Hagai Bar-El

Standardization and Intelligent Information Gathering

Nobody needs a page on a website to realize that accurate knowledge is key to success. No organization can succeed in its engineering efforts without knowing where the market stands every moment. No one can develop a technology without being aware of similar products, without being aware of emerging standards, or without being aware of academic work being done on similar topics.

Research publishers, such as Gartner, publish periodical reports on market advancements. These reports are very useful, and are offered to cover a variety of topics, but are often unsuitable for technology developers, because:

• They focus on business rather than on technology. They focus on the "what" rather than the "how". We are technologists.
• They base their reports on publicly available information. Our service offers review of material that is restricted in its audience. For example, we can report on progress in standardization committees to customers who are members of these committees and who have access to the material that is used to carry out the analysis.
• These reports are written to be general enough for the public to benefit from them. This makes sense for one-size-fits-all reports, but may be less adequate for a company that needs an extra focus on a particular technology or on a particular aspect of it.

We offer a service of manual review and analysis of various information sources and compilation of well-organized customer-specific digests, including detailed analysis of facts learned from these information sources. These sources may be, but are not limited to the following:

• News, bulletins, web-casts, and other public information made available by news agencies, PR agencies, etc.
• Academic papers published by academic institutes and by individuals.
• Standardization material made available by standardization bodies to their members: draft documents, transcripts, meeting minutes, mailing list threads, etc.

This service is not about summarizing bulks of information. It is about understanding. We could probably make more customers by extending this service to each and every field of technology, but we don't. Information security is what we excel in and therefore this is what we do. Our outputs are not a mere list of events or facts. We understand what the customer does, report only on what's relevant, and explain how we see this relevance.

The service is also well suited for customers that are involved in a standardization process related to security, and who need some backup. The service allows such customers to outsource parts of the process to someone who understands this business.