Bridger Informatics is commercializing revolutionary computer software developed at the Center for Computational Biology at Montana State University. The Initial Product is a database development tool which facilitates data sharing in the scientific and SME business community. The inherent complexity of traditional relational database systems is a key obstacle to more widespread use of database technology in the scientific business community. Bridger Informatics is an alternative to relational technology - a semi-structured data model for documenting information. The product enables researchers and management personnel to document their information in an organized, regularly formatted, machine readable and network accessible manner - without requiring the services of a database professional.

Market: The commercial database market is monopolized at the high end and mid market by Oracle and its suite of products. In the mid to lower tier there are high install rates of MySQL and open source products. The lower end of the market is made up of desktop applications including Microsoft's Access and Excel products. None of the market players appear to have a Price/Performance/Ease of Use combination needed by today's scientific and business professionals who want to manage their own exponentially growing amounts of data.

Problem: Traditional relational databases (RDB's) are powerful tools but are very expensive and require significant overhead in the form of specialized database administrators (DBA'S) to develop and maintain them. Making market driven changes to a RDB involves a tedious process of communicating the changes properly to a DBA, having that skilled professional make the changes to the database and then presenting the revised functionality back to the person that requested the change. Often this is an iterative process. The market is looking for a robust database that is easy to set up, maintain and alter directly by a non-technical person - whether that person is a research scientist or business management professional. Such a database needs to handle both structured and un-structured data - a mix of which is common in e-commerce and web applications.

Solution: The Bridger Informatics toolset is a unique semi-structured, hierarchical database that incorporates easy to use drag-and-drop windows that allow novice computer users to create and modify sophisticated databases. Thus, a previous two phase manual process is bundled into one automated step without sacrificing the ability to model complex data relationships.