Growing in ALX: Featuring SynGlyphX
By: Adrianne Griffith
From retail and restaurants to tech and media, contractors to coworking spaces, large, small, and everything in between, a diverse array of businesses call Alexandria home. In our blog series, Growing in Alexandria, we sit down to talk with businesses around the City to learn more about who they are, what they do, and why they love it here. Have an idea for a business in Alexandria to talk to? Email us!
Alexandria is a growing hub for tech talent and some pretty cool tech companies. One of those is SynGlyphX, a software company located in Old Town. We virtually sat down with Mark Sloan, President & CEO, to learn more.
AEDP: SynGlyphX- interesting name, interesting company. Can you tell us more?
Mark: SynGlyphX is a software company. Our software helps users make sense of their data – but we do this differently than a lot of the analytics companies that are out there today. We do it visually – but we are different from charts and graphs in Microsoft Excel.
For example, one of our customers is a global athletic shoe retailer. They intended to use our software to see if they could identify regional preferences in online shoe sales so they could locate inventory closer to the customer and decrease shipping costs and shipping time. What they found, instead, were multiple millions of dollars of fraudulent sales transactions. This was something they were not even looking for – but the way we visualize the data – this anomaly just popped out visually. (In fact, the visual anomaly was so pronounced, they thought they had done something wrong at first. So they asked us to help them recreate the visualization – and we got the same result.)
Said another way, we help you see more of your data at one time, so that patterns, trends, and anomalies just pop out.
A few years ago, we formed a second company, GlyphEd, which is a joint venture with the University of Notre Dame and SynGlyphX. GlyphEd is bringing the software into the Higher Education market. GlyphEd is focused on helping college / university Enrollment Management offices makes sense of their student data. Gannon University credits our software with an 8 point improvement in student retention – which equates to improved tuition revenue for the school AND lifelong success for the students that did not leave school. John Carroll University credits GlyphEd with helping them discover similar insights in student data that are leading to better student outcomes.
AEDP: How would you describe your “company culture?”
Mark: We try to live by the mantra, “Make it happen!” As in, when someone asks if they should do something because they think it’s a good idea, the answer is simply, “Make it happen!” The team does not always need to ask for permission to do something. We all talk a lot, we have meetings, we generally know where we want to go. If something comes along (i.e., meeting, customer event, other) and you think it helps the business move forward, “Make it happen!”
Along the same lines is the phrase is that “there is no monopoly on good ideas.” We are a team – and at some point, everyone has a brilliant idea; so, we cannot just look to one person to make all the decisions. We all need to “Make it happen!”
AEDP: Do you have a favorite quote to share?
Mark: “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
AEDP: And what is the most rewarding part?
To learn more about SynGlyphX and their second company GlyphEd, visit them at 113 South Columbus St. or visit their website.
