Company Spotlight - AppTek

This week, dcTechSource.com shines the Company Spotlight on Applications Technology (AppTek) headquartered in McLean, VA. Apptek specializes in software development for human language technology. Read more to learn about this leading DC technology company...

January 7, 2010

Company Name:   
Applications Technology, Inc. (AppTek) -- Developing human language technology products with a complete suite for text and speech (voice) processing and recognition

Year Founded: 
1990

Company Background/History (300 words or less):
AppTek is one of the oldest vendors in the human language technologies market and a leading provider in research and commercial software offerings.  AppTek is unique in offering a complete platform of language technologies, which cover both speech and text.  The Company is also a leading partner on government research programs to advance the state of the industry.  It leads the way in MT innovation with its patent-pending Hybrid Machine Translation system, a novel approach unlike any other offering on the market.

Location and contact information:   
Washington, DC area headquarters with offices around the world.  www.apptek.com or 6867 Elm Street, Suite 300, McLean, VA 22101, 703-821-5000

Company Size (employees and revenue):   
Private company with approximately 40 full-time employees

Name and title of person submitting form (with contact information):   
Michael Veronis, Business Development (mveronis@apptek.com or 703-394-2317)

Please list key executives and/or board members:   
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, Board Chairman, Mudar Yaghi, co-CEO, Mohammad Shihadah, co-CEO, Steve Cook, CTO, Hassan Sawaf, Chief Scientist. Michal Veronis, Head of Business Development

Describe your industry (300 words or less)
The human language technology or machine translation industry focuses on using software-based solutions, such as computational linguistics and/or speech technology to translate text or speech from one language into another.

Describe your product/service (300 words or less)
AppTek is a developer of human language technology (HLT) products with a complete suite for text and speech (voice) processing and recognition. AppTek offers the first complete hybrid machine translation (HMT) system, a full integration of statistical and rule-based methodologies to assist linguists, translators and analysts in achieving greater productivity and higher quality results in a timely and cost effective manner. AppTek's other product offerings include machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) for a growing list of more than 23 languages; multilingual information retrieval with query and topic search capabilities; name-finding applications; and integrated suites providing ASR and MT in media monitoring of broadcast and telephony speech as well as handheld and wearable speech-to-speech translation devices. 

Describe your biggest challenge over the last 6 months and how you resolved it (300 words or less):
To further differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market, which we did through greater customer outreach and the proven performance of our HMT product.

Describe your biggest opportunity in the last 6 months (300 words or less):
There were a number of opportunities, but the greatest one was to introduce customers, who knew us as a rule-based machine translation provider, to all that we have to offer, including our HMT and automated speech recognition products and some of our other technologies.

How has the economy changed your business over the last 12 months?
There has been a greater interest in our technologies from our primary market.  With the ever increasing volumes of global data, there continues to be a great improvement that our language technologies can offer organizations.  Personnel-based language organizations are seeing a greater value in coupling language technologies with language professionals to be able to process more of the critical information they need in the right amount of time.

Is your company global?
Yes

Which are your company’s most important markets?  If Federal, what contract vehicles?
Our primary market is the US Federal market, but we also have commercial customers around the world.

Where does your company see the greatest success (markets, industries, etc.)?
The convergence of speech and text and the use of more language technologies on the Internet and in mobile communications.

Please list key customers:   
DoD, CACI, Northrop Grumman, US Federal government

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