Exclusive Interview With The President And CEO: Datawatch Corporation (DWCH) - Michael A. Morrison
June 13, 2012 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published Business and Application Software Report offering a timely review of the sector. This Special Report contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs, Equity Analysts and Money Managers. Please find an excerpt below.
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Michael A. Morrison is President and Chief Executive Officer of Datawatch Corporation, and is responsible for driving the strategy for the company's report analytics solutions and its other products. Before Datawatch, Mr. Morrison was Vice President, Financial Performance Management, at International Business Machines Corporation, and held a similar position at Cognos before its acquisition by IBM in 2008. Before Cognos, he was Chief Operating Officer at Applix Inc., a business analytics software company. During his three-year tenure at Applix, Mr. Morrison was responsible for sales operations, marketing, business development and customer support. During this time, the company emerged as the fastest-growing vendor in its market segment, achieving compound annual growth rates in excess of 30%. Applix was acquired by Cognos in 2007. Mr. Morrison holds a J.D. from Boston College Law School and a B.S. in mathematics from Tufts University.
TWST: What is Datawatch Corporation?
Mr. Morrison: Datawatch (DWCH)is a publicly traded 22 million software company that's been in business for about 25 years. We have a strong balance sheet and a worldwide customer base of over 40,000 organizations. From a product and solution perspective, Datawatch is focused on solving an increasingly important part of the big data issues inside businesses. We specifically focus on delivering software that provides organizations the ability to get at data that's trapped in semistructured reports and business documents to improve their analytics for decision-making.
TWST: What are the company's principal solutions?
Mr. Morrison: Our principal solution is the Monarch Report Analytics platform, and again, this is technology specifically designed to access large-scale, semi-structured content for analytics from many different sources and formats, like print spools, log files, PDFs, text files, EDI streams, HTML and business documents. In essence, this represents a new paradigm we call "report analytics" that allows companies to vastly increase the value they get from all semistructured content inside and outside their organizations. And our approach is unique in that we leverage an organization's investments in existing reports and in existing reporting processes. We are able to harvest the valuable data and the insights that are trapped in these static reports and deliver the results back to the organization through a self-service analytic environment to enable faster, more efficient decision-making.
TWST: Who is a typical customer for Datawatch today? Are there integrated verticals the company tends to have more expertise in or tends to focus on?
Mr. Morrison: We cut across all verticals and virtually every horizontal application inside an organization, but our top verticals are financial services, health care, manufacturing, retail and the public sector.
TWST: What are some of the industries Datawatch is best suited for?
Mr. Morrison: To answer this simply, any industry where there is a large amount of reports and semistructured content. A good "for instance" is in financial services.One of our financial services customers is a large institution that provides outsourced settlement services for more than 60 large brokerage firms. This customer uses our report analytics solution to parse through hundreds of millions of pages of mainframe green bar reports every month in order to deliver to their clients, via the Web, detailed analysis and reports of trades, settlements and broker commission - all in a secure, auditable environment.Another good example is in health care, where our solution enables hospitals to immediately transform semistructured EDI streams containing detailed remittance files of accepted and rejected claims into an interactive dashboard that highlights accepted and rejected claims by insurance company, by physician, by procedure and a number of other criteria. Our report analytics solution plays a critical role in streamlining revenue-cycle management activities in these hospitals.
TWST: What are the keys, as far as competition, and how do they play into Datawatch's strategies, as far as overall sustainability and differentiating the company?
Mr. Morrison: With regard to competition, as I mentioned earlier, we're quite unique in our approach to analytics in that we leverage an organization's existing reporting infrastructure as opposed to starting from scratch, by moving source data into a relational database. So there's really no meaningful direct competition to Datawatch. We're very complementary to the traditional players in the market - the business intelligence players, the ERP players and the content-management-system players.We like to say that Datawatch serves a content blind spot that exists in a lot of organizations, where they have lots of data assets in semistructured formats but no way to get any real value from these assets. We allow these organizations to access the reports from various systems and vendors that tend to be static and isolated, and harvest the data from the reports into a single environment for dynamic and interactive analysis.
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