Birmingham-based Recognition Systems UK Ltd is looking to raise 3m British pounds for a major sales and marketing drive and raise its standing with its potential customers when it goes for a full listing on the UK stock market within the next month. Market capitalization at the issue price is expected to value the company, which made losses last year on turnover of just 612,000 pounds, at between 15m pounds and 18m pounds. Formed in 1989, Recognition developed first the technology and then products that use neural networking techniques to analyze large customer databases and find unusual or individual buying patterns. Managing director Paul Gregory said the market is now ripe for the company’s products, which are of particular interest to banks, insurance companies and other large financial institutions with huge amounts of customer data. Recognition Systems will announce this week that its software will now run on IBM Corp mainframes under the MVS operating system. It currently runs on both Unix and Windows NT systems. Gregory said the nature of many of its customers meant that they tended to have large mainframe systems holding vast amounts of data, and there was a demand for the neural analysis to run directly on the mainframe. The company says its tools are ideally suited to mining data held in a data warehouse, and it has already formed a strategic alliance with Sybase Inc to exploit this potential. Last August, Recognition licensed its AutoNet neural networking technology to SPSS Inc, a US supplier of statistical software (CI No 2,739). It has also opened an office in Chicago, from where it is hoping to spearhead its drive into the US market.
