There are some hurdles to Corworks’ growth in the marketplace, however. Richard Winter, president of database consultancy Winter Corp. in Waltham, Mass., says the Corworks product doesn’t currently accept SQL, the standard language for data access. "That means they aren’t a candidate for the mainstream data warehousing market," he says, though he adds that the company can still be successful as a specialty tool. He also notes that the big players in high-end data warehousing, such as IBM, NCR and Oracle, are also investing in data compression technology and won’t make it easy for startups like Corworks to hone in on their territory.

Corworks flagship product is Knowledge Server, an open-platform software product. It also offers Relationship Builder, which allows users to create customer definitions any way they choose using existing data, and Data Exchange, which allows users to move data across the Internet or an intranet at faster speeds (the data is compressed to 20 percent of its original size). As far as Farrell’s strategy for growth, he’s focusing on a new marketing campaign to spread the word to other large data hubs such as large credit card issuers, government agencies and telecom companies. He’s confident that Corworks has no place to go but up: "We have what people need, and the need is only getting bigger."