Janes CTO named in the 2022 CIO 100 Award for technology leadership

Janes, the leading open-source defence intelligence provider, has been recognised with one of the most prestigious and influential awards in technology, the 2022 CIO 100 award. The award recognises leadership in technology-led transformation and celebrates the business leaders that are driving change at their organisations. 

Janes is currently on its own transformational journey as it moves from its publishing heritage to become a data led organisation at the forefront of a technological revolution.  At the heart of the Janes transformation are Janes SOLAR and Janes Intara, which together deliver an integrated tradecraft and data exploitation environment for open-source intelligence. These programmes are led and supported by the Janes in-house technology team and third-party partners, and are the culmination of 18 months of development and ten years of data modelling efforts. 

The award recognised Janes work on SOLAR – which is the development of a core tradecraft platform for transforming the collection and processing of open-source intelligence. Covering a broad range of foundational, geospatial, and image data, the SOLAR platform seamlessly fuses AI automation and human assurance into Janes tradecraft processes to create an integrated intelligence asset.  

Another incredible product that has been recognised is Janes Intara, an API-accessible knowledge graph, containing Janes assured foundational defence intelligence. Powered by Janes SOLAR, it structures the relationships between entities, such as orders of battle, equipment inventories and defence procurement and has been developed to be able to integrate and interconnect with other data sources, and unstructured text sources.  

Janes Intara is interoperable with a wide range of systems, platforms and tools, and can be integrated by Janes customers to bring all the data they need into a single environment.  

In August 2021, Janes worked with QuietProfessionals to build an evacuation tracker dashboard to capture and display data about who in Afghanistan needed help, what help they needed, and where they were. The technological advances made possible through Janes Intara meant that Janes was able to augment the dashboard with unclassified, validated insight about incidents and installation status to track those who needed help.  

Janes Intara has also been delivering continuous monitoring of Russian troop and equipment sightings that connect the battle group and location capabilities. This in-depth analysis derived from Janes assured open-source intelligence and enabled by the technology delivered through Janes Intara, has supported our customers’ understanding of the battle space.  

Phil Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Janes, said “The CIO 100 is one of the most recognised awards for technology innovation and transformation. I am incredibly proud of the technology team at Janes who have mastered these complex data challenges and worked tirelessly to deliver these two fantastic solution platforms – all credit to them for their work, well done”.