Lone Eagle Systems: The Importance of Technical Communication

The Importance of Technical Communication

The importance of good communication when using consultants cannot be overstated. When study findings, technology assessments, and software designs are supported with clear documentation, the benefits can accrue to organizations for many years. Without clear documentation, it is possible for knowledge to leave the company when the job is done. This is not a risk with Lone Eagle^TM Systems, where the lasting quality of finished projects is due in part to the way in which results are communicated to clients:

Performance characterization and improvement projects result in detailed analyses - presented in text and graphics - illustrating the important findings and improvements that were achieved.
Software development projects result in clear, concise on-line user documentation, design documents and - of course - well-commented source code.
System designs and architectures are developed through written documents that are incrementally improved through the design process. In some of Lone Eagle Systems' most recent work, automatically-generated Java code documentation and graphical architecture diagrams are combined in a unique way - resulting in easily-accessible on-line design documents.

Technical and Marketing Communication

It is not uncommon for Lone Eagle Systems to be called upon to relate new technology developments and research results in the form of technical white papers, guides, briefs, and presentations. A complete list of papers is available, and examples of recent work (with links to on-line documents where available) follows:

Architectures for Managing Internet Data Centers exemplifies Lone Eagle Systems' research and reporting capabilities. The paper discusses IDC architectures, the software and servers needed to manage them, and the need to integrate different management tools at the functional and user interface levels.
(Technical White Paper, Sun Microsystems, October 2000).

Better By Design-- the Solaris Operating Environment helped to launch Sun's Solaris 7 operating environment and aggressively position the product's benefits with respect to Microsoft Windows NT.
(Technical Brief, Sun Microsystems, December 1998).

Breakthrough Workstation Performance with the Intel Pentium II Xeon Processor, written with performance data provided by Intel performance engineering staff, gave highly-specific details on the benefits of the Xeon processor products.
(Performance Brief, Intel Corporation, June 1998).

The gripping prose of Technical Computing Leadership from Sun was used as the take-away whitepaper at Sun's first 64-bit UltraSPARC computing launch in January 1998.
(Executive Brief, Sun Microsystems, January 1998).

The highly-detailed, point-by-point analysis of ad-hoc database query performance in Data Warehousing Performance with SMP and MPP Architectures helped to distinguish the areas in which Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) provided superior performance to Massively-Parallel Processors (MPP).
(White Paper, Sun Microsystems, September 1997).

Internet Service Provider Configuration Guidelines discusses the architectural principles for designing ISP network infrastructure, and highlights the servers and software available to implement highly scalable, reliable secure, and manageable services.
(Technical White Paper, Sun Microsystems, April 1997).

With HAL Computer Systems producing workstations and servers based on their own 64-bit SPARC processors, Memory Throughput - The Key to Balanced Performance, helped to distinguish the balanced system performance provided by HAL at the time.
(HAL Computer Systems, February 1996).

Sun. The Power Behind Pixar's Movie Making was one of several behind-the-scenes whitepapers describing the use of compute farms in the production of Pixar's fully computer-animated movies. (Technical Brief, Sun Microsystems, December 1995).

Long History of Good Communication

Further testimony to the importance of good communication is seen in the lifetime of software that is supported with good documentation. In 1979, Software Scientist Steve Gaede developed a measurement technique for evaluating UNIX system capacities with Bell Laboratories. Through the 1980's this benchmark was used within Bell Labs, and in 1990 it was adopted as the SDET benchmark by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) - and is still in use today. A software lifetime of almost two decades is almost unheard of and, in the case of the SDM benchmark, it was due to the fact that the quality of the documentation was as good as the quality of the measurement technique - allowing it to be used by organizations around the globe.

The same expertise that assists well-known companies to communicate their technological innovations to their customers - and which has enabled a software life-cycle of more than two decades - is accessible to others through the consulting services of Lone Eagle Sytems Inc.

More Information

Read the complete list of technical marketing materials that have been prepared by Lone Eagle Systems Inc.