Papers & Articles

Platform & Infrastructure Solutions

• Why an Ontology Engine Drives the PointCross Orchestra Platform
  Suresh Madhavan, Ph.D. CEO, PointCross Inc

This white paper is a response to frequent requests recently from customers who are curious about our choice of dynamic ontology to drive the entire data representation within the unique software architecture of our Orchestra platform instead of the traditional monolithic data model based software solutions in the industry.

Orchestra is a horizontal platform for building, presenting, and encouraging the re-use of institutional memory and knowledge for business processes, collaborative discovery and decision making, as well as...Continue reading>



• The Need to Unify Your Business Information
  Osterman Research White Paper, Network World , 11/11/2008

Information is spread across a large and growing number of data stores, ranging from email systems to customer databases to hosted collaboration tools. Because of the nature of the IT infrastructure and the management structure of most organizations, this content is stored in a way that...Continue reading>



• Organizing content by context
  Unified Communications Alert By Michael Osterman , Network World , 09/25/2008

As users of e-mail, desktop productivity applications, collaboration tools and other information generation and management capabilities, we create lots of content and we have lots of difficulty finding it when we need it. A key part of that difficulty is based on the fact that we...Continue reading>



• Active Directory Role based Authorization is Ineffective

Business information is handled in a very torturous way in enterprises today with the result that critically important functions such as search across real-time business information cannot be made available securely to business; and there are more software applications than are truly needed for elegant, simple enterprise software architecture. There is no excuse today for why business information cannot zip across the business to meet any need in real time, with utmost security, and absolute adherence to compliance regulations.

The two main sources of the problem are...Continue reading>



• Problems with Access Control of Business Information in Modern Enterprises

Business requires that people work in small or medium sized teams, often on multiple project teams and functional teams concurrently. Unlike the military where a rank and their unit defines everything about a soldier and establishes clear inviolable boundaries; companies are, and must be...Continue reading>



• Enterprise Search is still Elusive and Ineffective

When we "google", we are searching through hundreds of billions of web pages and documents in the world wide web - content that people and organizations have published with no intention of keeping private. The moment we click on a search result, we are actually going to the site where that web page or content resides and if subsequent to the original indexing, the site has been secure we may occasionally be prevented from accessing that site. But even in those cases the search engine usually will provide a cached page of results showing what it found when it did the indexing sometime in the past. That and a lot of technology, is how finding stuff has become...Continue reading>



• Business Information Suffers from the Balkanization of Enterprise Software

The typical knowledge intensive, decision centric enterprise shown on the right is still dependent heavily on the embedded human knowledge and experience for almost every aspect of their core business. Their interpretation, judgment, and decisions are critical in the execution of every context of their business. What these people do is clearly not...Continue reading>



• Contextual Management of Information around Business Activity

The solution to the problems and issues of managing business information today can be centered on a few simple principles...Continue reading>



• Orchestra™ + Solo™ Architecture – Designed around Business for Managing Business Information

Providing secure access to all allowable information, whether it is for work, or distributing information or searching is entirely based on the business roles and assignments and the real time changes that happen routinely. By ensuring that, Orchestra makes enterprise search possible in a simple and powerful ways...Continue reading>



• UBIS™ – Unified Business Information Services

UBIS - Unified Business Information Services is an enterprise implementation of the Orchestra server platform; the Solo client; and the Codetta enterprise search system that creates a sterile layer of business communications that is separate from the noisy traffic into business user's personal email address inboxes...Continue reading>



• Innovation Starts Here
  Microsoft and Innovative Software Solutions, July 27, 2004

PointCross, Inc. is a leading software technology company that delivers automated business process management (BPM) solutions, such as those for global asset and program management, to help customers compete successfully through quick and efficient decision making. The PointCross Orchestra solution is a business information framework that enables organizations to streamline business processes by automatically organizing e-mail content according to business topics and by using e-mail correspondence to...Continue reading>



• Companies Utilizing Technology to Build Contextual Collaboration.
  Houston Business Journal, November 2001

Today's business environment is largely driven by individual interactions. This is contrary to the ambition of every business to be dependent on its processes rather than being limited by individuals. Not everybody has real-time, fingertip access to the information required to...Continue reading>

Oil & Gas Solutions

• Microsoft and PointCross: Leveraging the Microsoft Upstream Reference Architecture to Fully Integrate E&P Decision-Making Processes in the Digital Oilfield

This joint paper from PointCross and Microsoft explains how a solution framework from PointCross can be simply and elegantly deployed with the Microsoft Upstream Reference Architecture (MURA) to integrate decision-making processes and results to create and retain information relationships, history, and context - a complete institutional memory for your digital oilfield - that can further inform, optimize, and potentially transform operations and business... Continue reading>



• POINTCROSS’S SMART OILFIELD (SOF™)

PointCross’ Smart Oilfield (SOF™) supports intelligent operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making by offering meaningful access to E&P companies’ existing knowledge base, including SCADA and DCS data; advanced search, orienteering, meta-analysis, and predictive analytics capabilities; and process orchestration, all in a secure, unified collaborative environment... Continue reading>



• Operations and Maintenance

The primary production and operations related processes are conducted by control room activities. These are real time decisions that are based on SCADA and DCS data busses. Plant operations also require involvement and approvals by stakeholders responsible for the governance and execution of strategy, planning, HSE, compliance and security. These require people who work outside of the control rooms but who are still required to make... Continue reading>



• Contextualizing Legacy Information in an E&P Company

One of the topics of discussion during our recent meetings with customers is the question of how metadata of very large quantities (in the billions of files) of legacy documents, sub-surface data stores, and files in the company’s shared file stores as well as managed content systems can be properly categorized, their metadata extracted, and all content related to specific business topic related so that they can support technical search and meet other important needs of the E&P business such as legal discovery, knowledge management, key business processes and compliance. This is not a trivial problem. Many companies have been known to expend enormous amounts of time and money hiring... Continue reading>



• Modeling and simulation catch up
  Hart's E&P publication, Suresh Madhavan, PointCross Inc, Oct 2006

Computer modeling and simulation is common in many industries today. In the early days of computing simulation replace physical experimentation only in simple cases where the simulations executed faster than the associated physical experiments...Continue reading>



• Train for Decision-Making
  Hart's E&P publication, Suresh Madhavan, PointCross Inc, May 2006

Simulation techniques used by the military can help geoscientists and engineers train themselves to make effective decisions in spite of incomplete information. . Used successfully in military planning and decision-making, simulation and modeling and scenario exercises to train people to rapidly assess complex situations and make good decisions with incomplete information can be beneficially employed by the exploration and production (E&P) industry...Continue reading>



• Driving Project Management by Achieving Goals
  Hart's E&P, Marathon Oil Company Supplement, September 2002 (page 36)

Orchestra™ collaborative platform allows speedy, high-quality decisions to be made across multiple companies, with repeatable processes easily automated...Continue reading>



• The Value of PointCross in Capital Projects

PointCross enables companies involved in capital projects meet their twin goals of production growth, and increased Return on Capital Expenditure (ROCE), by achieving cost leadership and operational excellence. We reduce decision cycle time and improve decision quality across the enterprise. On specific capital projects we reduce cost and time while increasing first year operability...Continue reading>



• Oil, Gas Industry Makes Advances in Managing Data and Knowledge.
  Steven Poruban and Judy Clark, Oil & Gas Journal, December 2001

Oil and gas companies continue making strides in better managing both data and knowledge. Gains in managing and retaining institutional knowledge are evident amid a backdrop of some formidable challenges...Continue reading>



• Eliminating the Energy Industry's Blind Spot in Capital Projects.
  White Paper for Senior Executives, November 2001

Wall Street does not like surprises and uncertainty. It is merciless on CEOs and CFOs who do not have good visibility into their business operations, and control over them. Upstream capital projects are growing sources of surprises, and PointCross has developed a technology solution that gives CEOs and senior management instant visibility and control into projects...Continue reading>



• Transforming the Energy Project Business.
  New Energy Economy, September/October 2001

Many industries - energy, petrochemical, information technology, pharmaceuticals, defense, aerospace and manufacturing - spend trillions of dollars to accomplish their business goals and objectives through multiple layers of globally dispersed companies, utilizing a number of contractors, vendors and partners to deliver products and services to their customers... Continue reading>



• Real-Time Project Enterprise Management in the Energy Business.
  Journal of Petroleum Technology, August 2001

The energy industry is a capital projects intensive industry, and the success or failure of any firm depends on how well the company manages its capital projects. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on capital projects, yet they display consistent...Continue reading>



• lnnovations to Make Industry More Efficient Aid Productivity.
  Houston Business Journal, June 2001

At the recent Petroleum Leadership and Outlook Conference sponsored by the Society of Petroleum Engineers, it became very clear that it will take a dramatic increase in infrastructure to deliver the energy needs of the global economy...Continue reading>



• Speeding up Energy Projects.
  White Paper, May 2001

Oil and Gas projects depend on a loose coalition of many global players, working in real-time, in close coordination, creating a virtual Project Enterprise. This temporary economic, business entity requires a unique Project Enterprise Management Solution (PEMS) to improve productivity and decision-making. A few innovative, Fortune 100, US and European E&P firms, and a $1.5 Billion software company have embarked on...Continue reading>



• Total Project Control Using World Wide Web
  Faramarz Rahbar, "The Saudi Aramco Journal of Technology", Fall 2000, page 61

The use of the World Wide Web provides exciting opportunities to enhance project control by simplifying access to detailed and pertinent information and presenting a comprehensive picture of the project. A project Web site can be used as a dynamic tool for timely and more accurate cost/schedule forecasts and interactive communications with the right information at the right time...Continue reading>

Pharma Solutions

• Keeping Pace, Keeping Track
  James Netterwald, PhD, Drug Discovery & Development Magazine, February 2010

Pharmaceutical companies have difficulty in performing comparative analyses across their entire knowledge base because preclinical data is often sitting in disperse systems and in disperse formats. "We offer a number of search and orienteering solutions, and business process automation, all built on top of our Orchestra platform," says Suresh Madhavan, PhD, founder and chief executive officer of PointCross, Foster City, Calif. For example, two systems built upon Orchestra are semantic data exchanger (SDE) and safety data integration (SDI). "SDI solution puts all available preclinical studies into a common universal operational data model with normalization, and with unit and taxonomy harmonization," says Madhavan, who adds that they also use a number of statistical techniques to extract layers of metadata from the raw data and pre - index them for rapid search. Following extraction, SDI then "allows researchers and study team members to navigate, search, and compare metadata across studies to discover patterns and correlations within the datasets." Ultimately, these technologies perform such analyses to support early safety screening.

According to Shree Nath, PhD, vice president of pharmaceuticals at PointCross, there is also an increasing need by their pharma clients to...Continue reading>



• Search & Orienteering Solutions for Pharmaceutical R&D

PointCross's Search & Orienteering offerings enable scientists to exploit institutional information from structured data and unstructured content, fostering new discoveries and finding safety signals sooner to drive innovation and better pipeline decisions.

Pharmaceutical companies have billions of dollars worth of structured and unstructured data within their own data warehouses, servers and drives, and across their partner and CRO network. Unfortunately, they are unable to exploit this information for pipeline decisions because...Continue reading>



• Semantic Data Exchange for Pharma R&D
  Shree Nath, Ph.D., PointCross Inc

The global Pharmaceutical Industry is facing a number of unprecedented challenges including increased use of global partners and CROs in the R&D process; pressures from the FDA and other regulatory agencies and the public for greater rigor in safety assessments; and a need to accelerate new drugs to market.

All of these challenges require a rapid shift towards data centricity, increased transparency, and the ability to look for safety related effects, perhaps overlooked, in past work through meta-analysis spanning multiple studies...Continue reading>



• Contextualizing Legacy Information in a Pharmaceutical Company

One of the topics of discussion during our recent meetings with customers is the question of how metadata of very large quantities (in the billions of files) of legacy documents, regulatory data stores, and files in the company’s shared file stores as well as managed content systems can be properly categorized, their metadata extracted, and all content related to specific business topic related so that they can support scientific search, cross-study meta-analysis, and meet other important needs of  pharmaceutical companies such as legal discovery, knowledge management, key business processes and regulatory compliance. Big Pharma is especially concerned not about only legacy data that resides internally, but sourced from the companies with which they merge or may acquire.  This is not a trivial problem. Many companies have been known to expend enormous amounts of time and money hiring...Continue reading>



• Pharmaceutical companies, innovation is closer than you think - if you have the right relationships

As expiration dates on patents loom ever closer and pipelines dry up, the biggest challenge that pharmaceutical companies face is a lack of innovation. The companies that survive this innovation crisis are those that are best able to manage relationships: relationships that connect knowledge, people, and organizations across the world.

If it hadn't been for Edmund Halley and a wager of forty shillings, one of the greatest innovations in human understanding might never have happened...Continue reading>

Cross-Industry Solutions

• Delivering Visual Solutions for Strategic Business Process Management
  CORDA case study - PopChart and OptiMap, August 30, 2004

Many organizations are challenged with finding effective solutions for managing and using business-critical content. Complex business processes require a hybrid of knowledge and information delivered in an accessible, structured and discernible style to aid in effective decision-making. The process of streamlining information and appropriately displaying that information for executive decision makers can be...Continue reading>



• Six Sigma: A Healthy Compliance Regime for Corporate Governance
  Suresh Madhavan, PointCross Inc, April 26, 2004

Companies that have adopted a 6-Sigma model for continuous improvement of their key business and management processes will find that they already have in place important components for a compliance regime such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. They will have the culture and systems for identifying and defining compliance risks, the methods and systems for maturing them through a rigorous review process, and the ability to...Continue reading>



• Real-Time Project Enterprise Management
  White Paper, June 2001

Trillions of dollars are spent each year on projects. Yet, whether constructing an offshore platform or a manufacturing plant or developing software, almost all projects are characterized by cost inefficiencies and delays. These are due to slow and error-prone decision making. The virtual “project enterprise” is fragmented organism, held together by a loose coalition of tens, hundreds (if not more) of companies that come together for the duration of a project. Today, there are no...Continue reading>



• Powering the Project Enterprise into the 21st Century
  Project Management Institute "eProject Management Strategies" Conference, May 2001

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines an entire body of knowledge (PMBOK®) as a call for integration of all aspects of a project to allow total control of such efforts. This paper expands upon this position, and proposes that project-oriented businesses now need to think beyond individual projects, and view all business activities involving all participants as one unified enterprise, the Project Enterprise. This unified view demands that key stakeholders, owner companies and contractors in particular, must deploy an integrated information technology (IT) platform capable of orchestrating...Continue reading>