Total Cost of Ownership

Roll out and Maintenance

Installation of the software is very simple. There are two different ways to do it. The first is to use the familiar install procedure which is well known from many other standard applications. As the software is self contained and does not need any additional packages (e.g. database systems), this usually is a matter of seconds.

In addition there is a silent install; this is targeted to the system administrators of larger companies. As APIS uses the standard MSI¹ package, support of and adaptability to standard software maintenance systems is guaranteed. For ease of distributing new releases of the software, the program files can be installed on a single directory in a company wide network ("network license"). Local installation (say on laptop computers) can be easily maintained through a software management system using MSP².

Focusing on the Company's Core Business

Many companies have started building their own risk analysis tools using standard office products with their word processors, spread sheets and diagramming tools. But they soon realize that the built in features of office tools are not sufficient for a good, let alone sophisticated risk analysis. No spreadsheet knows the relationship between a failure cause and its effects. If a search in the data is to be done based on these relationships, or if statistics detailing the risks in a system or process must be produced, word processors and spread sheets are little or no help.

And then companies start to develop their own macros in the macro language of the office product, a task which soon tends to get out of hand. Instead of doing risk analysis, people are trying to teach an office suite new tricks it was never meant to do.

With the APIS IQ-Software you receive a product that has been on the market for more than 15 years and during this time, has always been setting the standards for advanced risk analysis. It is maintained by a team of very experienced computer scientists which are also experts in the field of risk analysis. The product has a very broad customer base all around the world and is thus guaranteed to satisfy every need of even the most demanding customer.

Scalability

The question whether a risk analysis system should to be based on a standard database system often is discussed controversially.

Standard database systems provide access to a shared knowledge base to all users that are connected to the database system. But this comes at a price: the application has to be aware of conflicting accesses (several users trying to modify the same data item in different ways) and this awareness permeates the architecture of the system and tends to greatly degrade system performance and responsiveness. Also, access rights have to be managed inside the database system, which is an additional burden to the administrators and can become a nightmare, as some have found out.

Also, it often turns out that sharing ALL information is not only unnecessary but often unwanted.

APIS takes a different approach which always guarantees the best solution depending on the customer's demands. This is done by providing two product lines for different demands which can be seamlessly integrated.

The client software stores information in documents (files); this approach is well known from word processors or spreadsheets. It is simple to install and maintain and does not need additional IT infrastructure (databases). The client software is simple to use and maintain and powerful at the same time. A sophisticated knowledge mining tool (IQ-Explorer) can search through all files accessible to a user for better reuse of data. The client software also allows several members of a team to work on the same data at the same time through File Cloning.

Only if you know that you need to manage and administrate a company wide body of knowledge you should start using the server software (CARM Server). The CARM server extracts data from the documents produced by the client and distributes this data to other clients for a number of different reuse scenarios and applications. This might be as simple as the automatic timer based creation of PDF documents and as sophisticated as managing a version controlled central knowledge store.

¹ MSI = Microsoft Software Installation

² MSP = Microsoft Software Patches