Practical Solutions

Whether it's extracting and integrating data from spreadsheets across your enterprise or building scalable, fluid, end user driven applications that adapt quickly to changing business requirements, Cambridge Semantics offers the Anzo suite of products can make it happen.

High value, low Impact

The company's focus is to apply its technology where it can provide the highest value in the least time. Examples include addressing the growing shadow IT problem by making spreadsheet data accessible, track-able and consumable by users and applications across the enterprise; providing fast, seamless integration across applications; and providing tools for end users to build their own views of data on the fly. Cambridge Semantics tools have been developed so that they can be implemented with minimal impact on the organization, letting the customer take on as much or as little as they wish initially and extend the solution at their own pace with their own resources.

Give the end users what they want

A typical computer user has a simple wish; give me the answers I need, when I want them, in a format that makes sense to me, and without costing me a lot of money. And one more thing: please don't bore me with technology or show me what's under the hood. Just let me do my thing over here, and you guys make it work. Easy enough, right? Give the users what they wish for. The only problem is the user interface that the user needs simply does not exist, the data they want to see is stored on any number of computers, in different applications, formats and so on. Even if you figure out how to solve that problem, the requirements will all change the next day.

The standard solutions

This challenge is broader than the standard document management system, data warehouse, BI solution, stove pipe application or portal. Once you reach into the world of end user developed applications like spreadsheets or try to integrate information from external business partners, the standard solutions become unmanageable. The databases grow more numerous and complex, integrating data from documents is too granular, keeping up with variations on desired views is difficult and keeping everything synchronized seems impossible.

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Anzo Technology Overview

The Data Collaboration problem

Until today, document-centric collaboration was accepted as the best way to make information available across the enterprise. The problem is that the ability to make use of the data is constrained by the practical limitations of the silo in which it resides. These silos take many forms, including hard copy faxes or images, application databases, spreadsheets, wiki pages or Word documents. Currently, collaboration consists of sharing documents and spreadsheets via email, shared files on a common file/web server or within a document management system. It is often impractical to find--let alone reuse--the data contained in these documents without significant effort and risk of error. Data created by applications and business systems is also difficult to reuse outside of the application that created it. Most difficult of all is combining data from a number of these different sources in an ad hoc manner that can quickly meet an immediate business requirement.

The Cambridge Semantics Advantage

While it is widely accepted that semantic technology is the future of computing, until now no company has managed to develop practical shrink-wrapped solutions based on these new standards. Cambridge Semantics is the first company to do so. With connections to industry-standard databases and a plug-in for Microsoft Excel, Cambridge Semantics has solved a major problem that plagues many of the world's largest corporations a how to leverage information locked up in millions of independent spreadsheets.

As former founding members of IBM's Advanced Internet Technology Team, Cambridge Semantics engineers have been working at the forefront of the semantic space from its inception. By building the most robust semantic middleware available today, they have created a platform that has solved many of the most difficult problems associated with creating advanced semantic applications. Much of the platform is drawn from the Open Anzo open source project to which Cambridge Semantics is a major contributor. Cambridge Semantics' middleware dramatically simplifies and accelerates the process for building innovative applications and scalable systems that integrate easily with other applications. Semantically-enabled data brings computing to an entirely new level:

Data Access - Semantic open data standards act as a least common denominator representation for data of all formats, making a semantic platform the natural choice for working with information in databases, spreadsheets, documents, the Web, and more.
Flexibility - Semantic data is freed from the confines of the software that creates it. Spreadsheet data can show up in a database, on the web, or in other new spreadsheets. Database records created in one application can now be manipulated through spreadsheets or other applications.
Extensibility - Business requirements typically change more quickly than application software. Semantically-enabled software is built for change. Logic changes, data-schema changes, and presentation changes can all be made on the fly in a matter of hours by non-programming resources.
Security - Traditional security models offer limited protection because they secure systems rather than data. With the Anzo suite of semantic applications, security is possible at the data-element level. Wherever the newly smart data goes, it carries its full security model along with it.