ICARIS Services was established in 1995 - a few years before Electronic Commerce had really become fashionable. Its first task was to study EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and to determine why relatively few organisations in the world have adopted it.
From there, the ICARIS Project has continued onward to devise a simple method for facilitating the interoperation of business processes, known as BSI (Business System Interoperation) and to produce a sophisticated software product to implement it. This new technology is free of all the problems which have been inhibiting the widespread adoption of EDI.
To enable BSI to be used in an Open environment, where an organisation can enable its own business processes for interoperation without have first to arrange a detailed and customised implementation with each trading partner, requires the Uniform Naming of the attributes of interoperation. This proved to be anything but simple.
ICARIS solved the problem of Uniform Naming of transaction attributes and constructed a Technology Infrastructure Service facility, naming it BEACON. It was discovered that BEACON had many more capabilities other than being able to produce nonambiguous Uniform Attribute names. In fact, only one small part of BEACON, the Business Data Register (BDR) provides the Uniform Naming service. You are invited to use the guest password (guest@user) and explore BEACON's BDR and see how this Uniform Naming works.
The ongoing Research and Development activities of ICARIS includes the realisation and commercialisation of the further potential of BEACON.
Projects already completed have resulted in several methodologies with supporting documentation and tools for use by Management and IT consulting organisations. Using these methods, consultants can produce results in many areas with time scales and costs up to an order of magnitude lower than is possible with the classical approaches and with much lower risk factors. In many cases it is also possible for end user organisations to reduce maintenance costs by a similar ratio.