Newsletter from America: TeraText leads the way in the USA | ADM Feb 07

1 February 2007

By Lincoln Parker

An Australian innovation has been snapped up by a US defence giant, highlighting once again the strength of the 'Not Invented There' syndrome that appears to be so prevalent in Australian business and government circles.

In December 2006, in Washington DC, I met Steve Rizzi, vice president of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and heard a story about an Australian-developed technology that is helping overcome the unfortunate perception in Australia that if it's not developed in the US it can't be any good.

On 26 April 2006 Ron Sacks-Davis received the Australian Academy of Technical Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) Clunies Ross Award.

The Clunies Ross Award recognizes technology innovation and the application of that technology for the economic, social or environmental benefit of Australia.

However the benefits, intellectual property (IP) and ownership are being spread far wider than just Australia, as I will explain.

In 1980 Ron Sacks-Davis collaborated with Dr Kotagiri Ramamohanarao on the prototype of a computer search engine called Titan while working at Monash University in Melbourne.

It was the first system Sacks-Davis would design in a career creating information retrieval and text database management programs.

From 1991 to 1994 Sacks-Davis was Research Director of CITRI, an IT collaboration of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and Melbourne Universities.

His team created the Structured Information Manager (SIM) system which would later become the world-leading text database system known as TeraText.

As success stories go this one has gained very little exposure.

But from the genius of one man, his small group of researchers and the money from a US corporation, this Aussie home grown text database system and search engine is revolutionising large text collections.

With vast torrents of data now flowing across the Internet, unprecedented demands on information management systems have been created.

With a search capacity of 47 million pages per second per CPU, processing up to two billion documents every four seconds, while simultaneously loading data, this Australian technology is meeting the challenge.

From the US Intelligence Community to Australian Department of Defence to the Federal Government of Canada, its fame is growing and light is being shed on where it came from.

Outside of the defence and intelligence communities SAIC is a little known name.

But with 44,000 employees worldwide and an annual revenue of US$8 billion it's one of America's most powerful and influential scientific, engineering and systems integration companies.

It was the US intelligence community that first notified SAIC of the work being done by Sacks-Davis and his team in this field and from that point forward the rest was history - American history.

Because, as it turned out, the Aussie technology was bought by SAIC.

"We were told by our customer that Ron's work in the area of very large text collections was cutting-edge," said Steve Rizzi, SAIC vice president of operations in the Research, Development, Test and Evaluation Group.

"After doing some research and benchmarking on our own we figured out that SIM was significantly faster than the state of the art at that time."

In 2001, with the help of SAIC, Sacks-Davis became the managing director of InQuirion Pty Ltd, an RMIT spin-off formed to further commercialize SIM, which was later to be re-branded TeraText.

InQuirion employed 25 full-time developers and continued to grow its business until its eventual outright purchase by SAIC in October 2005.

Since then TeraText has since been put to considerable use by US intelligence agencies in pursuit of terrorists.

The system's applications for national security are incredibly significant, particularly in the global war on terror, and in some instances could be the difference between life and death.

So why wasn't this recognised, funded and kept in Australian hands?

Sadly, as many Australians will tell you, this is not an isolated case.

Many good ideas, inventions and products have gone off-shore for a variety of reasons: funding, bigger markets, or lack of local understanding and recognition.

It's the latter that needs to be fixed so the erroneous perception that if its not developed in the US it can't be any good is put to rest once and for all.

Clearly its not true and unfortunately it's the Americans, not us, that recognise the potential in Australia and our ability to innovate on a shoe string budget.

But all is not lost.

Even though SIM, now TeraText, is American owned, SAIC is investing in Australia. SAIC Pty Ltd (Australia) employs the Sacks-Davis team of about thirty people in Melbourne and plan to expand in other cities across Australia, working on programs of national significance to Australia (and other countries) in both the public and private sectors.

Currently TeraText is being used by the Australian Department of Defence, the US Department of Defence, Tenix Defence Systems, the Australian Commonwealth Government, the State Governments of Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, Standards Australia, the Australian National Library and the Federal Government of Canada.

Where do we go from here?

The question of whether a Government-industry program should be established in Australia to recognise, fund, develop and market home grown Australian technology and innovations worldwide could well be addressed.

Editor's note - the draft Defence Industry Policy released by defence minister Dr Brendan Nelson late last year goes some way towards addressing this issue, and not before time.