The hottest new tech company on Prince Edward Island is disrupting the data asset management market – not to mention a few stereotypes.

DiscoveryGarden Inc. was created by a librarian, who then recruited a religious studies professor, and financed the company through a grant from the Atlantic Innovation Fund. Yet the data asset management company is turning heads, winning awards and compiling a prestigious client list.

“We met our aggressive sales targets in our first year and will double it this year,”’ said vice-president Joe Velaidum in an interview. The company has pioneered open-source software that helps clients manage their data, and in just 15 months it has grown from its original three members to 15 to 20 employees and is recruiting more.

DiscoveryGarden was born when Mark Leggott, the librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, received a $2.5 million grant from Acoa’s Atlantic Innovation Fund to develop software to help organizations manage their data. 

As a rule, entrepreneurs gnash their teeth at the thought of academic grants, because the economy (so goes the theory) would be better served if the grants were given to businessmen to grow businesses. But Leggott stuck a pin in that theory by quickly creating a company out of the technology he devised, called Islandora.  The company is an autonomous spin-off from the university, and its technology won the Innovation and Technology Association of Prince Edward Island’s Exceptional New Product or Service award this year.

Developed at UPEI, Islandora  combines a data management software called Fedora with a user-friendly front-end called Drupal. What’s special about Islandora is it’s open-source and DiscoveryGarden’s five largest competitors are all multi-billion-dollar-a-year companies operating on closed systems. The company says there are other open source competitors as well, but none has DicoveryGarden’s functionality. DiscoveryGarden makes its money by customizing the system to suit each client’s needs.

“We ensure that all the data is in the most open system possible,” said Velaidum, who is also the chair of religious studies at UPEI. “We have a more secure system because your data remains your data.”

The company’s clients include the Smithsonian, Oak Ridge National Laboratories (a NASA funded lab), and the City of Hope Cancer Centre, among others.

The next stage for the company will be the release in the spring of migration tools that will help clients now using closed systems to transfer their data to Islandora. “This was driven by customers coming to us and saying they bought into proprietary systems and want out,” said Velaidum.

DiscoveryGarden is also becoming the gold standard in digital humanities, a discipline that focuses on the digitization and analysis of traditional arts material online or with computerized aids. Several of the leading universities in the U.S. are now using DiscoveryGarden to move further into the field.

The company was funded initially through the AIF grant and has moved forward with operational revenues. It will soon seek about $500,000 to $1 million in funding to cover the cost of the migration systems.