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Connecting the dots

Visual Analytics’ data mining products help enforce the law around the world

Friday, Feb. 17, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Rachael Golden⁄The Gazette Visual Analytics CEO Chris Westphal, on why his data mining and analysis company is still in Poolesville, said, “We could have gotten office space in Bethesda, but the glass and marble and steel wasn't that important to us. We'd rather take the money and roll it into employee benefits.“ And the company has a general purpose room, above, with games for employees to enjoy at lunch.

‘‘I always liked the underdog,” said Westphal, CEO and co-founder of Visual Analytics Inc.of Poolesville, a data mining and analysis company.

‘‘Many times the criminal element has better equipment, more money and unlimited resources to conduct their operations,” Westphal said. ‘‘Basically it is an unfair playing field. Law enforcement has to follow rules and work with what they got ... I think the technologies we created at VAI help to level the playing field, and then some.”

So Westphal and his partners and company co-founders David O’Connor (CTO) and Bennett McPhatter (COO) have crafted their life’s work around using the latest and greatest software they can develop to provide IT services for law enforcement and public safety officials around the world.

The company’s customers include the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency — though not the agency’s domestic surveillance activities, Westphal said — and the Central Intelligence Agency, and private-sector clients such as Science Applications International Corp. Its software has been used to combat, among other illegal activities, money laundering, embezzlement and fraud.

With 35 employees, Westphal, 40, heads a company that has several multimillion-dollar contracts under its belt but may have even better days ahead, he thinks. The Business Gazette talked to Westphal recently about his career in IT, how Visual Analytics was founded and how its products help the good guys.

Where do you see the emphasis on homeland security for the future, and your company’s role?

A lot of the post-Sept. 11 money was 20-minute money — it was based on what happens in the first 20 minutes after an attack. You get your biohazard suits and you get police and firemen communicating on the scene, radios, put up a fence around the port of Baltimore ... All that stuff is reactive.

A lot of what we do is on the preventive side, the proactive side ... a lot of the information sharing, on the federal, state, local levels, to integrate all the law enforcement, public services infrastructure organizations and agencies. We’ve been involved with that with MCAC [Maryland Coordination and Analytical Center] here in Maryland, starting to tie all that together.

Describe your products.

VisuaLinks is the most powerful interactive, visual analytics system in the marketplace — it basically ‘‘connects the dots” across a large number of diverse data sets and helps expose hidden patterns and trends. We’re able to look at the relationships that exist within the data set and exploit those relationships to expose patterns and tracks. VisuaLinks is deployed throughout the world including Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South America.

These relationships can be people or events?

The data are generic, so if we’re doing a job for, say, FinCEN [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network], we’re going to be looking at people and accounts and financial transactions and addresses and phones. If we’re doing a job for a government entity it might just be looking at communications patterns ... If it’s for the FBI it could be people and organizations and how they connect together.

So the goal is to look at these networks, determine how people are interrelated, what links are important, what characteristics tend to stand out a bit more, and then be able to essentially act on the patterns that we expose.

DIG [a product selected for MCAC] is an information-sharing system that allows different organizations to securely share data without giving up ownership or control of their sources. It is an ideal solution for fusion centers. Fusion centers are a new fundamental requirement for consolidating the resources for a region — county, city, state or nation. One primary focus is to have the resources to securely access, query, integrate, analyze and report on data throughout the region. The center provides the infrastructure and personnel to support these functions — and more important, to ‘‘act” on the results.

Are all your clients governments?

Right now it’s 90 percent government. Part of our future expansions will be more in the commercial sector.

But the patterns that we are looking at are constantly evolving. We have an intelligent adversary, and you also have many different sources ... and every source will give you different sets of patterns, so it is like a river flowing. Every new bit of work that comes by will show you something new and different that you haven’t seen before.

You’re from New York?

Yes, Chappaqua, in Westchester County.

What did your dad do?

He was identified early as a math whiz, and was a forecaster for Reader’s Digest. He generated computer models to approximate how many copies of the magazine they needed to sell and how to adjust their production schedules. He bought me a Radio Shack computer, one of the early models of home computers, when I was a kid. I was always good at programming and in eighth grade I was taking computer courses at the high school, doing Basic programming.

What was your first job out of college?

I went to work for a company called BDM [offices in Tyson’s Corner and Rosslyn in Northern Virginia]. We were working on advanced technologies for the Defense Department and other agencies. I got interested in analytical work, gathering information, helping users understand the information.

I also worked on projects, expert systems, for DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], which was really good because I got to work with a lot of Ph.D.s at the time, a really good learning experience.

What did you do after BDM?

I took a sabbatical and went to work at the Technical University of Denmark on some expert systems dealing with sensor fusion. Made some great friends and had a wonderful experience. After that I worked at IDA [Institute for Defense Analysis], on expert systems for the FBI dealing with organized crime and terrorism.

How did you get to Bethesda?

I worked at United Information Systems [since acquired by other companies] in Bethesda, where I met my current partners, David and Ben. UIS was basically a services company that provided IT government services, and since we were going to work on product, we had to restructure and refocus. Their business model and what we wanted to do didn’t sync up so that’s why we spun out. We were focused on intel, law enforcement, financial crimes, fraud, where they were focused more on medical research.

So you three started Visual Analytics? How much did it cost for computers at the beginning? Was that the biggest cost?

It was incremental. We’d get stuff from here, from there, from different retailers and we actually assembled our own servers for a year and a half. We could do that for a few thousand dollars. If we had to go out and buy a server, it might be six, seven, eight thousand dollars at the time. So we certainly saved some money that way.

And we [didn’t draw] salaries for two or three months. So those monies went to buy the equipment, the lawyers for incorporation, for document reviews, that stuff. And we worked out of our houses for a while as well, and then finally as we grew, we realized we had to get some office space put in place.

Bennett’s father had some space in here [Poolesville building] and we kind of doubled up with him and then eventually grew out of that and then kept growing and growing, taking over more and more of the building.

From information you told The Gazette in 2002, you said you were expecting $10 million in sales that year. But the information provided to Deloitte & Touche, for its Maryland Technology Fast 50 list in October, said the company expected $4.4 million in revenue for ’05. What happened in between?

About two years ago when we looked at our revenue and we looked at the industry and looked at how we were fitting in, certainly we had aggressive projections then because we were still doing quite a bit of services [as opposed to developing products]. And we were subcontracted to a lot of the bigger integrators, who controlled and ran a lot of these projects, and we were at odds with them sometimes.

So we decided that we would transition away from those services and focus more and more exclusively on our products. So whatever the projections we stated back then were largely based on services projects.

But since we transitioned away from that, we had to pull in our belt. Then we were able to focus back on our technology, because in terms of revenue we want the pendulum to swing to the other side and be more product-oriented. And the pendulum has definitely been swinging over that way.

What are your goals for ’06?

One of things we’ve done is hire a vice president of sales [Randall Jackson]. As a small business, Dave, Ben and myself wear many hats. Up to now, the sales front of the company has been ourselves. So the revenue that we generated was pretty much generated on a part-time basis.

So a big part of our 2006 game plan is to expand our sales and marketing presence. For our license sales alone, our goal for ’06, and I won’t give you an exact number, but it is at least eight digits,

And you’re in a lot of countries around the world?

Last year, from January to June, I visited 12 countries ... and just on Delta alone had over 100,000 frequent flier miles. In Paraguay we have three governments coming online for information sharing, for example. We see that as a real big growth market for 2006, 2007. We have installs in Poland, Russia, the Netherlands, Turkey, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, El Salvador. So the future looks bright.