Unlike many companies for which many of us have worked, IdeaMachines would prefer to not depend upon captive customer accounts and the service revenue derived from customers for its livelihood.  We intend our tools to contain the essential solutions to the customer's problem, and would prefer to spend our time thinking of, building, and selling new "machines" which implement those ideas.  Models, whether "black box" or "white box", are well-defined, with well-defined interfaces ("Contracts"). We intend that our products be understood, and "owned" by our clients, but will help when that achieves the business objectives of our clients.

Errors are rare when a model "executes", and all of IdeaMachines' origninal products consist of executable models: Executable models are first tested in the UML framework, and then tested after translation to the machine-specific target environment. We provide the test scenarios used to build and validate our models.  We encourage the use of Telelogic's Automatic Test Generator to insure test coverage, and use Telelogic's Rhapsody Test Conductor to deploy our scenarios.

Modeling is new to approximately 90% of the software world, and IdeaMachines is prepared to go beyond supporting our own products, and to help companies developing their own modeling expertise with the startup ramp.  We want modeling to penetrate the market as quickly as possible.  We "Mentor".

IdeaMachines believes in the value of the domain expert.  We have seen companies with world class experts in medical imaging fail because the system requirements described by the experts were not adequately translated by a software team.  We don't intend that consulting or mentoring constitute the majority of our revenue, but understand (from experience) that our clients may have little experience with an environment where domain experts become more tightly integrated with design engineers, and their effort results in commercial quality code.  We are ready to help our clients make that transition.