The Computerworld Honors Program
Honoring those who use Information Technology to benefit society
LOCATION:
Ottawa, Ontario, CA

YEAR:
2007

STATUS:
Laureate

CATEGORY:
Business and Related Services

NOMINATING COMPANY:
Cincom

ORGANIZATION:
Satellite Forces International

PROJECT NAME:
Atlantis

Short Summary
Atlantis Software and Business Solutions.

Effective. Fast. Customized.

Satellite Forces contributes to business innovatation through the development of the technology known as Atlantis.

Atlantis is a comprehensive business process solution which can be used to automate any business. One of the benefits of becoming more efficient is that businesses operate optimally and continuously every day. Atlantis is designed to make this dream into a reality by identifying business potential and maximizing it through automation. There are many benefits to automation. Automation saves money, time and creates effective and efficient communication between business partners.

Atlantis is based on a unique and innovative methodology known as SAGETEA. The SAGETEA methodology permits rapid application development through a software tool we call SAGETEA Developer. SAGETEA Developer processes customer requirements and quickly translates them into a working software solution based on the customer’s own terminology.

Getting started with Atlantis is easy. Satellite Forces provides process engineering services using Atlantis, known as Atlantis BPM. Atlantis uses SAGETEA Developer to support process engineering services that can build customized solutions for specific clients, rapidly, and at low cost.

Satellite Forces' unique SAGETEA methodology and SAGETEA Developer tool lets the company rapidly create and deploy customized software solutions for business - making our clients more effective and efficient, helping them achieve higher return on new technology investment, and ensuring they can adapt quickly. The company's Atlantis product line supports SAGETEA and provides everything that is needed to run an integrated application.

Satellite Forces Strategic R&D Vision & Values:

* Deliver a large return on investment by producing competitive products.
* Deliver a rapid turn around time.
* Bring a new standard of quality to systems integration.

Founder and CEO, David Long, describes Atlantis and the history of how the company was started in
this CBC radio interview with Rob Clipperton:
http://satelliteforces.ca/DAVIDLONGANDROBCLIPPERTONCBC.MP3.


Introductory Overview
The objective of Atlantis and SAGETEA Developer is to give Satellite Forces a competitive advantage in providing business process/workflow management solutions. The company gives its clients control over their projects.

The SAGETEA Developer is used in a variety of BPM solutions to Define, Implement, Evaluate and Create processes for business. These tasks are all related to each other and work in cycles as a business grows and changes. For tasks of this type, SAGETEA Developer and Atlantis are the most adaptive and flexible business process management system available today. The SAGETEA Developer includes the functionality to add new service processes and workflows into a integrated environment without a major programming effort, through the use of simple workflows tools, methodology and templates.

The majority of business is still conducted using written documents, plain language and text. One of the unique abilities of Atlantis is its ability to manage and process plain English and plain text. The SAGETEA Developer processes such natural language from an expert user directly into the computer based SAGETEA modeling language. Together with Atlantis, this allows functional applications to be developed rapidly from concept through design and then to solution. SAGETEA is simple and contains all the information needed to generate a user interface, network, database and solution for almost anything that can be expressed in words. This is a better approach than competing BPM products in that the software is produced directly from a customer's own business terminology and semantics. This has a direct effect on the acceptance and performance of the software. It also lowers the customer's cost of using BPM technology as part of business operations while simultaneously increasing the flexibility of the solution.

Satellite Forces' research shows that when we produce solutions using the language of our customers, the quality of the final solution is higher and is more readily accepted. Atlantis effectively combines with a variety of other technologies, such as IDBlue RFID. This allows the delivery of integrated solutions for a wide variety of applications.

Consider a typical business using the simple questionnaire and ROI figures in Appendix 1.

The ROI figures are for an average Atlantis installation during periods of low, average and high volume. Even in the worst case, Atlantis pays for itself in less than 1 year. This frees up a lot of money and time which can be used to accelerate a particular business.

Satellite Forces International Inc. complements all its software products and solutions with real-time interactive BPM services available online at http://satelliteforces.ca, under the name of Atlantis BPM. When used with SAGETEA Developer, it's like having a whole team of software developers, engineers and architects on a desktop. Atlantis BPM Services allows customers the flexibility of accessing an array of resources directly over the internet. This effectively puts the power of an entire team directly onto the desktops of requirements analysis people, business experts, and key process stakeholders, in near real time. Satellite Forces can offer high performance service levels between Atlantis technology, customers and solution providers.

Satellite Forces describes Atlantis in detail the following video:
http://satelliteforces.ca/ABetterWayToMakeABusinessProcessVideoDemo.wmv

Benefits
Has your project helped those it was designed to help?   Yes

What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people?
Satellite Forces has pioneered its own methodology to solve a need for rapid software development. SAGETEA Developer has systems and methods for automated development of software applications for implementing business processes or workflows that avoid the kinds of problems that typically plague a software project. After obtaining a set of specifications or expert knowledge from a customer or potential end user about the desired operation of a software application, these systems and methods allow this knowledge or these specifications to be represented in a modeling language that can easily generate the software system, including a user interface.

SAGETEA is an acronym for:

State: A state is a moment in time within the context of a process.

Activity: An activity is a task and is contained in a state.

Group: A group is a collection of elements.

Element: In SAGETEA, everything is considered an element. An element is a single unit of data such as a person's first name.

Transition: A transition is a change in state and is a path along which data can transfer. Transitions connect different states together.

Event: An event is an object or instance of data which will cause a process to change states.

Action: An action is a method that runs when a process changes from one state to another.

Benefits of SAGETEA

-Customizable to clients' own needs and based on their own language.
-Full solution for general processes.
-Improves an organization's capabilities at relatively low cost.
-Increases ROI on new technology investment.
-Processes can be merged and integrated as part of a general process library.
-Upon request, Satellite Forces can supply a wide array of pre-built processes for business.
-Helps kick start process design.

With SAGETEA Developer, business processes can also be integrated with customizable web services, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and the Open Source product, Atlantis Developers Kit (ADK), which provides adaptability to other BPM products.

Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed?   Yes

How do you see your project's innovation benefiting other applications, organizations, or global communities?
The Atlantis technology benefits applications such as warehousing, asset management, preventative maintenance and many others by providing a new standard in systems integration. For example, when combined with Cathexis Innovations' (http://www.cathexis.com) IDBlue RFID technology, Atlantis produces a flexible inventory control solution that is highly attractive to early adopters. For larger operations, Atlantis has the scalability in design that ensures that it can grow with the needs of a business.

Atlantis uses its unique combination of methodology and Finite State Machine technology to encompass a breathtaking degree of possibilities.

This is proven by its simultaneous use as an RFID enabled inventory control solution, a variety of business process management and control applications, and applied academic research in the areas of simulation and prediction. Atlantis has been successfully used as part of Carleton University's Dept. of Systems and Computer Engineering honours project program: (http://chat.carleton.ca/~sguganan/project/index.html). This program produced two prototypes, one for weather prediction: (http://satelliteforces.ca/Ottawa_Citizen.pdf) and one for IDBlue RFID technology.

Starting in 2007, advanced research is taking place to explore the use of Atlantis, IDBlue RFID Technology, and Forest Fire Prediction models in conjunction with research being undertaking by Dr. G. Wainer at Carleton University (http://www.sce.carleton.ca/faculty/wainer/index.html).

Applications that combine with Atlantis will benefit by having faster and easier adoption in new markets. Organizations which include Atlantis will have greater flexibility and lowered operating costs. Global communities benefit from Atlantis through its sharing of technology through Open Source and the Atlantis Developers Kit Project: http://adk.sourceforge.net. Systems integrators will have the assurance that they are free to select future technologies through Atlantis' relationship with Open Source.

The Importance of Technology
How did the technology you used contribute to this project and why was it important?
Atlantis is powered by a Finite State Machine based architecture which provides performance and scalability.

All Atlantis solutions can be customized for a single delivery or as a low cost monthly service.

Atlantis can be merged and divided to form unique process solutions for each of our customers.

Atlantis has an open architecture which gives users access and control over their solution.

Atlantis can bridge Windows, Linux and other operating systems.

Atlantis Finite State Machine architecture provides fault tolerant computing.

Atlantis technology is scalable and provides a one size / fits all capability.

Time to market for new features is measured in days and weeks using Atlantis.

Atlantis process engineering services build customized BPM solutions from scratch or from one of our packaged solutions.

Atlantis technology uses system level and business controllers (Finite State Machines) in the same solution. This allows the easy integration of machines and automation with your human resources.

Atlantis solutions are data driven. Our unique method for linking customer requirements with dynamically generated user interfaces ensures rapid and accurate delivery of custom solutions.

SAGETEA Developer translates business requirements from plain language directly into a visual model of a business. The visual model directly generates a software solution without the use of programmers.

Atlantis automatically defines and maintains all databases tables.

Atlantis requires PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced open source database.

Business experts can translate their human knowledge into controllable, sharable and reusable processes using Atlantis and SAGETEA Developer.

Atlantis customers can avoid being trapped in closed source software.

The Atlantis Developers Kit (ADK) Open Source project provides integration solutions and a forum for developers.

Originality
What are the exceptional aspects of your project?
Due to the growing complexity of software development in today’s competitive environment, there are a large number of people involved in the development of software applications. A software development process generally proceeds as follows:

(1) End users have expert knowledge of one or more processes which they wish to translate into a software application.

(2) They communicate this expert knowledge to their development team.

(3) Software architects are responsible for translating this knowledge into the software architecture.

(4) Developers are responsible for implementing the architecture to create functional software.

(5) A feedback cycle then ensues, with the application being presented to the end users for evaluation.

(6) This evaluation process results in changes, which in turn, result in another cycle.

Such complicated software development processes are prone to inaccuracies and delays as a result of a myriad number of factors such as: problems in translating the customer’s desires, knowledge or requirements into a system design or architecture; or, human factors such as the end users changing their minds about the way the system should operate.

Satellite Forces determined that it would be much more efficient to be able to capture expert knowledge directly and use it to generate a complete, functional software application in an automated fashion, based on the terminology of the end user. It thus pioneered its own methodology for just this kind of software development. SAGETEA Developer permits the automated development of software for business, avoiding the problems identified above.

After processing the expert knowledge about the desired operation of a software application, SAGETEA Developer translates this knowledge directly into a modeling language that generates the software system, including a user interface.

Rather than the months or years that are typical of most software development cycles, a working solution is produced within days or weeks.

How is it original?
A variety of automated approaches have been developed to assist in the life cycle of the software development process and address the problems noted above. Typically, these automated approaches allow a software system or application to be modeled, for example with a modeling language such as universal modeling language (UML). However, the actual coding of the software application must still be accomplished. Additionally, a user interface must be developed for the software application which will allow operation of the software application. Thus, while these automated approaches provide a framework for the development of a software application, they do not actually generate a complete and functional software application and user interface. As these methodologies still require a significant amount of human intervention in order to generate a functioning software application and user interface, the problems discussed above with respect to human factors cannot be completely ameliorated.

Atlantis’ unique methodology automates the entire software development cycle. To the best of our knowledge, no other software tool permits the automated generation of a user interface from natural language. Atlantis is unique because it automates the work of software developers. With Atlantis the software development cycle is faster, less prone to inaccuracies and errors, and permits the rapid turnaround of a prototype for the End-users’ review.

This was the objective of Satellite Forces' initial U.S. Patent Application Entitled "System and Method for Development and Architecture of an Expert System and Corresponding User Interface" / Publication No. US-2007-0055954-A1.

Once the patent application was completed, the company was then able to advance its marketing and sales initiatives, along with the Atlantis product line. In addition, Satellite Forces has continued to make further advances on its original concepts, based around its evolving Atlantis 6 architecture and related academic research projects.



Is it the first, the only, the best or the most effective application of its kind?   All of the above

Success
Has your project achieved or exceeded its goals?   Exceeded

Is it fully operational?   Yes

How many people benefit from it?   Unknown

If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work.
Atlantis Business Technology was proposed as a solution for managing orders and installations at Tapis Tony's Carpet in December of 2004. The solution was designed using the existing paper/fax driven process as a model. The working solution was rapidly developed and shipped on time in January of 2005. The introductory cost of the solution was $6000.00 CDN. The solution included a Linux based SQL PostgreSQL database server along with an Atlantis Client / Server configured for a small office. The system was deployed at the customer's Baxter Road location. It has been in operation since then and is now running at their recently expanded location at 1444 Cyrville Road. The customer was able to setup and run their system at their new location with no additional support required. The system database has grown significantly and manages inventory for 6 warehouse locations in Eastern Ontario. The office staff use the technology each day with a minimal need for support.

Customer feedback:

Atlantis is an integral part of our operation and makes the job of tracking our large volume of orders a breeze. We have enjoyed using the technology and are very pleased with it's overall performance. We are looking forward to using Atlantis for more of our needs as our business grows and accelerates.

-Tony Bourizk
Owner, Tapis Tony Carpet

Are you satisfied with the service you get with the product?
"Yes, it gives us what we need."

How is Atlantis impacting your business?
"It organizes and provides a facility to find orders. It's easy to find files."

Is there anything you would like to see added?
"We hope to do more, like scanning in a plan. We want to get everything into the same customer file."

Does it (Atlantis) allow you more time to dedicate to selling carpets?
"It saves time which I can apply elsewhere."

-George Hatter
Tony's Carpet Employee

How quickly has your targeted audience of users embraced your innovation? Or, how rapidly do you predict they will?
Our targeted audience was initially a select group of business and technical people with skills and resources in the areas that we needed. We had little trouble in acquiring interest in the concept once it was fully explained. The interest was strong enough to allow for several years of research and development, eventually culminating in the production of a working prototype. The next major step for the business was to now focus on marketiing and sales, in order to drive a sales driven growth approach. At times this was a struggle, especially because of how different our approach is compared to other software products. In order to complement the new product, Atlantis, Satellite Forces developed its own sales strategy, in order to use its unique strengths in a highly competitive market place. Again, the company was able to demonstrate its adeptness in reaching out to its target audience, and defining its own market space.

Atlantis has been made available as a free trial download, now with hundreds of free trial users. Atlantis has been running at customer locations successfully for more than 2 years. This is expected to expand through governments and institutions with the release of Atlantis 6.

Satellite Forces International Inc. also directly contributes to the Atlantis Developers Kit Open Source project (http://adk.sourceforge.net). The Atlantis Developers Kit is based on the new Atlantis 6 technology and provides developers with programming access to Atlantis technology. This gives a further assurance that Satellite Forces can maintain customer technology over the long term. Using the outputs from this open source project, customers may further leverage the capabilities of Atlantis technology from within their own applications. Examples of these possibilities include technologies such as Delphi, Visual Studio .net and Visual Works Smalltalk. We predict the adoption rate will accelerate steadily.

Difficulty
What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
The initial technical objectives for Atlantis required the development and integration of key concepts that had not previously been attempted. In order to generate a user interface dynamically, using only plain text as the driver, an entirely unique new methodology needed to be developed. In addition, once the methodology was developed, a framework needed to be invented in order to make an automatic solution. This involved the expertise of a high performance team of software designers "Team Atlantis", lead by founder and CEO, David Long.

Team Atlantis was formed by the founders of Satellite Forces, and provided expertise in the areas of database systems, object oriented networks, user interface design and networking. The team website is: http://atlantisteam.blogspot.com.

Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
Satellite Forces and Atlantis began with a new concept in a time when technology investment was in rapid decline. The company was driven by the knowledge that its new technology would become a pivotal force once it had reached production. The major objection that the company faced when seeking funding was that it had not proven that its technology worked. The problem was that in order to produce a completed product with customer experience behind it, investment would be heavily needed. All the financial support was provided by the personal investment of time, money and materials by the company founders. The first major investment success for Satellite Forces did not come from a financial investor. In the end, it came from willing customers, ready to take a risk on the prospect of success with Atlantis and the hard work of Team Atlantis. The company still faces a challenge in obtaining large scale investment, one that it is planning to solve with an upcoming IPO, soon to be announced.
Digital/Visual Materials
The Program welcomes nominees to submit digital and visual images with their Case Study. We are currently only accepting .gif, .jpg and .xls files that are 1MB or smaller. The submission of these materials is not required; however, please note that a maximum of three files will be accepted per nominee. These files will be added to the end of your Case Study and will be labeled as "Appendix 1", "Appendix 2" or "Appendix 3." Finally, feel free to reference these images in the text of your Case Study by specifically referring to them as "Appendix 1", "Appendix 2" or "Appendix 3."

Currently Uploaded Appendices:
Appendix1.xls