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WELCOME; our Webmistress thanks you.
Our value
to our customers is to help reduce costs, improve the value
of existing assets, and enhance revenue.
To enhance
your understanding of our products, we describe here just how it is that
we make these contributions to your bottom line. We have divided information
on these subjects into two groups: Reducing Costs and Enhancing Revenue.
While several sections appear to overlap or be redundant, we have provided
different feature information and different perspectives in each.
Lowering
costs:
Increasing
Revenue:
Lowering
Costs :
Automation
BigSur
was designed with automation in mind as a key component. With both Demand
and Eager capabilities, BigSur's Distributed Processing System can perform
event-driven, rule-driven, or scheduled activities, or a combination
of these, seamlessly. The system also gracefully handles interfaces
to human workflow elements.
BigSur's
automation can span installations, replete with bi-directional meta-data
for tracking just what went where. Requests for down-stream data products
can automatically initiate upstream process requests, thus simplifying
your planning and work-flow development.
Staffing
- Data Center
With BigSur,
your staff doesn't need to bother with as many details of running your
Data Center.
With a
strong emphasis on success in the Data Center, BigSur can in most cases
reduce Data Center's staffing budgets. By providing robust system management
tools, and by providing a one-login-is-enough paradigm, BigSur helps
staff members get more done in a day, freeing them to handle more responsibilities
with competence. Staff members will need to learn fewer skills and need
to interface with fewer tools, thus enabling them to develop deeper
skills in key systems.
Further,
because BigSur can be applied to a large variety of tasks typically
addressed by Data Centers, there can be more overlap in your staff's
skills, enabling them to move among groups and departments more easily,
thus increasing the value and utility of any one individual. These tasks
include activities such as; Process Tracking, Archiving, Disk "Cache"
Management, Load Balancing and Resource Management, Performance Evaluation.
Staffing
- Key Talent (Scientists and Researchers)
If someone
has a passion for biology, for example, why trap them into a morass
of computer-science work in how to harness the computer as a tool when
they can spend a much greater fraction of their time actually working
on biology problems?
Key Talent
will no longer have to worry about infrastructural aspects of their
work. There are several aspects of this savings, both in terms of very
basic elements like object-level security, "Grid Computing",
and so forth, and also application-based concerns. Your staff will instinctively
know that no matter what solution they implement, they're going to get
full security, full tracking of their data and processes, error handling,
etc. and - whatever they produce - they don't have to
develop any of that.
Similarly,
years of elapsed time and seemingly countless years of development need
not be spent trying to determine the best way to do things because they'll
have an easy to use, high-speed, rapid development and production-deployment
system. If they aren't sure which way is best, they can organize things
in multiple ways and then determine which way to go. Competing strategies
can be implemented in parallel without crossing paths because BigSur
keeps everything organized, even the running of different programs with
identical names on the same system at the same time.
Your key
talent will discover the fundamental concept of teaching BigSur how
they do their work their way. We call this "learning." BigSur
learns how you do your processing, how you organize your objects - it
learns your paradigms. Once taught, your staff can move on and
potentially forget how they did things. It remembers, and in such a
way as to aid those that follow so that they can ferret out the truth
later, if need be. When that key intern goes back to school at the end
of the summer, you have less to fear if you're using BigSur, or when
that most important researcher decides to retire. ...It also means that
your staff loves you all the more since they don't have to remember
everything!
Improved
Efficiency - workflow, processing
When you
teach BigSur how to perform your processing, you are free to declare
each input and result as you wish, so it's not just that the input is
in some particular format, but you can give it a semantic name of your
choosing and at the same time also tell it what the format is. This
means that when you create "adjacent" processes, those that
take the inputs or create the outputs that go into other processes,
each is a stand-alone process, and each has a higher-level semantic
about what the process actually does.
This is
very important because it means that you can modify your processing
as you see fit, on the fly, as necessary. You can create alternative
work-flows without having to change everything you're doing. Just create
an alternate version of your next processing step. You can run it along
side, in tandem, with what you've done previously. In the case of differing
versions of a single process, you can choose any version to be the primary
one for automated processing and run the other for evaluation or on-demand.
You could even automate multiple choices! All, with just the click (or
two) of a mouse.
You don't
have to spend time dealing with workflow issues, scheduling problems,
taking the system off-line for testing, or any other system related
issue. Because BigSur keeps track of things, you can later very easily
determine which resulting data set is which, and you can even specify
completely different processing tracks for each data-product.
Increased
Resource Utilization
It's true;
nothing comes free. When you utilize The BigSur System™, you'll
have CPU cycles, stored bytes, and I/O & network operations spent
in support of what BigSur is doing for you. Any such system would have
these kinds of duties, so that's expected. But BigSur has some advanced
features that help make the best of what you've got.
Fully distributed
objects and fully distributed processing mean that you can make fuller
utilization of every compute cycle and every stored byte. Local cache
management means reduced network transport. Distributed objects mean
distributed storage. With heterogeneity support, you can bring more
system resources online quickly and easily. And, a CPU that's free and
therefore looking for work isn't costing you anything as it has otherwise
wasted cycles available.
Reduced
or eliminated dependencies on other systems
There are
at least three fundamentally distinct ways BigSur provides opportunities
to eliminate dependencies. One is with BigSur itself; BigSur uses an
RDBMS as a meta-data manager, but which one is up to you. There are
no less than six major RDBMS vendors today, and each with its own dialect
of SQL. We have provided the capability to translate between RDBMS dialects
so that you are not dependent on any particular RDBMS vendor.
You can
use BigSur's polylingual capabilities so that your RDBMS applications
can be written in a database agnostic fashion. Since robust error trapping,
retry, and reconnection is included, it's production-ready for your
most demanding applications, and it can utilize our journaling for database
vendor independent recovery, too.
BigSur
is a natural environment in which to develop your own replacements to
other systems. For example, you can implement alternatives to various
processing steps, whenever you want to or are able, on your own schedule,
without impacting your production activities. BigSur's DPS enables you
to concentrate Legacy processing on one or a few key systems while migrating
other systems to new ways of doing things. Thus, you can alter your
environment as you please to reduce or eliminate dependencies.
Harness
otherwise disparate systems into a cohesive whole
This technology
was first designed in 1994 as a tool to integrate an entire, very sophisticated,
scientific enterprise with no less than five distinct disciplines within
a single system. Thus, it's reasonable to view it as "the glue
layer" used to bring together the capabilities of an entire environment.
It was designed from the start to leverage the work of others, so it's
perfect as an environment to integrate everything an enterprise does.
In one example, BigSur has been the platform for integrating billing,
shipping, product generation, planning, workflow, archiving and customer
management.
BigSur
is able to perform these functions because it doesn't attempt to do
these functions itself. Rather, it provides a competent, well thought
through framework for connecting computational power with flexible meta-data
management and the ability to call other tools to harness their power.
With distributed processing and distributed object management, anything
can be anywhere, yet known to the system. Able to represent the relationships
of any scientific application in meta-data - with straight-forward schema
extension for integrating any data-set - and with an ability to launch
processing whenever and wherever needed, BigSur is particularly well
suited to enterprise integration applications.
Heterogeneity
support
We understand
the value of having everything run the same on every platform; this
helps ensure your success - and ours. Heterogeneity saves money because
it means seamless integration of different systems, and you have less
concern as new systems enter your environs. Even when needs differ radically
and different systems must be accommodated, the ability to handle all
systems with equal aplomb serves to enhance your capabilities and reduce
costs.
True heterogeneity
starts with a choice of tools: We have chosen Java, Gnu-C, and SQL as
the foundations of our code base because each are the most portable
of their kind in the world. We're platform and RDBMS agnostic; we have
no vested interest in forcing you to one system or another. Where there
are shortcomings, we code solutions ourselves in these same tools so
we aren't dependent on others. This means you aren't so dependent on
others, either.
Heterogeneity
means we only use one code-line for our engineering and therefore there's
no chance that a bug-fix will be inadvertently dropped from a new release
for a particular platform.
It's worth
noting our partnership with the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). NAG
has mathematical libraries that perform all the most difficult and challenging,
yet incredibly common mathematical work. From computational fluid dynamics
to simple differential equations, NAG's got it in a version that's suitable
for virtually every operating system variant on every hardware variant.
NAG lets you get identical results across the whole gamut of computing.
Because BigSur supports compile-on-the-fly processing, with a NAG library
on your systems, you can ensure your processes run everywhere the same
with much less concern for platform specifics.
Leverage
existing resources better
Information
is key in knowing how to better utilize resources, but so is the prospect
of choice to effect change. BigSur serves both well.
Processing
performance is tracked so any manner of statistic can be garnered from
meta-data. It provides you at least four powerful opportunities to control
processing behavior; 1) Associate processes into groups and then control
processing resources using the processing group names. 2) At run-time,
specify each process' individual queue priority - which jobs get to
jump ahead in the queue? 3) Each daemon can be directed to start Processes
in any desired system-level priority. 4) Start any number of daemons,
each with their own settings, including whether or not they single-thread
(perform sequentially) or work in parallel. Collectively, these features
ensure you can implement whatever resource utilization policy you wish
and have your wishes carried out easily and conveniently.
Every network
transfer is tracked, in bytes per millisecond, so while overall network
utilization remains out of BigSur's realm, it can give you effective
performance rates, including awareness of whether or not encryption
was used. Configurable file transports mean that you can harness any
data-mover you wish without any code changes, so you can choose the
most efficient for your needs. Staff can control which of multiple transports
are default, or BigSur can choose the fastest. Other transports may
serve as fall-back capability. And, developers may choose one file transport
over another.
Sometimes
things go wrong. When you've spent resources preparing and running an
expensive process and something goes wrong, it can be an even bigger
disaster if the system machinery decides to clean up the environment
prematurely. Lost is all the resource utilization up to that point,
moving data, etc., and maybe lost is the opportunity to figure out what
went wrong. Surely lost is any chance of restarting the work. BigSur
provides for restartable processes so you can avoid these losses and
salvage the resource utilization that's been already expended.
Keep
people from waiting
In the
case of a user whose own system can be utilized for processing, when
the time comes, a specialized "Daemon" is used. In short,
the user's own process takes on Daemon functions, dispatches the process
as a child, and it gets on with business. You get all the standard security,
tracking, control, and other features but with a more efficient approach
so you don't keep your users waiting.
Expand
capabilities of Legacy Systems without replacement
Many times
an older system is doing fine but is unable to be flexible enough to
accommodate new demands. Much as it integrates systems, BigSur provides
an innate ability to live in harmony with existing systems and can serve
to enhance their useful lives. For example, it might move data sets
to customers or publish them to web sites on behalf of a less-capable
system. BigSur may serve as an interface to modern protocols, formats
or access methods for older systems. Simple transformative processes
can be automated by BigSur, called on an event, on demand, or on schedule,
as needed by older systems.
Salvage
dead projects
You
can use BigSur's 'glue' capabilities to salvage otherwise unsuccessful
projects, by taking the useful bits and giving them a new place to live.
Maybe a great user interface was developed but the back-end didn't perform,
or maybe a great data-model was developed but had no framework within
which to let others access it. Whatever the case, BigSur can help you
make the best of the worthwhile remnants of what went before.
Resource
Sharing and Virtual Organization Support
When you
want to partner with others, you have greater challenges than when you
harness only your own resources. You need to know a lot about them,
and they you. You each have security concerns. Some call this the "Grid
problem."
BigSur
provides the only comprehensive "Grid Computing" solution
in the world. And, it's turn-key. Its got seamless, bi-directional processing,
object management, and tracking for all partnering activities. And,
its got great security controls, complete with defaults, and several
policy levels for easy management of the whole effort.
BigSur
was originally architected with a fully-distributed paradigm in mind
- it's not an add-on; It uses a client-server architecture in which
any client can be in any organization, and can participate in as many
grids as desired simply by connecting to different servers. You
can add a new organization to your BigSur "Grid" in a few
minutes by just updating the meta-data and installing a client-installation
somewhere within the new organization.
In addition,
BigSur lets you support "projects;" project support lets you
declare who are in what projects, declare primary contacts, provide
descriptions and, optionally, point to web-sites, thus providing a natural
description of a project.
System
Integration
Bringing
systems together can be vital for an organization. It can save a business
during a transitionary period such as an acquisition. When bringing
two or more systems together, you can either use BigSur's base meta-data
capabilities as the core manager of objects, or you can use your other
systems for those purposes with BigSur as the processing system that
glues them together, or both simultaneously.
You can
develop a library of functions that translate between systems and expand
capabilities over time, as needed.
Increased
Reuse and Reusability
It's obvious
that reuse saves money, but nobody will reuse anything unless it's both
easy and cheap - and, of course, they have to know about it, and know
they need it.
For discovery,
find data-sets, processes, tools, relationships, along with all the
other things, through the meta-data. The idea is to give people the
meta-data they need to make a decision about something. Specify the
purpose, give an abstract, or provide supplemental information on just
about everything. Give that data as a URL, as html, as plain text, etc.,
whatever works for you. Now people can figure it out. Sometimes people
want to transform data and they can look to see what someone else is
using for processing, visualization tools, and so on.
Easy is
what BigSur's about; run anybody's process, if you have privilege,
without having to do anything more than provide the input arguments
it needs. Done. Click a ScienceMaster™ button and instantly
visualize results with the appropriate visualization tool of choice.
Cheap is
in your department; do you charge for your data and processes? We just
make it possible and easy - and let 'em know about it.
Resource
Management
If you've
got a lot of resources, it can take a lot of effort just to keep track
of it all. We can help reduce that effort. BigSur has a light-weight
typing system where you can represent any types you want, even things
that aren't ordinarily represented in computer systems.
Intellectual
property is just such a resource. Wouldn't it be nice to track that?
How about real property? Satellites? Buoys? Maybe clouds? Want to track
not only what you've got but what you can do with it? No problem, BigSur
can do that.
Conceptual
objects are managed as easily as digital ones. Relationships are represented
in many ways, such as a set-member paradigm among objects, typing, special
meta-data branches for processing and ownership, etc. Processes may
also be conceptual instead of actual, thus representing your assets
better.
No resource
management is complete without the ability to manage privileges on the
resources that are managed. It's clear that nobody's general purpose
system should try to second guess everyone's needs, so we provide an
extensible security scheme so you can devise your own access methods
and provide your own restrictions; BigSur will enforce your rules your
way.
(If you're
thinking of computer resources, BigSur helps manage them, also. The
most important aspects of this are covered elsewhere in this document.)
Manufacturing
In today's
jumbled world, integration of manufacturing with other enterprise needs
can yield huge savings. Use BigSur's processes to represent non-computational
processes, if you want, like dipping an airframe structure into a protective
coating. Easy. And if you have machinery that can make it so, and programs
that can make it go, BigSur can be the glue between desire to and actually
performing the dip.
You might
set up your processing within BigSur and start with tracking things
like production through an assembly line. Some elements may involve
running computational steps while other tasks are only tracking physical
activities. When individual points become computerized, you can use
BigSur as the interface to automate them and keep the meta-data clean.
Humans can be in the loop the whole way or not at all. And when you
have external partners, use BigSur to connect you together for clock-work-like
precision and coordination - for just-in-time inventory management,
for example. Use the distributed, publishing, integration, and time-management
features to full advantage in managing your global production strategy.
Data-Mining
These days
it's clear that there's money to be saved or discovered by mining information
from huge data-sets. Our mining strategy is open and adaptable.
BigSur
does not provide any data-mining functions per 'se. Instead, it lets
you harness any data mining process or system and provide it a common
interface, tracking, distributed computing, distributed object management,
and so on. If you aren't sure which data mining strategy is better,
implement each within BigSur and evaluate the performance metrics. Using
BigSur's automation, mine data whenever you want, eagerly, on a schedule
or on demand, using whatever hardware you want; it's up to you.
Expanded
Capabilities through your own Library
Ever wanted
to own the Digital version of the Library of Alexandria? You can. What
would that be worth?
Nobody
can tell you in advance what the cash savings, value, or other outcome
might arise from the library you build, but BigSur can help you do it.
Data objects of every type are easily collected, and BigSur also integrates
processes in a natural way wherein the processes so encapsulated don't
actually change at all, they just get wrappered into a container of
sorts. You can capture knowledge, information, know-how. You can
represent computational steps computationally, data-sets digitally,
and relationships relationally. It's a natural.
You might
save your organization's old systems, paradigms, strategies! What might
it be worth to someday be able to re-process something from the past,
using the actual old paradigms, code, etc.? No one can tell you, but
you can capture these items forever with BigSur. Perhaps more valuable,
capture the tricks of your partners, customers, even competitors! You
can organize it so when new things come along, older things don't have
to be thrown out, yet the new items are easily found as the latest and
greatest.
What's
sure is that you can know more when you have a competent library.
Time
Management
Being wrong,
or misunderstood about what time it is - ever have that problem? Gosh
it can be costly!
It's hard
to know where to begin to describe the problems with tracking what time
it is. But, we bet you know many of them. Our view is that every computer
has an offset from the Naval observatory in Greenwich, England, expressed
in minutes because hour-offsets are not universal. This value is then
used to convert all local times into Greenwich times in the meta-data.
When needed, time values are then translated back into local time. Mostly.
Sounds
simple; it isn't.
But we've
made it easy for you, complete with automatic checking for time-zone
and daylight savings time changes on restart, just in case its that
time of year again or you've taken your laptop somewhere and reset its
time zone.
Get
Notified when it counts
Knowing
when something important has happened can be the most valuable information
in your day. How valuable? That's up to you; we just make it easy to
get the word. Through what we call End-Action, BigSur's Distributed
Processing System can automatically notify anybody - as many people
as you like - about events, in real-time. If your staff has pagers,
it can page them with a message or it can send them an email or an "instant
message." You can learn of successes or failures, transitions between
steps, whatever you want to know about, when you need to know about
it.
Your staff
can use this capability in the applications they write, too, so it's
easy for them. You can even use this to notify you of when things begin!
What do you want to be notified about?
Increasing
Revenue:
Automate
interactive relationships with customers to create new revenue streams
BigSur's
Publisher can provide your customers with automated delivery of digital
products whenever is appropriate, thus providing an opportunity for
you to increase the number of products delivered while increasing customer
satisfaction and enhancing their experience dealing with you.
BigSur's
automation can span installations, with replete bi-directional meta-data
for tracking "what went where" and "what came from where",
so you can create your own "customer" installations on your
own hardware, isolating your production systems from customer activities
while at the same time enhancing their ability to find what they want
on their own. Or, use this capability to have sophisticated, automated
interactions with customers on their own systems. Or, use both at the
same time for the ultimate in automated interaction.
Requests
for down-stream data products can automatically initiate upstream processing
requests, thus simplifying product generation planning and work-flow
development. This can be vital for your customers: Let them ask for
any derived data product, extant or not, and your system will either
deliver previously generated data or initiate desired processing. If
earlier processing steps haven't yet been performed, BigSur can initiate
the request for all of the missing bits and create the data the customer
wants, automatically. Note that BigSur has an ability to check for duplicate
requests and, if found, skip the processing and simply return previously
generated results. This gives your customers what they want faster while
helping eliminate needless loads on resources.
Create
new products, intellectual property, capabilities
Key talent
is always engaged in developing your new product lines, your new intellectual
property, and your new capabilities. Or, they're involved with the refinement
of these. BigSur helps you increase your revenue streams by dramatically
reducing your key talent's distractions associated with using the computer
as a tool.
If someone
has a passion for biology, for example, why trap them into a morass
of computer-science work in how to harness the computer as a tool when
they can spend a much greater fraction of their time actually working
on biology problems? After all, there's money in it for you when they're
working on the problems associated with their key skills that you hired
them for in the first place.
You allow
them to focus on increasing your revenues by freeing them from having
to worry about infrastructural aspects of their work, both in terms
of very basic elements like object-level security, "Grid Computing",
and so forth, and also application-based concerns. Your staff will instinctively
know that no matter what solution they implement, they're going to get
full security, full tracking of their data and processes, error handling,
etc. and - whatever they produce - they don't have to develop any of
that.
Similarly,
years of elapsed time and seemingly countless years of development need
not be spent trying to determine the best way to do things because they'll
have an easy to use, high-speed, rapid development and production-deployment
system. If they aren't sure which way is best, they can organize things
in multiple ways and then determine which way to go. Competing strategies
can be implemented in parallel without crossing paths because BigSur
keeps everything organized, even the running of different programs with
identical names on the same system at the same time.
BigSur
can help you retain your key talent, too. There's an obvious improvement
in job satisfaction when people are allowed to focus on their area of
passion. And, BigSur can help reduce the losses to your revenue streams
when people move on because it learns how you do your processing, how
you organize your objects - it learns your paradigms. Once taught, your
staff can move on to other things - they don't have to be "owners"
of something they've done for their entire remaining tenure with your
organization. BigSur remembers, and in such a way as to aid those that
follow. So, you have less to fear when loosing key people or when they
change jobs within your organization. And it means that your staff loves
you all the more since they don't have to remember everything!
Expand
capabilities of Legacy Systems without replacement
Many times
an older system is doing fine but is unable to be flexible enough to
accommodate new demands. Don't miss out on new revenue opportunities
just because your old system can't do it and you don't have the resources
for replacement. Because BigSur has an innate ability to interact in
harmony with existing systems, it can serve to enhance their useful
lives. For example, it might move data sets to customers or publish
them to web sites on behalf of a less-capable system. BigSur may serve
as an interface to modern protocols, formats or access methods for older
systems. Simple transformative processes can be automated by BigSur,
called on an event, on demand, or on schedule, as needed by older systems.
Thus, you can enhance your revenue streams by adding desired functionality
with less risk, less down-time, and fewer changes.
Salvage
dead projects
Computer
analysts tell us that of all IT projects, half fail outright, and another
30% fail to satisfy basic requirements, such that only 20% even reach
the level of usability. Therefore, most IT shops have unsuccessfully
expended a lot of resources going after new ways of doing business,
with battle-scars, decimated bottom-lines and war-stories to show for
it. Usually there are very strong reasons for these projects to have
been attempted.
Capitalize
on those opportunities by using BigSur's 'glue' capabilities to salvage
otherwise unsuccessful projects; take the useful bits and give them
a new place to live. Maybe a great user interface was developed but
the back-end didn't perform, or maybe a great data-model was developed
but had no framework within which to let others access it. Whatever
the case, BigSur can help you make the best of the worthwhile remnants
of what went before and capitalize on otherwise lost opportunities.
Create
new Partner Relationships through Virtual Organization Support
Sometimes
new ventures which bring together partners make sense and provide new
revenue opportunities for the participants, but the cost of creating
a real organization to implement such ventures may be beyond what's
appropriate, or may create more risk than is comfortable for the partners.
Capitalize on those opportunities using BigSur's "Grid" technologies.
"Grid Computing" has come into vogue in recent years because
it is aimed specifically at creating "virtual organizations."
BigSur
provides the only comprehensive Grid Computing solution in the world.
And, it's turn-key. Its got seamless, bi-directional processing, object
management, and tracking for all partnering activities. And, it's got
great security controls, complete with defaults, and several policy
levels for easy management of the whole effort.
BigSur
uses a client-server architecture in which any client can be in any
organization, and can participate in as many grids as desired simply
by connecting to different servers. You can add a new organization to
your BigSur "Grid" in a few minutes by just updating the meta-data
and installing a client-installation somewhere within the new organization
- it's easy.
In addition,
BigSur lets you support "projects;" project support lets you
declare who are in what projects, declare primary contacts, provide
descriptions and, optionally, point to web-sites, thus providing a natural
description of a project.
Manufacturing
Use BigSur
to go after manufacturing opportunities that you might otherwise miss
out on by taking advantage of its distributed properties and superior
meta-data management capabilities. For example, you might be able to
offer custom features at customer request, electronically, automatically
getting customer choices to the right points in the line for their particular
product. This is possible with BigSur because the materials and steps
that are used to produce a product "map" exactly onto the
objects and processes it manages. Its flexibility to manage any kind
of scientific data or process means it can also manage any kind of product
or production data or process. It's therefore perfect for helping manage
manufacturing. The ease with which it interfaces with other systems
means that it can work in parallel with other manufacturing systems
so you can combine systems to gain flexibility and capability that was
otherwise lacking without disruption of existing systems.
With increased
"outsourcing", costs may be reduced or new capabilities of
a partner introduced. That's fine, but often enough a delay is introduced
along with a considerable increase in risk making such outsourcing doubtful.
An additional problem is encountered when you and your suppliers use
different information management systems. Instead of missing out, BigSur
can help you go after those opportunities by helping reduce risk and
delay and by helping you partner connect at a much deeper level. Use
BigSur's distributed, automation and integration features to bring you
and your partners into better harmony, feeding each partner vital information
as it's generated. Yet, enjoy the strong security and privileges management
to have the confidence to proceed without hesitation or delay.
Data-Mining
There's
money in information. You know that. But data isn't information - data
has to be processed, and therein lies the rub; Some data is of low-information
value and should only be processed into information on demand, when
it's really needed, while other data should be processed more eagerly.
BigSur helps you go after the money hidden in your data by helping you
turn it into information through a process known as data mining.
Our mining
strategy is open and adaptable. BigSur does not provide any data-mining
functions per 'se. Instead, it lets you harness any data-mining process
or system and provide it a common interface, automation, tracking, distributed
processing & object management, and so on. If you aren't sure which
data mining strategy is better, implement each within BigSur and evaluate
the results and performance metrics. Using BigSur's automation, mine
data whenever you want, eagerly, on a schedule or on demand, using whatever
hardware you want; it's up to you.
Digital
Library
Ever wanted
to own the Digital version of the Library of Alexandria? You can. What
would that be worth? Could you sell the data from your library? Could
you sell processing against the data? Is your library filled with Processes
and data objects? Would you use it as the foundation of a services business?
Nobody
can tell you in advance what the revenue streams, cash savings, value,
or other outcome might arise from the library you build, but BigSur
can help you do it. Data objects of every type are easily collected,
and BigSur also integrates processes in a natural way wherein the processes
so encapsulated don't actually change at all, they just get wrappered
into a container of sorts. You can capture knowledge, information, know-how.
You can represent computational steps computationally, data-sets digitally,
and relationships relationally. It's a natural.
Ever consider
a Geo-Spatial library? It can contain not only the what, but the where
behind your data sets. Would it be nice to have the actual location
of your assets in your library? Would you like to easily correlate where
your assets are with maps and other location data? It's no problem with
BigSur's GeoDb meta-data extension. GeoDb provides an implementation
of the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Geo-Spatial Meta-Data
Standard and it's fully integrated with the rest of BigSur. So, you
don't have to develop any of the infrastructure, just your user interface.
What's
sure is that you can know more when you have a competent library.
Time
Management
Want to
"Go Global," but can't because you haven't got an enterprise
management system that can keep track of what time it is in Mumbai,
India (5 hours, 30 minutes from Greenwich, England), Newfoundland, Canada
(3 hours, 30 minutes from Greenwhich), and California (8 hours from
GMT)? No problem? Use BigSur's time management features to be sure you're
always right on time.
Because
it started out as a scientific system, BigSur has to be right about
time anywhere around the globe. Since there are places that have minute
resolution offsets from Greenwhich, hour-based time zone management
isn't nearly good enough. Neither is relying upon mass-market products
like Microsoft Windows or Red-Hat Linux since they don't even know about
these different locations around the globe. Our view is that every computer
has an offset from the Naval observatory in Greenwich, England, expressed
in minutes. This value is then used to convert all local times into
Greenwich times in the meta-data. When needed, time values are then
translated back into local time. Mostly.
Sounds
simple; it isn't.
But we've
made it easy for you, complete with optional automatic checking for
time-zone and daylight savings time changes on restart, just in case
it's that time of year again or you've taken your laptop somewhere and
reset its time zone.
Expose
more resources and services to customers
There's
almost always more money to be had by offering your customers more.
With BigSur, you can offer customers more. For example, offer them more
information about the data-products they get from you such as their
sources, how they're processed, when they were processed, by what algorithms,
etc. Or, maybe offer compute cycles to generate their own custom one-offs.
Perhaps BigSur can open up whole new business segments by offering both
compute services as well as data products. As it's more efficient to
perform processing "near" the data, perhaps you can offer
your customers some compute cycles on your hardware to generate the
data products they have specifically requested. It's becoming more and
more of a custom-tailored world out there, so be ready to custom your
offerings to your customers needs with BigSur.
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