Northern Light Group, LLC is a company specializing in strategic research portals, enterprise search technology, and text analytics solutions. The company provides custom, hosted, turnkey solutions for its clients using the software as a service delivery model. Northern Light markets its strategic research portals under the tradename SinglePoint. Typical applications for SinglePoint strategic research portals are in market research, competitive intelligence, product management, product development, and technology research. Northern Light's client base consists of global companies that typically have more than $10 billion in annual sales. Companies that have stated publicly that they use SinglePoint research portals from Northern Light include HP, Verizon, Symantec, SAP, and Cisco. Northern Light has been picked for six years in a row as one of the "100 Companies That Matter In Knowledge Management" by KMWorld magazine. According to the industry trade magazineInformation Today, Northern Light is innovating the automated analysis and extraction of meaning from large repositories of market intelligence documents.
History
The company is named after the clipper shipNorthern Light, which held the speed record for the San Francisco to Boston voyage for nearly 150 years. From its founding in 1996 until January 2002, Northern Light operated a Web search engine for public use, originally on the domain nlsearch.com. It was regarded at the time as innovative in provision of search based on classification and inclusion of both public and proprietary information resources. During this time period Northern Light also developed private custom search engines for large corporate clients marketed under the trade name SinglePoint. In 2002, after immediate public backlash against the sudden monetization of their formerly public search engine, Northern Light discontinued it. With their market value in tatters, they were easily acquired by an enterprise software company. In 2003, an employee group bought the company from its parent and it is still employee-owned as of 2010 and SinglePoint is its main product line. In 2000, the company was the title sponsor for the IndyCar Series.
