IdeaMachines' core "domain" expertise, is in mission critical, security, surveillance, medical, realtime instrumentation and control systems. We were early adopters of object oriented design, decades before it evolved into sophisticated modeling frameworks and the Unified Modeling Language.  Today it has become the method of choice for developing modern military airplanes, weapons systems, and growing numbers of commercial/industrial applications.

Our principal business is providing UML/SysML-based domain specific frameworks to our clients.  Our products include full documentation, and some training.  Our secondary business is to transfer sufficient knowledge of the architecture of the framework, and the development techniques to our customers to make them independent of our services.  Our goal is to be a product and technology provider rather than a custom service provider.

We are advocates and users of both IBM/Telelogic's and Microsoft's products.  We have developed almost exclusive with Microsoft operating systems and tools since migrating from DEC VMS over ten years ago.  Our market demands deterministic and mission-critical applications; for us there is simply no alternative to Windows given the inhomogeneity of our target platforms, which range from Windows Embedded to large servers.  Because the .NET Framework is an open standard, we can also integrate with Linux clients and servers using the Open Source .NET implementation MONO.  We have used Oracle, but now prefer Microsoft SQL, finding that we can achieve superior commit times with at least equivalent reliability.  All of our development is integrated on top of Visual Studio, which integrates seamlessly with Telelogic Rhapsody.   We use Telelogic Rhapsody both: because it  is the only UML tool we have found capable of invertible, executable, real-time modeling of deterministic systems; and  we have also found the DODAF (Dept of Def Arch Format) profile available with Rhapsody essential to several of our clients. The UML and SysML are international standards. Our models can be examined, executed, extended, and translated into machine executable modules by frameworks from vendors other than Telelogic, if another vendor existed.  Thus far, we haven't found one!

Our framework tools have not been announced yet, but will initially address realtime security and surveillance markets.  We have developed some of the largest traditional security systems for facilities such as nuclear power plants, chemical processing plants, and some of the largest office buildings.  Our Security Framework couples the domain expert directly to application development.  Too often, in our view, language programmers become system architects, creating problems because they are not problem domain experts. A C++ expert does not usually have the knowledge of an airport, or naval shipping, or power plant security officer.  Too often, it is the programmer making decisions to achieve a deadline.  Often the programmer's decisions are ill-informed.  Our tools allow the architecture to be determined by domain experts.

Finally, developing software with architects in the US or Europe, and engineers in India, Russia, or China is inefficient, and thus often costs more than the presumed savings from lower labor costs; it exposes a company's intellectual products to theft; it adds latency to the development cycle causing missed market windows, and often results in a product which is too laden with deficiencies or errors to be competitive.  IdeaMachines is developing a set of interface models to facilitate remote development and testing of models.  These remote models are not likely to be UML descriptions, but will behave as if they were when integrated into a system model.  The interface models can be safely shipped to a remote development team and used to validate the component model prior to integration.