ASK : An excellent anticipation of the market

ASK has a good anticipation of the market since its creation. To list a few :

•    1989 : Workflow Engine. Since its creation, ASK introduced workflow
engines inside of all its projects !

•    1990 : 19" E-racks. Since 1990, ASK built and installed its own multi-processor. E-racks with 3 processors by each 4U rack, when Compaq introduced its Proliant(c) systems late in 1995 with 2 processors by each 4U rack.

•    1990 : System Fault Tolerant (SFT systems). ASK was already providing
SFT systems not only HDW but also SOFTWARE, which is much more relevant and difficult.

•    1990 :  No SPF. No Single Point of Failure in the ASK architecture.

•    1990 : Precursor of MS MQ Series (1997). At that time, multiple protocols were put in connection (SDLC 3270 / 5250 / 9750 BSC VIP770 ASYNC IPX NetBios...) and there were absolutely no service providing any kind of recovery quality... ASK did it...

•    1990 : Precursor of Adobe Acrobat in some sense. ASK was providing
multi format converters used as automatic tasks, driven by the internal workflow engine.

•    1991 : Clusters. ASK provided dedicated servers (one would say Back Office Servers today) with SFT and managing a pool of sub-processors (PCs) as a big whole virtual machine. This architecture is still much smarter in 2006 than most available other today’s architecture. See next point.

•    1989-2002 : The first generation of UM (Unified Messaging) servers we built was called ASK-COMSERV. Later it became ASK-HERMES (HI-End Redundant Messaging Server). Today, it's called ASK-HERMES.Net

•    1999 : Zero-client approach. Which means that standard client applications used generally by our customers (Outlook, Office, ...) could be used for our Services / Servers.

•    2000 : Email Archiving. In 2000 we developed a complex project of email archives Nowadays, it would still be innovative on the market. Just to mention some advanced feature : it was preventing several users to archive several times the same mail except if one user wanted to add additional search indexes (metadata). Another feature was to allow a user to extract a part of the archives, go and travel off-line with it and resync automatically at each connection to Internet.

•    2002 : Package to help Investigations (for lawyers) : Most lawyers companies send and
receive their documents electronically. And when they must investigate the transactions / actions / statements of their customers, they have to refer to emails... We provided a solution to help investigate millions of emails, re-establish the chronology of the events and with some semantical techniques, we helped our client to win the case just because the other party couldn't discover / learn / structure / prepare a defense as well as our customer...

•    2004 : SOA for airport applications. We were soon convinced of the advantages of that architecture. We convinced some airport managers that new requested services regarding tracking, security, higher quality

and availability were implying some revolution in their traditional approaches... (software was traditionally developed by electro-mechanical engineers)

If you call us, we will most probably understand your concern in a broad view and with all potential related matters : technical, organisational, legal, financial, social, cultural, ...

•    2006 : BP Performance Analysis. We install the 1st dynamic synoptical display in a bank showing one of their business processes 'live' on a wall where everybody passing by can check if everything runs smoothly...

•    2007 : We trust the Open Source Community by selecting the best (along our judgment) Business Wiki : Deki Wiki of Mindtouch. We develop custom extensions for this collaborative work platform