Meet InfoSoft International

The world’s preeminent supplier of linguistic software to the OEM market is now standing on its own two legs.

Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin has spun of its thriving software division as an independent entity called InfoSoft International. The establishment of the new company went hand,in,hand with an initial public offering earlier this year; InfoSoft is now currently being traded on the New York Stock Exchange. As corporate communications director John Riley explains, the time was right for the company to head to the capital markets to fund future growth rather than compete with the other divisions within the parent company for the limited resources available. Riley points out that the software division had evolved into a rather different creature than the rest of the divisions within the Boston publisher. Houghton Mifflin’s traditional strengths have been in education and mass-market publishing; the software division supplies linguistic tools and resources to customers almost exclusively as an OEM supplier. However, Riley does point out that Houghton Mifflin has maintained a minority interest of forty percent in InfoSoft. “In some ways it is better to have a forty percent share in a fast,growing company than complete ownership of a slow-growing division,” explains Riley.
While the InfoSoft people have been adept at squirrelling out new markets for the established triad of spellcheckers, hyphenators, and thesauri, it is clear that this corner of the software market cannot sustain unlimited growth, particularly in view of the consoli, dations taking place in the software world. InfoSoft is therefore embarking upon a new generation of information management tools for information retrieval purposes. The first of these, called IntelliScope, is slated for release later this year. InfoSoft claims that “IntelliScope will greatly increase the power and accuracy of information retrieval by incorporating powerful linguistic capabilities, such as mor, phological reduction, to ensure that variant forms of target words are found in word searches or permit searches to be expanded to include other related words.”
    In March, InfoSoft also concluded a long’term licencing deal with Microlytics, another major supplier of linguistic software, in which InfoSoft will take over responsibility for marketing Microlytics’ linguistic software. According to John Riley, Microlytics offer, ings complement the InfoSoft line in a variety of ways.
In particular, Microlytics has focussed on the hand, held dictionary market with its corresponding demands for speed and compactness. In turn, Microl ytics intends to license InfoSoft technologies for use in future electronic reference products, such electronic telephone directories. Selectrics, Microlytics’ parent company, also sees wireless communications as a potential market for Microlytics’ wireless compression technology .
As the software division of Houghton Mifflin, Info, Soft remained reticent about sales figures and numbers of employees, but it was obvious that the group had enjoyed solid financial health for a number of years. Its new-found independence as a publicly-traded company reflects the maturity of the linguistic software world as a whole, and bodes well for further commercial exploitation of computational linguistics in the future.

InfoSoft International, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA, 02116,3764, USA; Tel: + 1 617351 3098, Fax: + 1 617 3511115