After 30 years in business, this tech company is scaling like a startup

by Andreas Rekdal
August 30, 2016

A common criticism of the tech industry is that techies tend to undervalue experience. The growth seen by a Naperville-based analytics firm in its 30th year might lend credence to that criticism — thanks in large part to data.

“Data is the lifeblood of businesses,” said Sumit Nijhawan, CEO of Infogix. “They make so many important decisions based on data that they need to make sure they can trust it.”

Ensuring data integrity is his firm’s specialty. Founded in 1982, Infogix works with Fortune 500 companies in finance, healthcare, insurance and media to ensure their data is utilized in the best way possible.

By integrating with a company’s data flow from end to end, Infogix can monitor the quality of data as well as perform more traditional analytics tasks like fraud detection, compliance monitoring and looking for inefficiencies in business operations. Think of it like an automated auditor looking through the books in real time.

“[We are] inferring from the data itself what could potentially be wrong with the data,” said Nijhawan (pictured right).

Like Chicago legal software titan kCura, Infogix was born out of a consulting project. Recognizing a broader market need for software that could automate controls of data integrity, founder Madhavan K. Nayar retained the rights to the software he created and built a business around it.

Over 30 years later, that business is thriving more than ever. A few years ago the company reinvented itself with a broader set of offerings and branched into a number of new industries, an initiative Nijhawan was hired to lead.

Today, though it can’t exactly claim the “startup” moniker, Infogix is certainly growing like one. The company’s headcount has doubled in size to nearly 500 in the past four years, and Nijhawan expects the headcount to double again in the next three. And earlier this year the company was acquired by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm.

With companies from an increasing number of industries turning to analytics firms to understand their data, Nijhawan said his company sees its long track record as a major asset. Many large companies still operate with legacy systems that can make data hard to get to without an extensive library of connectors, which Infogix has been building for years.

The exposure to all manner of different systems has also given Infogix a deeper understanding of the ways in which data’s integrity can get compromised.

“We’ve been doing this for 30 years, so we’ve seen a lot of different kinds of data, making our software aware of a lot of different problems that it needs to uncover,” said Nijhawan.

In a world where decisions are increasingly based on data, understanding where the data goes wrong is unlikely to fall out of relevance anytime soon.

Images via Infogix.

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Jobs at Infogix, Inc.

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