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Our Value

Features - Functions - Benefits

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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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