START-UP
START-UP
Vice President Oscar Fuster, from left, President Fred Giordano and Chief Technology Officer Kristofer Younger help lead Epok.
(By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Name: Epok Inc.
Location: Bethesda
Funding: The company has received private venture funding from the family firm of Ayman Hariri, chairman and a founder of the company. It would not disclose the amount.
Big idea: Epok is developing software to allow organizations to control who has access to sensitive information, both inside and outside, as business relationships change. "This is what we call the authority net," said Fred Giordano, president. "It's really a tightly managed information-sharing environment, with full auditing capabilities, in which no individual or organization is anonymous." The software helps to define the circumstances under which information should be shared and with whom, as business relationships begin, change or end.
How it works: The software allows business users to manage the sharing of information, which frees the information technology department from having to control access and makes the right information available to the right people faster, Giordano said. The company's flagship product, Information Sharing Environment, relies on a business user's roles and responsibilities at an organization to map people to the resources they need for their jobs. "Links between people and resources can be predefined or activated based on events like Katrina or a corporate merger," Giordano added.
Where the idea was hatched: Giordano and Chief Technology Officer Kristofer Younger, both experienced technology executives, came on board as consultants when the company was writing code and developing a product. "We realized it was a platform to write applications on top of," Giordano said. "The notion here was to write commercial off-the-shelf applications."
Example of use: Epok is first targeting the federal, state and local government. Giordano said the product will also work well in commercial sectors, including financial services, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, health services, and pharmaceuticals with clinical trials.
Customers: None yet. The company plans to deploy its suite of software applications this summer and is in discussions with several federal government agencies, Giordano said.
Price: Giordano estimated that baseline deployment of the software will start at approximately $250,000 and that large-scale deployments would run into the millions.
Founded: 2004
Who's in charge: Giordano; Lance Hood, chief operating officer; Younger; Frank Sacco, senior vice president, global sales and development; Oscar Fuster, vice president, marketing and strategic alliances; Nigel Simmons, vice president, products; and Jerome M. Jump, vice president, engineering. Scott Birnbaum, co-founder and director, sits on the board of directors.
Employees: 53
Web site: http:/
Partners: The company is in discussions with Computer Sciences Corp., SAIC and Northrop Grumman Corp., Giordano said, but has not cemented partnerships.
What the name means: "Epoch is a significant year or period of time and the two founders had a little play on words: Epok as opposed to epoch," Giordano said.
-- Andrea Caumont
