Manufacturing leaders have enough to worry about as they juggle an assortment of unintentional threats to their supply chains — natural disasters, geopolitical instability, suppliers that fail to deliver parts, or fail altogether. But to that list many are now adding malicious intrusions, such as counterfeiting.
A young company called New Momentum is looking to carve out a niche by helping goods producers peer into the underworld of black market and gray market activity. Since its first product rollout in early 2008, the company has targeted its software at high-tech and pharmaceutical companies, and with its latest release, New Momentum adds luxury goods manufacturers to that list.
The privately funded company offers SaaS-based software that searches as many as 1 million websites and other online sources daily, surfacing potentially illicit sales activity in e-mails and on eBay, other auction websites, and bulletin boards. The tool is essentially a search engine for keywords associated with the brands a customer wants to protect — particular prescription drugs for a pharmaceuticals company, for instance, or lucrative components in a high-tech producer’s catalog.
Most of New Momentum’s approximately 10 customers hail from the high-tech industry. Cisco has gone on record in a webcast about its use of the technology to ward off counterfeiting threats.