Xegen hunts for Retriever customers

Startup Xegen has completed development of its Retriever data search product and is now embarking on the even harder search for customers.

The company, which received bridging finance from a Government-backed venture investment seed fund managed by iGlobe Treasury, will demonstrate Retriever at its headquarters in the AUT Technology Park incubator at Penrose on Thursday.

Director Ian Shields said that while Xegen was talking to some potential New Zealand customers and distributors, its main focus would be Britain and Europe.

"Companies there are reluctant to invest in IT. They want more proof there is something there," he said.

Existing business intelligence and online analytical tools probe the structured data that companies store in their financial, production and distribution systems.

Shields said Retriever was the first product able to automatically find the connections between that data and the unstructured data stored in places such as email servers and file and print servers.

He said it was aimed at the business compliance market, which had grown in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom frauds.

Chief executive Ian Carter started Xegen in 2002 as Tauranga-based Business Information Systems to distribute decision support systems.

But he saw a gap in the market for a next-generation analytic tool.

Hamilton-based Reel Two, which makes an advanced search engine for biomedical and chemical patent searches, was contracted to help build the tool. Shields said Xegen Retriever was a new product, not an extension of a Reel Two product.