Expert Technology Evaluation and Oversight

EnSoft provides high-stakes technology evaluation and oversight for complex software-driven research portfolios and technical assets in sectors like automotive, aerospace, defense, finance, healthcare, medical devices, telecommunications, transit, marketing, business operations, cybersecurity, energy, and consumer electronics. With experience managing over $100 million in research oversight for the U.S. Department of Defense and private-sector clients, our assessments help inform critical decisions in areas such as mergers and acquisitions, pre-investment analysis, strategic partnerships, litigation support, corporate restructuring, and post-acquisition integration.

Delivering Clarity for Strategic Decisions

Whether you’re evaluating an industrial application or research from a lab, we adapt our approach to meet the unique demands of your project. We understand that teams under review may not always fully cooperate or could have objectives that differ from your organization’s. Our thorough assessments are designed to navigate these complexities, ensuring you receive an accurate, unbiased evaluation of the technology, providing the clarity you need to make informed decisions.

Our Capabilities Include:

Verification of Research Claims: We rigorously attempt to replicate results, whether from industrial practitioners or academic researchers.
Expert Interviews: We engage with teams—whether industry engineers or PhD-level researchers from institutions like MIT and Stanford—to clarify the strengths and limitations of their work.
Contextual Benchmarking: We compare your technology to alternative methods within the industry or research community.

Services Include:

Analyzing technical reports, academic papers, and progress briefs.
Attempting to replicate and validate research results under practical conditions.
Reviewing software deliverables to ensure they match performance claims.
Conducting thorough interviews to test the reliability of researcher assertions.
Preparing detailed reports on research status, potential, and risks.
Comparing your project with similar efforts to gauge its relative value.

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Case studies

Litigation Support

Patent law requires enablement, meaning that a patent must provide enough detail to enable someone to duplicate the invention. In a software patent, this is typically done through a source code deposit accompanying the patent. In a patent infringement case, EnSoft reconstructed the source by OCRing the large volumes of scanned source code pages from the patent office and then used our Atlas program analysis technology to map out the code.

We discovered that the patent holder had surgically removed thousands of key pieces of code from the patent’s source code deposit. We briefed counsel with diagrams and expert explanations of how the code was architected and the significance of the redacted portions. Then, we used Atlas to automatically produce a detailed report, which included the source code—indexed and specially annotated to allow counsel to, in real-time, question the witness on an overwhelming number of details. Without technology like EnSoft’s, opposing counsel was simply unable to prepare for this level of detailed questioning. Ultimately, the patent holder was forced to drop the suit.

This was an example of no cooperation from the party under evaluation, and of EnSoft’s ability to process volumes of technical information, produce actionable briefings and artifacts, and deliver a significant strategic advantage.

ERP Modernization

EnSoft’s client was bidding for a large federal contract to modernize a large ERP system written in COBOL. The client was given access to the source code to estimate the effort required. EnSoft used its Atlas technology to discover that a significant portion of the source code was deprecated, meaning that at one time it ran, but as the software evolved, its functions were subsumed by newer code, or the cases it covered were no longer applicable to current operations.

Our client’s bid was based only on the portion of the code that actually ran. EnSoft helped the client prepare a detailed report and visual presentations used to support their competitive bid. In contrast, the other competitors based their bids on all the code, deprecated or not. Our client won the contract not only because they were able to modernize the code at a lower cost, but because they demonstrated to the federal agency a much more detailed understanding of the code than their competitors.

Post Acquisition Reorganization

After acquiring a startup, the founder left due to unforeseen personal reasons. His staff was able to keep operations running, but the new management struggled to get them to expand software features to evolve service offerings. The acquisition was based on the perceived value of the startup’s innovative software. The technical staff was divided into a software team and a data analysis team. The software team was hostile to the evaluation, while the data analysis team welcomed it. We analyzed the software and interviewed members of the software team, data analysis team, and management.

It turned out that the software used long-established mathematics, albeit beyond the typical computer science curriculum. The innovation was actually in applying these mathematical methods to support the human-aided data processing that staff performed with the software before customers viewed the data. It also became clear that, although the staff could maintain operations, they lacked the mathematical background to make changes to the software.

EnSoft clarified the reality on the ground, enabling ownership to address both personnel and technology issues effectively.