[April 19, 2004] N8 Systems Debuts with Innovative Approach to Defining and Modeling Requirements for Application Development; N8 Archetype Targets Wasted Billions in Software Development Budgets BERKELEY, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- April 19, 2004 -- N8 Systems, an innovator in services and software for application development, announced today its official debut with the introduction of N8 Archetype(TM). Archetype directly attacks the most widely-cited major cause of failed development projects: incomplete and inaccurate requirements. Archetype radically improves the generation of effective systems requirements because it allows business analysts to describe requirements in English text and immediately see them represented as meaningful diagrams. Developed from breakthrough research on building object models from natural language, Archetype is the first application to give business analysts automatic visual feedback of what requirements have actually been communicated. From textual descriptions of requirements, Archetype automatically creates industry-standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) use case and activity diagrams. Because these are well understood both by business and IT, these diagrams become a communication medium. Archetype enables rapid iterations of refined requirements, significantly reducing the time needed to make them truly accurate. "Companies waste billions of dollars each year on cancelled and impaired development projects because of the inability of business and IT to converge on accurate and effective system requirements," said David Hartford, president and CEO of N8 Systems. "The crux of this multi-billion dollar problem is the difficulty which business and IT seem to have in communicating. Business people tend to express themselves in words, while IT works with objects and relationships. This difference creates a huge communications gap. Archetype is the first solution which enables business and IT to create mutually understandable, effective and comprehensive representations of system requirements in a natural way." Provided as an online service, Archetype offers an innovative dual-view interface that utilizes Microsoft's familiar Word(R) and Visio(R). With minimal training, business users can rapidly transform text (in Word) describing business processes into highly readable diagrams (in Visio) of an existing or desired system, filtering out ambiguities in the process. Business people and development teams can then jointly review, and rapidly edit, the various participants, activities and sequencing of activities to ensure mutually understood, robust and consistent system requirements models. As a result, errors and omissions are identified and corrected at the very beginning of the development process, before they become deeply entrenched, and costly, causes of system development failure. "One of the significant challenges in Model Driven Development is unifying all aspects of the application design process," said Stephen D. Hendrick, a Group Vice President of research at IDC. "The ability to create well-defined object models from textual documents enables application requirements to now be semantically bound to the application's design. This achievement brings IT another step closer to understanding and aligning itself with the business needs of the enterprise." The cost of fixing software errors can increase 25 to 200 times if they aren't discovered until application deployment, rather than in the inception phases of requirements and business modeling. As development teams become globalized, spread across time zones and cultures, the risk of undiscovered errors grows exponentially. The precision and timeliness of defining and modeling requirements with Archetype overcomes these challenges, preventing costly and damaging errors. Archetype is available as a subscription-based service as of April 19, 2004. About N8 Systems N8 Systems is an innovator in services and software for application development focused on bridging the communications gap between business and IT. Developed from breakthrough research on building object models from natural language, N8's Archetype is the first application which enables business users to automatically create effective and comprehensive Unified Modeling Language (UML) use case and activity diagrams from text descriptions of requirements. By facilitating communication between business and IT, Archetype reduces the time to capture accurate requirements, provides faster and better implementations through model optimization, and significantly reduces the risk of project failure. For more information, visit www.N8systems.com or email [email protected]. N8 Systems and Archetype are trademarks of N8 Systems. All other company or product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]