TechAlert - February 2007

Welcome to the February 2007 edition of TechAlert, the bi-monthly newsletter of the Illinois Technology Development Alliance. Our issues feature articles of great interest to entrepreneurs; to investors interested in leading-edge, high-technology opportunities, and to established companies looking for innovative solutions to pressing business needs.

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ARTICLES

- ITDA Clients Recieve Investment Capital Awards

- Errant Gene Therapeutics Seeks Cures for Orphan Diseases

- ITDA Supports Venture Capitalist Investment Competition (VCIC)

- ITDA New Hires Increase Client Services

- Monday Morning Meeting Retrospective

- Entreprenuer Briefcase -- Back-up and Recovery: A Critical Business Initiative

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ITDA Clients Recieve Investment Capital Awards

The Illinois Technology Development Association has awarded three technical development awards totaling nearly $300,000 in the last ninety days.

“These awards are aimed specifically at helping entrepreneurs get their prototype to final stage product,” says John Noel, ITDA vice president and manager of ITTC. “This is a focused way to provide money straight to companies that are ready to turn prototypes into products at a time when they really need the money and are a little too early for institutional investors.”

The Illinois Technology Transition Center (ITTC), ITDA’s commercialization arm, made its first ever award to UPONUS Technologies, LLC of Wilmette, IL. Additionally the NASA Illinois Commercialization Center (NICC), operated by the ITDA under contract with NASA and the Glen Research Center (GRC) in Cleveland, OH, made enhanced commercialization awards to Santec Systems, Inc. of Chicago, and CogniTek Management Systems, Inc. of Northfield, IL.

UPONUS Technologies: Break-through lossless compression and encryption technologies

UPONUS (www.uponus.com) has been working over the last several years to develop a black-box solution for Department of Defense and Homeland Security applications as well as for companies in the entertainment, financial services, and healthcare fields. Their solution provides for streaming encryption of data with a unique key exchange management system that would allow two black boxes to communicate securely in real time and without human intervention.

“We will use the award to create the key management system and an API and to implement the solution into an embedded processor or similar device,” explains Larry Tropp, CEO.

By approaching data compression, encryption, and communications in a fundamentally different way than other technologies currently in the marketplace, UPONUS delivers a suite of technologies that can adapt to virtually any data format; overcome the speed, ease of use and capacity limitations of older technologies, and effectively handle real-time streaming data.

In October, UPONUS announced a strategic partnership agreement with Intergraph Corporation, a leading global provider of spatial information management software. “UPONUS has proven the feasibility of their solution and is an excellent example of a company ready to make optimal use of this award to get their product to market faster,” says Noel.

Santec Systems, Inc.: Innovating Ultrasonic Inspection Processes

The NASA Illinois Commercialization Center (NICC) continues to provide competitively award financing to Illinois companies by awarding Illinois-based Santec Systems, Inc. (SSI) $100,000 to support collaboration with NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) on acoustography, a unique ultrasonic imaging technology developed by SSI (www.santecsystems.com).

Many of the materials employed by NASA products require ultrasonic testing to ensure their integrity. SSI has developed a portable ultrasonic inspection tool that has the potential to make conventional ultrasonic testing—which is currently done using very large machines—simpler, faster, and more economical by allowing inspectors to get closer to a structure and to move more flexibly around it during inspections.

The award money will be used to help SSI complete a technical milestone in the path toward commercialization of their product. “The award creates the opportunity for SSI and NASA Glenn to work synergistically,” says Jaswinder S. Sandhu, CEO of SSI. “SSI will work with the nondestructive testing group at GRC—a group with decades of experience—and will benefit from intensive testing in the GRC’s state-of-the art laboratories.”

“These companies literally work side by side with NASA research scientists,” says Cary Nourie, ITDA Vice-President and Program Manager. “In that environment, they gain access to some of the greatest scientists of the world.”

The proposed work with SSI will benefit NASA by providing a fast and cost-effective method to inspect items such as spacecraft components, horizontal and vertical stabilizers, ailerons, and helicopter blades. Sandhu says that the work will also benefit commercial aerospace companies such as Boeing and GE Aircraft Engines, through similar simplification of inspection procedures.

CogniTek Management Systems, Inc.: Improving the efficiency of solar heat exchange

CogniTek Management Systems, Inc. (www.cognitek.com), a company that is developing new technologies that center on heat transfer for thermal management, received a $100,000 enhanced commercialization award for collaboration with NASA Glenn Research Center.

“These awards are intended for Illinois-based small business firms that are developing technologies that can benefit NASA’s mission requirements,” says ITDA’s Nourie. “We are looking for technologies that help NASA and are also commercially viable. NASA wants to use the technology, and they also want it to be used by the general commercial market so it’s a win-win for the entrepreneur.”

CogniTek’s technology impacts alternative energy as well as the traditional power plant. “We are doing development work on solar thermal applications that transform solar heat into both cooling and power simultaneously,” says Michael Gurin, CTO and founder. “We have technology in house as well as from technology that we licensed from NASA for an absorption heat pump system that we have transformed into a power generator.”

The integrated energy system has immediate application in both aerospace and terrestrial markets. The product area supported by the enhanced NICC grant is a combination of CogniTek’s super critical micro-channel heat exchange technology coupled with NASA’s cermet coatings (a specific type of solar coating). “We are testing the direct integration of those coatings with our heat exchangers,” says Gurin, “as a way to collect solar energy. If there is a fit, our strategy is to license their technology.”

Space equipment must deal with extreme temperatures of hot and cold simultaneously. “What normally happens is that the side of a satellite facing the sun gets extremely hot,” Gurin says, “and the side not facing the sun gets very cold. NASA has a wide range of technologies to move heat from one to the other, and the efficiencies that we believe we can achieve are very high compared to typical solar energy.”

CogniTek is well along the R&D curve moving toward early commercialization. “We are entering into relationships with partners to accelerate the commercialization of our product,” Gurin says. “This opportunity with NASA fits right into our strategy.”

The company is seeking additional investment of $2 to $3 million and is actively pursuing both angel and strategic investors. The funds will be used to finalize the product development, to subcontract initial manufacturing processes, and for initial market development activities. “We’ve been working with the NICC for many years, and the team there has been a tremendous help with everything from networking to helping us work with NASA, to now raising capital,” Gurin says.

“A lot of times the company is hitting a technical milestone because of the grant,” says Nourie. “That means that these grants help reduce the overall risk of the company so that they can raise additional funding and accelerate taking their products out to the commercial market place.”

Awards Process

The ITDA created the awards programs using a portion of the funding they received from the Department of Defense and NASA. “Instead of spending the entire budget on operations,” says John Noel, ITDA vice president and program manager of ITTC, “we held money in reserve to fund these awards.”

The award programs are open-ended until the allocated funding is committed. Award decisions are made through an RFP process that is scored and evaluated based on scientific, technical, and management review. An award recipient must be an ITDA client, an incorporated Illinois technology company, a small business as defined by the SBA, with a documented proof-of-concept, a production-ready prototype, an in-place management team, and a complete business plan.

Priority will be given to projects which promote Illinois’s strengths and advantages, particularly projects commercializing locally developed technologies with Illinois economic developmental potential. (For more information, visit http://www.illinoistechnology.com/services/federal_funding/).

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Errant Gene Therapeutics, LLC: Finding Cures for Rare Diseases

Rare diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), sickle cell anemia, and thalassemia, affect more than 25 million people in the US. There are more than 6,000 of these “orphan” diseases, so-called because they have not been “adopted” by the pharmaceutical industry which typically focuses on developing blockbuster drugs that can serve very large markets.

In fact, an orphan disease is defined by US statute as a disease that impacts less than 200,000 Americans. As a business person, that might lead you to think of this a niche market—that is unless you or a friend or loved one has one of these rare and often life-threatening conditions.

Errant Gene Therapeutics, LLC, of Chicago, IL (www.errantgene.com) was founded in 2003 specifically to identify and rapidly commercialize curative treatments for rare or orphan diseases, in particular those that are caused by errant gene expression (defective genes). The company holds 13 issued patents with eight others pending as well as worldwide exclusive licenses from prominent laboratories and universities.

“Our goal is to address the unmet medical needs of patients through the development of new therapeutic advances,” says Jason Feldman, Director of Business Operations.

Leading Products Target Beta Thalassemia and Refractory Prostate Cancer

Thalagen™, EGT’s leading product, is gene therapy treatment for beta thalassemia, also referred to as Cooley’s anemia. Thalassemia is a genetic disorder of two types in which the bone marrow cells cannot produce normal hemoglobin. The disease creates anemia (a shortage of healthy red blood cells resulting in not enough oxygen reaching body tissue) and causes the body to absorb too much iron. The iron settles in patients’ organs and is fatal over time.

There is no curative therapy for thalassemia. Currently, patients are treated by transfusion therapy, which helps with the anemia but worsens the iron overload. There is treatment to extract the iron, but it eventually wears the body out. While thalassemia is fairly common world-wide, in the US it is classified as a rare (orphan) disease.

Thalagen™ is based on technology that came out of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City, which corrects the errant gene expression that causes thalassemia. EGT holds the exclusive worldwide license to this technology. “Our relationship with Sloan-Kettering has allowed us access to incredible technology that has the potential to save lives,” Feldman says. “We anticipate that Thalagen™ will soon enter Phase I human clinical trials.”

A second product, CG 1521, is targeted at the treatment of refractory (therapy-resistant) prostate cancer and is nearing completion of pre-clinical development. EGT also has potential products in development for pulmonary and neurodegenerative disorders.

EGT’s Efficient Business Model Benefits from the Orphan Drug Act (ODA)

Once EGT identifies a promising technology, the company has deep internal expertise to develop the opportunity and bring it to market, but the real key to EGT’s strategy is that their products are not blockbuster drugs.

“We have streamlined operations,” Feldman says, “which allow us to cost effectively develop new drugs. We know how to effectively utilize our relationships with prominent research institutions and universities, and we engage consultants as needed to match the cycle of our business. We have researchers and consultants all over the world and technology allows us to operate as if we were in the same office. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry and empowered small companies like EGT to successfully compete.”

As EGT becomes known, researchers contact the company. “As our technology successfully progresses, we are becoming identified as a leader in orphan disease research,” Feldman says. “Research that traditionally may fall under the radar of major pharmaceutical companies is our sweet spot. We can dive into those specialized opportunities, develop them, and profitably bring them to market because of our streamlined approach. It can be a very lucrative niche.”

Feldman says that EGT has on-going dialogue with companies and universities who are doing bench research. “They want to get connected with a company like ours,” he says. “Today a lot of solid research is getting shelved. We want researchers to know that if they have a discovery that looks promising, we are the company to call.”

The company also achieves leverage through the provisions in the 1983 Orphan Drug Act (ODA), which encourages the development of products that demonstrate promise for the diagnosis or treatment of orphan diseases.

This legislation offers tax incentives on clinical trials that include a 15-year carry forward and three-year carry back; grants of up to $200,000 for three years to help defray costs of clinical studies, and seven years of marketing exclusivity upon FDA approval for drugs developed for rare conditions. Additionally the act waives up to $250,000 in prescription drug filing fees. (http://www.fda.gov/orphan)

“Orphan drugs also receive fast-tracked regulatory review,” Feldman says, “which means that they can advance from Phase I clinical testing to FDA approval in approximately three years. For traditional drugs, the FDA review process can take over a decade.”

Feldman says that EGT’s budget goes almost entirely toward research and development. “We are serving an unmet medical need,” he says. “Most patients with orphan diseases currently have very limited therapeutic alternatives. Since there is typically no competition, products like ours are usually pulled to market and do not require a large sales force. We get emails on a daily basis from across the US as well as from countries like India, Pakistan, Italy, and Greece. People with orphan diseases are desperately in need of new treatments, and we are doing our best to answer their prayers with a cure.”

Feldman says that EGT’s capital doesn’t go toward maintaining extensive facilities and overhead. “It goes to pushing research forward and preparing Thalagen™ for clinical trials,” he says. ”Furthermore, unlike big pharma, there’s no bureaucratic red tape here. If something is not working we can quickly adapt.”

Next Steps

EGT has currently raised nearly $2 million and plans to raise additional capital. The company is also considering several other strategic options to continue to provide for growth and product development.

“Our ultimate goal,” Feldman says, “is to both help people with orphan diseases and provide our investors with a successful venture that has multiple exit possibilities. We have built flexibility into our company that allows us to independently manage each product in our pipeline depending on the market and potential partners or acquiring companies.”

Feldman uses ITDA as a sounding board. “They give companies honest advice and guidance,” he says, “and help negotiate through those early crucial decisions that can make or break a company. My advice to any entrepreneur is go see ITDA early. They will help save you time and money, and they have a network of relationships for financial backing. Not only will the ITDA help you map out a strategy, they’re friends to lean on.”

Feldman sees the ITDA as a great resource for the technical community. “They are a dedicated team with a genuine interest in helping local start-ups succeed. It is a mistake to think of Chicago as a fly-over city when it comes to biotech,” he says. “We have world-class resources and an incredible infrastructure to help biotechnology companies like ours grow and succeed.”

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ITDA Supports Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at University of Chicago's Polsky Center of Entrepreneurship

Most graduate schools of business sponsor business plan competitions for entrepreneurial students, but through the Glencoe Capital Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC), the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago offers entrepreneurial training from a different perspective.

The Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital and Private Equity (EVP) student group and the Polsky Center coordinate the student-run, winter quarter event which is held with the purpose of providing students the experience of thinking and acting like venture capitalists and of identifying the top students to represent the University’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) at the regional and final intercollegiate competitions.

The event is designed to be primarily educational, but as a side benefit participating students get exposure and can compete beyond the state in advanced rounds for cash prizes. “This local competition began in 2005 and is gaining great traction,” says Arun K. Bhatia, ITDA Venture Development Director. “The ITDA is pleased to serve as one of the sponsors of this innovative initiative.”

In this school-wide competition, student venture capitalist teams are charged with managing a multi-million dollar mock fund. The business school brings in entrepreneurs from real companies to present their business plans, and the student VCs decide where to invest. The student VCs are then evaluated by a panel of investment experts.

“The ITDA has been very generous in their sponsorship,” says Vipin Kalra, EVP co-chair and student coordinator of the event. “They provided multiple client companies for us to choose among—and the company we selected to present, Falck Medical, was picked by the most teams as the company they would most choose to invest in.”

“When the ITDA introduced the idea of us participating we acted,” says Rich Milliman, a University of Chicago GSB alumnus and CEO of Falck Medical, Allentown, PA. “I like to have whatever contact I can have with the business school, and any time you have the opportunity to talk about your company in a public forum, you want to take it. It was also enjoyable to interact with the students.”

The student teams received and analyzed the companies’ business plans in advance, and then during the one-day competition event, they heard the companies’ formal presentations, interviewed the entrepreneurs, and developed their investment strategies. Then it was their turn to present to and have their recommendations evaluated by a panel of actual investors and venture capitalists.

Representatives from ARCH Venture Partners, Glencoe Capital, LLC, and OCA Ventures were among the panel participants. The student VC teams were judged based on their company analysis, investment strategy, and deal structure. Four of the seven teams (including the winning team) “invested in” in Falck Medical. “Our story is compelling,” Milliman says, “as the student interest validates. Additionally, we attracted the attention of some of the venture capitalists who were judging the event.”

Falck Medical’s products enable optometrists and ophthalmologists to much more accurately and quickly measure eye pressure and assess a patient’s risk of glaucoma and diabetic eye disease. The company, whose technology has been under development for more than 12 years, has working prototypes, approved patents, and clinical studies underway.

“We are currently raising A round funding of up to $1.5 million and plan to use the money to move into early stage commercialization, which would include gaining FDA 510(k) approval, beta testing at four universities, and entering a regional market,” Milliman says.

“We and Falck Medical were very pleased with the whole VCIC experience,” says Bhatia, who is also a University of Chicago GSB graduate. “ITDA’s participation aligns us closer with the Graduate Business School, gives our client companies exposure to leading venture capitalists, and brings out great ideas from these really bright students that our client companies can use in refining their business plans and capital-raising strategies.”

The GSB internal competition tends to attract leading-edge entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. “Our judges and entrepreneurs are always exceptional and that makes our teams extremely well-prepared for the follow-on competitions,” says Kalra, who is planning to pursue a career in private equity after he receives his MBA in June.

This year’s GSB winning team went on to earn first place in the regional contest at the University of Boulder. Their next step is the national competition at the University of North Carolina in April where they are competing for a $10,000 prize.

For more information on the Polsky Center and the University of Chicago’s VCIC event, visit http://www.chicagogsb.edu/entrepreneurship/events/competitions/. For information about national VCIC® visit www.VCIC.org.

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The Illinois Technology Development Alliance

Announces New Hires

The Illinois Technology Development Alliance is pleased to announce that Shalini Dewan has joined the organization as Director of Technology Transition. Dewan will be supporting ITDA’s contract with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) as well as other contracts enacted by the ITDA.

“I’ll be working with our high tech clients in review of their marketing and commercialization plans with an eye to their fit in ONR and DoD,” Dewan says. “I expect to be dealing most often with projects in the physical sciences. However, these days more and more of the different disciplines cross over, so it is hard to say a technology falls purely in the physical sciences. That means the range of applications is huge.”

Bringing considerable experience in working with the Office of Naval Research, prior to joining the ITDA Dewan was in commercialization and technology transfer in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she managed the ACCELERATOR program, an initiative which speeded the commercialization of technologies out of the University.

She knows how to match entrepreneurs with funding opportunities and commercialization and research partners in government and industry. “There are specifics to every federal agency that entrepreneurs or small companies may not know about,” Dewan says, “so we work very closely with different officials from the Navy to see what is coming up and what is mission critical. We make it our business to get the entrepreneur in front of the right people at the right time be that in a government agency or in the private sector.”

Dewan encourages entrepreneurs and small businesses to come to the ITDA earlier rather than later and not to be put off by the potential complexities of dealing with a government agency. “There are many opportunities for funding that come along,” she says. “They are deadline specific. We don’t want our clients to miss out on an opportunity that might be applicable so timing is critical.”

Holding a BA in Communications from Concordia University in Montreal and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dewan was an entrepreneur herself. She previously founded a business in the power electronics field. She also directed the vision, development, and launch of a web-based search engine used to identify federal funding opportunities and licensable technologies at universities while at NCSA.

“My biggest goal is to make a tangible difference in building an economic development benefit for both the entrepreneur and for the Office of Naval Research,” she says. “As a community, we all benefit from an emphasis on giving small businesses a good start on a path to a solid footing. The thrill of having a business achieving their potential keeps me passionate about this kind of work.”

The ITDA is also pleased to announce that Katherine Liu, a senior in marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has joined the team as an intern. Liu will assist with marketing and public relations projects, including www.illinoistechnology.com; TechAlert, the organization’s newsletter, and Entrepreneur Briefcase, ITDA’s information series for entrepreneurs.

“I am very fortunate to have this fantastic internship with the ITDA,” Liu says. “This organization is so unique in its mission and services that I have a chance to contribute to the economic development of our region while I am broadening and maturing my marketing skills and experience.”

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November Monday Morning Meeting Retrospective

Three early stage companies presented to an audience of more than 100 investors, entrepreneurs, public officials, and other parties interested in the start-up space at the November Monday Morning Meeting. Joel Dryer moderated the event.

The event was co-sponsored by ITDA and the Illinois Technology Enterprise Center (ITEC)-Evanston, a partnership of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) and Northwestern University that is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs develop new businesses that generate high paying, sustainable jobs.

Presenters included E-World Enterprises, a technology-based company that provides a “single solution space” for career communities and their members; Scio Systems, a software provider whose first product, Lease Manager, allows property managers, financial analysts, and attorneys to analyze contracts without having to actually read through them , and American BioOptics, a Northwestern University and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare technology spin-out that is focused on the early diagnosis of cancer through bio-optics techniques.

American BioOptics Targets Colon Cancer Screening

According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the US. This cancer almost always begins with a polyp, a small growth on the lining of the colon or rectum, and 90 percent of cases are diagnosed in people older than 50.

Finding and removing colon polyps before they become cancerous can stop colon cancer before it starts, and even if a polyp is determined to be cancerous, the five-year survival rate is 90 percent for people whose colon cancer is found and treated at an early stage. However, because many people are not being tested, less than 40 percent of colon cancers are found at that early stage.

American BioOptics is on the path to developing a primary test for colon cancer screening that can be administered by primary care physicians. “Our goal is to make an office procedure that requires no preparation and would be an initial indication for at-risk patients, similar to the way a Pap test is for the cervix, a PSA is for the prostate, or a mammogram is for breasts,” says Andrew Cittadine, American BioOptics CEO. “Then if the test indicates that a patient is at risk, he or she would have a therapeutic colonoscopy.”

The company’s technology makes use of something scientists call the field effect---in this case looking at one part of the colon and detecting abnormalities elsewhere. “That’s the major innovation in our clinical approach,” Cittadine says. “We can detect the earliest cellular change at the nano-scale level optically, and we look at tissue that appears healthy instead of diseased.”

Seeing smaller changes earlier can help predict cancer because recent research suggests cells start changing in very small ways and in locations away from the cancer site well before cancer can be seen. “We can interrogate the most accessible part of the colon and look at the healthy cells there for indications of nano-scale change,” says Cittadine. “The goal of our technology is to see change in healthy tissue that indicates the risk of cancer somewhere else in the colon.”

The company’s underlying research was sponsored by more than $10 million from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other private foundations. Research teams at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and Northwestern University jointly developed the prototype devices that have been used under the guidance of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare’s research board and with patient consent in preliminary patient testing.

Cittadine says that participating in the Monday Morning Meeting was a useful next step in commercializing these prototype devices and growing the business.

“What was very helpful was the feedback on the presentation. This was one of the first times that we had talked in front of a group to express what we are trying to do. The audience was a good cross-section of entrepreneurs, local business people, and potential investors including venture capitalists. They told us what they heard, and what they liked,” he says.

“Whenever you say you are holding an investor forum, people imagine that there are going to be investors who are looking for deals, but the majority of this program and the way it started off is as an educational process for the entrepreneurs,” says Arun Bhatia, ITDA’s Venture Development Director. “It’s not just investors in the audience. You have people from operations, marketing, sales, and finance. Everyone looks at the business through their own lens, and the entrepreneurs hear insights from all those different perspectives.”

Bhatia acknowledges that it can sometimes be a baptism by fire. “It gives entrepreneurs a taste of how raising capital really works,” he says, “but people in these meetings really want to see the entrepreneurs succeed. This is a great place to make a first time presentation, learn from it, and refine the pitch.

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Entrepreneur Briefcase - Back-up and Recovery: A Critical Business Initiative

The word disaster tends to make us think of devastating events like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or ice storms in Oklahoma; however, the leading causes of data losses are:

Hardware or system malfunction - 59%
Human error - 26%
Software corruption or program malfunction - 9%
Computer viruses - 4%
Natural disasters - 2%

The objective of business continuity planning is to recover mission-critical processes as quickly as possible following the disruptive event. Why? Because disruptive events like those listed above can put companies out of business faster than any competitor.

Consider these statistics published in the September/October 2005 edition of Continuity Insights:

43% of businesses suffering a disaster never recover sufficiently to resume business. Of those that reopen only 29% are still operating two years later.
93% of businesses that lost IT capabilities for more than nine days filed for bankruptcy within one year according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
50% of businesses that lost data for more than nine days filed bankruptcy immediately.

Corporate data is growing at 50 percent or more per year and is the most difficult of all infrastructure components to replace. For most high technology businesses, today’s competitive environment requires almost 100 percent data availability and access at anytime from anywhere—in part driven by Federal regulations that demand retention time frames of up to seven years with 24-hour retrieval for certain information.

Once company founders accept that the need to protect data as a key corporate resource is second in importance only to that of retaining key employees, the next step is to define the impact of a business interruption: what data is critical and what is the downtime tolerance for your business? Start by estimating the downtime costs when employees, suppliers, and customers can’t access information.

The good news is that there are affordable steps that thoughtful entrepreneurs can take with regard to operations recovery, IT, and data protection that can lay the foundation to make continuous operation, business resiliency, and real time recovery achievable.

Receive expert advice about what you can do to protect your company in the January Entrepreneur Briefcase. http://www.illinoistechnology.com/stay_informed/ebriefcase/documents

/January2007-rev.pdf

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