People can bring to book organisations that over-promise to make a sale. Eighty-five per cent of corporate data is unstructured (e-mails, Word documents, etc), and the new modes of communication are adding to this ‘unstructuredness’. It takes the discovery arena far beyond digitally-signed e-mails and contracts. The laws will have to keep pace with the innovations in technology for their rightful interpretation.

“At present SLDS can work with over 400 file formats, and is keeping abreast with the latest in the technology arena to take the process of e-discovery to the next level.”