We’re an assortment of talented and quirky people united by one common goal: to bring a higher quality of data to businesses worldwide, by changing the way people access and manage that data. It’s been our aim since the beginning, and we’re not slowing down.
Whether you’re looking at simple deduplication or a completely integrated 360-degree view customer data strategy, 360Science has a solution for you.
Our product philosophy is simple.
We build software that is fast, easy to use, and above all else, accurate.
Every good adventure begins with a quest, and our story is no exception. A long time before Steve Tootill became the CEO of 360Science, he was consulting to a life insurance company where he was presented with a challenge : “Steve, how can we be absolutely sure we don’t have any duplicate customer records?”
It didn’t take Steve long to realize that the available matching solutions were rudimentary at best and could only match on name and address data, not even close to all the other information a life insurance company has about its policyholders and lives insured, such as date of birth, payment details, social security number etc. But every single item of this data was prone to error.
If the effort to rid their database of duplicates was to prove successful, it seemed buying a solution wouldn’t be an option, it would have to be built. Spotting an opportunity, Steve suggested to his client that he would develop a solution that would dedupe their customer data using all the key information they knew – and he would just charge them a package price in return for them acting as a sounding board during development and as a reference site. This arrangement enabled Steve to ensure that what he built was:
• More flexible than anything else available
• Developed from the outset as a package, so it would be easy to upgrade
• Accessible, both in terms of simplicity and pricing.
When it came to accuracy, Steve’s client was pretty happy, but there was one thing that was causing a lot of manual review – the popular fuzzy matching algorithm for names that Steve had used, Soundex, proved to be totally inadequate for catching phonetic similarity. In fact, there wasn’t an algorithm available that could truly map the way names and words are pronounced. For help with this dilemma, Steve turned to his father, Geoff Tootill.
In 1947, an electric engineer and computer scientist by the name of Geoff Tootill was recruited by Frederic Williams to join Tom Kilburn at Manchester University. The three would go on to build the world’s first stored-program computer. This computer, also known as The Baby, ran its first program on June 21st, 1948.
In addition to being a pioneering computer scientist, Geoff was a linguist and a classics scholar. This made him the ideal person to cope with the challenge of coding pronunciation . Geoff developed soundit, the world’s most advanced phonetic algorithm for the English language.
This was the missing piece of the puzzle that enabled Steve to take matchit to market, under the banner helpIT Systems. Since then, helpIT Systems has supported thousands of customers in 27 countries with their data quality requirements.
In July of 2016, helpIT Systems went through a significant refocus and emerged as 360Science. Today we are dedicated to making the world’s most powerful matching engine even more accurate and putting it in the hands of everyone who needs it.
Located in the tech hub of Austin, 360Science is looking for entrepreneurial-like people ready to push boundaries.
