Over the past several years I have been the development manager and architect for several significant and successful products:

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Babelfish

Babelfish was one of the very first applications to display real-time values in a web page in late 1999 / early early 2000. Numbers and little graphical widgets could be wired up from many external sources and would just tick over at the update rate of the page. Babelfish allowed unskilled labour to build hundreds of sophisticated pages with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop mechanism.

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By breaking down the silos between operational data from historians and say, laboratory data or maintenance systems, customers could put all the relevant data for their entire enterprise into one place, superimposed on schematics and maps of their operations. It was “context through physical proximity” - still a powerful concept for organisation and structuring information.

ISS was acquired by P2 Energy Solutions. Babelfish is now sold around the world as P2 Explorer.

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CalcEnginePlus (calcengineplus.com)

CalcEnginePlus is a expression-parsing and evaluation tool aimed at software developers. It is used to build analytics applications where the end-users configure the application with mathematical expressions at run-time.

 

Users configure calculations in the UI created for them by the developer. CalcEnginePlus parses the end-user formulae, tells the developer what external data needs to be fetched and evaluates the expressions for display or storage.

 

It support dependency-tracing, custom functions, hierarchy functions and vector operations. It allows application and product developers to offer user-authored ‘where’ clauses, to filter arbitrary datasets.

It has been used to build a variety of analytics and modelling applications, trends that plot arbitrary expressions at runtime, performance optimisation and predictive maintenance applications.

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Akumen

Akumen is a simulation-modelling and data-analytics tool produced by Optika Solutions. It is a sophisticated and extensible decision-support framework for those situations where future outcomes need to be evaluated, and where the complexity of the domain far exceeds the capabilities of Excel.

It democratises access to simulation and analytical models through consistent scenario-configuration, master data, traceability and reporting facilities. It is extensible enough to host complete applications, and can act as a scenario-management framework that sits over any third-party model. For those developing models from scratch, it has a variety of built-in modelling tools, including a powerful driver tree subsystem based on CalcEnginePlus.