It all started with a bottle of Pepsi. The local distributor hired some programmers to find ways to save money. It snowballed from there, and Salient was born.

On the outside, Salient looks like your typical suit and tie company but inside, computers are buzzing away, tracking data. Software engineers are typing away, finding ways to save New York state millions of dollars every year.

“It’s absolutely about efficiency, economic efficiency. Getting more for less,” says Guy Amisano, CEO of Salient.

Guy Amisano ran The Elmira Bottling Company for decades. Around 1983, he wanted to come up with a way to keep track of who was buying what and how much.

“We didn’t lose money but we didn’t make any money either. So I decided at that point in time, after losing two days of sleep that it was time to take control of this economic system we call a business,” says Amisano.

So he hired computer programmers to develop software to do just that.

“The program let the average salesperson understand the worth of his activity so he could then adjust his activity for more profit,” says Amisano.

It became so profitable, Amisano sold the bottling company and went full time with Salient.

In the early 2000′s, Chemung county taxpayers were paying $20 million a year to cover the county’s share of Medicaid costs.

“Everything that we were raising in property taxes, growing at 10-percent a year, was going to one program called Medicaid. People were outraged by it,” says Tom Sanutlli, Chemung County Executive.

Santulli started a letter-writing campaign to then-Governor Pataki. Amisano got wind of it, and put his programmers to work tweaking Salient’s software to track Medicaid costs.

“The interesting thing was, Guy’s software package that actually tracked how every dollar and every procedure that was spent on Medicaid was a far better program then what IBM had come out with,” says Santulli.

County after county began using Salient’s data-mining software. Then, the state Medicaid office picked it up. Behind this door is Salient’s government division. We can’t get inside because of HIPPA laws but inside Salient employees are managing Medicaid data from across the state so counties can detect Medicaid from fraud and abuse.

It’s already saved New York state millions and it’s just the beginning for revolutionary software made right here in Horseheads.

“We think we can make a difference across the country and further,” says Amisano.

Salient’s software is now used on six continents.

1. BI has been and continues to be a top priority for CIOs, but has now also become a top CFO priority. A key reason for this trend is that companies are looking to extract greater value from their data. CFOs want to ensure that technology investments lead to a more tangible ROI, while leading to smarter decision-making.

2. The Business Intelligence market is currently valued at $10 Billion, grew by 13% in 2010, and will continue to grow at this pace until 2014 when it’s projected to be valued at $15 Billion. The increased growth and investment in BI is driven by greater executive interest and sponsorship by CIOs and CFOs as outlined above. Executives see a tremendous amount of potential in the data their companies are sitting on. Spinning that data into a competitive advantage involves making it meaningful, useful, and accessible to the right people in a timely manner to support better decision-making.

3. The submarket for Analytics is currently valued at $1.65 Billion, and it will be an area of continued growth as users demand high-powered analytics within their BI platform. In-memory analytics, a relative competitive advantage for smaller vendors a few years ago, has become industry standard. Users are demanding interactive dashboards, along with predictive modeling capabilities. These are among the areas that will continue to drive growth in the Analytics submarket.

4. The top business benefit is making information more accessible to users. Buyers are shifting to purchasing BI solutions from independent, best-of-breed vendors, as opposed to stack vendors (e.g. Oracle, SAP, etc.). The new, independent vendors are differentiating themselves by providing in-memory analytics, dashboards, ease-of-use, and fast deployment and proofs-of-concept (POC’s). What really resonated throughout the halls of the Hyatt Regency in L.A. was that user-friendliness climbed ahead of functionality on the list of user priorities.

Drivers for platform growth will depend on:
• embedded BI for SME’s
• mobility
• new usability and mash-ups
• collaboration and social networking features
• engendering a performance management culture

We think all of these trendlines augur well for Salient and its users.
• We are an independent, high-growth, best-of-breed vendor that Gartner recognized as an up-and-coming “niche player” in the 2011 Gartner BI Magic Quadrant Report. We were recognized for our fast processing speed, and we achieved a top-3 ranking for business benefits, and single best rating for product quality, performance and product support
• We offer a fast, easy-to-use platform with powerful in-memory analytics
• Our easy-to-use visual data discovery platform empowers users to extract maximum value from their data by providing answers at-the-speed-of-thought and supporting the ability to maneuver seamlessly between a wide range of views and analyses
• We are a true enterprise-wide solution that can be leveraged at all levels of an organization, through any device, and that supports collaboration through unstructured data, and engenders a performance management culture through a positive, reinforcing feedback loop.