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Telecommunications MatrixView claims data compression breakthrough
Telecommunications MatrixView claims data compression breakthrough | MatrixView claims data compression breakthrough |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 05 September 2006 | |
  
However the industry is littered with video compression technologies for which impressive claims have been made and which have not been able to be substantiated, and MatrixView has attracted sceptical commentary also (see below). The product, SQZit, is based on MatrixView's existing patent pending compression technology Adaptive Binary Optimisation (ABO). According to Arvind Thiagarajan, the inventor of ABO and chairman of MatrixView, "In image management, SQZit is able to gain savings of up to 40 percent on existing technology and can reduce storage needs by more than 75 percent, which will be very appealing to major storage companies such as EMC and HP." MatrixView suggests that other major applications for SQZit will be in the management of network traffic for companies such as CISCO, Juniper and Citrix. It claims that the SQZit technology is in trial with several US-based Fortune-100 companies and MatrixView OEM partners. "Initial evaluations are very promising and may lead to major revenue in first half of CY07," the company said. CEO, Noel Robertson, told iTWire: "At this stage of its early commercial release, SQZit competes very favourably with Stuffit [a marketing leading file compression product] in the area of JPEG re-compression. However, we believe SQZit will quickly surpass anything currently available in the market due to continuing improvements in its performance and range of applications." MatrixView has been listed on the ASX for about two years and has had its ABO technology on the market for a similar time, targeting primarily the medical imaging market, but with limited commercial success. Robertson said: "The strategy at that time was to take the technology and embed in the equipment to compress the image file before transmission, but none of the manufacturers of this equipment would open up their source code or put at risk the technology in their multimillion dollar machines. "So that strategy needed to change and in the last six months we have developed two new products: the SQZit product and another called Dicom Optimiser targeted at the healthcare industry. The technology is now embedded in a box that can sit outside the imaging machines." "We have concentrated enormously on putting in place a number of trials around the medical application and it is working now at a number of sites but it is never going to be a really big business, so we had to adapt the technology to mainstream opportunities which are around JPEG and MPEG. We now have a number of evaluation trails with major email providers in the US." There are however no trials in Australia. Although MatrixView is listed on the ASX it has a minimal presence here: its HQ is in Singapore, its R&D centre in Chennai and it has a sales office in the USA. "There are applications here we know of in the medical space," Robertson said. "But the decision-making processes of many Australian companies are slow and cumbersome and tend tor rely on what is happening overseas so it is much better to establish our credibility overseas." Further down the track the company is looking at embedding the technology in a chip and being able to do video decompression in real time. "It will have great application in areas such as mobile phones: you will get downloads in a fraction of the time you get today," Robertson claimed. He added that this was not an immediate priority, saying that, if the company wanted to achieve it within 12 months time, would need additional funding to employ more R&D engineers. "A lot of effort today is going into partnering with multinationals in the USA. We are also looking at a fairly substantial project in South Africa and one in Europe but these are much more project-related and the future of the business is very much around licensing the technology," he said. MatrixView may need to work hard to establish its bona fides. It has already been tarred with the same brush as several 'breakthrough' video compression 'technologies' which did not live up to their claims. The most notorious of these, to Australians at least, was Adams Platform, but there have been plenty of others. According to one, albeit anonymous and undated web page, the MatrixView technology is little more than existing compression algorithms cobbled together. However when iTWire pointed this out to MatrixView, a spokeswoman said that former employees had been seeking to undermine the company, adding, "So, yes, there will be some fairly sceptical articles out there." |
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