Tech team, father and son, at it again

Two accomplished Bend entrepreneurs see a ‘fundamental unmet need’ for sharing complex data in an easy-to-use Word or Excel format

By Andrew Moore / The Bulletin

Published: February 08. 2009 4:00AM PST

Andy Tullis / The Bulletin

Paul van Eikeren, left, and his son, Josh van Eikeren, together in the Awbrey Butte office of their software startup, Blue Reference. Founded by the van Eikerens three years ago, the company will release its first commercial software application Monday. The van Eikerens previously founded the Bend software company IntelliChem, which they sold in 2004 to Symyx Technologies.

Inference will be available Monday from its Web site, http://inference.us, for $199, though a free 30-day trial is also offered.

Bend entrepreneurs Paul and Josh van Eikeren have a thing for data. The father-son duo has spent years thinking of better ways to collect it, manage it and share it in ways that make sense.

Their first company was IntelliChem, which Paul — a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former biochemistry professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. — founded in Bend with Josh in 1998. The company helped pioneer software to help laboratory scientists track their experiments, software that eventually became known as electronic laboratory notebooks.

In 2004, they sold the company to a Silicon Valley firm, Symyx Technologies Inc., for $29 million.

A year later, the van Eikerens formed a new company, Blue Reference Inc., and on Monday, the company will release its first commercial software. It’s called Inference, and it’s designed to deliver complex sets of data in ways that are easy to understand and share by harnessing the raw power of computer programming languages such as R, .NET and MATLAB, and partly by leveraging the ubiquitous reach of Microsoft’s Word and Excel applications.

In other words, the software can crunch data in R or MATLAB — languages broadly used for statistical research — and output an easily read graph that can be augmented with written commentary and presented in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet that can be e-mailed or passed around a boardroom.

“There’s an interesting tension in business software,” Paul van Eikeren said. “There’s the need for nonstructured data, such as text, and highly structured data, like stock tables. How can you get both to work at the same time? With (Inference), you can live in both worlds.”

Word and Excel have graphing functions, but they are not dynamic, or able to change in real time as new data become available, said Josh van Eikeren. Word and Excel’s graphing tools also are not as powerful as Inference, which can graph everything from climate models to Bollinger Bands, a relatively sophisticated technical tool for analyzing a stock’s price history.

Processing and presenting complex sets of data that are easily translated and displayed in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet is “a fundamental unmet need we’re trying to solve,” said Paul van Eikeren.

The company is pursuing two markets for Inference. One is the individual user who perhaps uses R to compile data and is looking for a better way to present and share the underlying data, said Josh van Eikeren. The other: companies or industries who can benefit from using templates Inference can create to display data common to the many users.

The first such industrial market the company is targeting is the pharmaceutical industry and its “Quality by Design” initiative, which was created by the industry to more efficiently address certain Food and Drug Administration regulations. To that end, the company hopes Inference — packaged with sophisticated data analysis tools for designing processes that reduce regulatory risks, increase drug product quality, lower manufacturing costs and get products to market faster — will appeal to companies pursuing the Quality by Design initiative.

Blue Reference recently formed a Quality by Design Product Development Consortium to help it formulate new applications for Inference in the pharmaceutical industry, where it still has numerous contacts on account of the success of IntelliChem.

Paul van Eikeren is planning for growth. How much he can’t say, as it also depends on the economy and the company’s ability to identify new markets. Blue Reference currently employs eight and is based in the former Awbrey Butte office of Brooks Resources Corp.

Paul van Eikeren would like Bend to become a technology hub and notes that it has taken some small steps to get there, partly helped by the region’s relatively strong broadband infrastructure.

Central Oregon is home to several software companies and it’s one sector business and government officials would love to grow. Other software companies in Bend include GL Suites, Symyx, Alchemy Suites and HighWire Software.

“I think Bend has an opportunity to remake itself during this downturn and be this thriving epicenter of entrepreneurial activity,” said Harvey Mathews, president of the Software Association of Oregon. “If you are able to do that, I think this whole downturn was worth it.”

Paul van Eikeren discovered Bend in the 1980s when he came on a sabbatical from his teaching position to work for Bend Research. He later took a position with the company, moving here in 1986.

Josh van Eikeren grew up in Bend but attended high school on the East Coast, after the family relocated there for a few years with Paul before moving back to Bend. Josh then attended the University of Oregon, where he studied computer science and chemistry until dropping out before his senior year to found IntelliChem with his father.

“He’s going the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs route,” said Paul van Eikeren.

Andrew Moore can be reached at 541-617-7820 or amoore@bendbulletin.com.