Why Cool:  LINQ brings infonomics to life. By measuring, managing and monetizing information supply chains in business terms, users of LINQ are able identify areas for new business value and can start to eradicate the information waste that arises from lost opportunities and business inefficiencies. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform features graphical workflow that models and correlates: data inputs, preparation and transformation steps, reporting outputs, business decisions, actions arising and resulting business outcomes. It enables analysts to communicate and make transparent the true business impacts of different data sets, surface hidden dependencies and evaluate the impacts of any changes to the data, systems and people needed to achieve business success. By orchestrating the organisation’s understanding of its people, systems and data, and identifying opportunities to improve in business terms, LINQ helps to proactively facilitate data-driven culture change.

Challenges. Multiple data catalog solutions are now available, many of which are backed by significant venture capital investment.  Data cataloguing is likely to be an increasingly competitive and congested higher-order capability within the metadata management market. LINQ may struggle to achieve sufficient critical mass unless they can capitalise on aligning so closely with infonomics thinking, perhaps by building partnerships with other more established metadata vendors. Being headquartered in New Zealand, geographic reach will be a further challenge for LINQ. While their solution is offered as a SaaS environment and is therefore “borderless”, it may be difficult to generate sufficient industry momentum unless LINQ work hard on their sales and channel strategies.