Tech: Bohica Associates and BIS 2: The Super Sorters

July 23, 2010 - PRLog -- ENCINITAS ---- Piling up gigabytes and terabytes of data keeps getting easier. But as those mountains of data grow, finding what you want from them keeps getting harder.

Bohica Associates Corp.'s business revolves around finding those digital needles in the haystack. The Encinitas-based software company works on civilian and military projects where accurate and prompt information for decision-making is essential. Clients include SPAWAR near downtown San Diego and Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado.

Privately held Bohica, founded in 1985, employs about 100 people in its Encinitas headquarters. Bill Heatherly, Bohica's corporate vice president, said annual revenues are more than $10 million. The company's strength lies in finding out the best technologies to solve a problem, and gluing the pieces together, he said.

"We are not an IBM or an SAIC or a Northrop Grumman," Heatherly said. "We are a small, agile company. We're not an elephant, but we're an elephant-tamer."

In that analogy, the data is the elephant. And Bohica knows it can't tame the elephants alone, so it teams up for the job.

In June, Bohica announced a deal with Rancho Bernardo-based BIS2 to do data analysis for the federal government. The alliance combines Bohica's decision-making information technology with BIS2's ability to represent information visually.

"They're a fast-moving and dynamic team," Andrew Cardno, BIS2's chief technology officer, said of Bohica
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The company and BIS2 are working with the SABRE airline reservation service so that airlines can see and understand the enormous amounts of information flowing in, Heatherly said.

"We are connecting reservations worldwide for 42 airlines," Heatherly said. "It shows the actual reservation data, which the airlines use for marketing, for predictive analysis and for profitability; if they're going to change hubs, for example. There are 817,000 markets worldwide, tracking 1.65 billion reservations ... and that's on a single screen."

Bohica's expertise is taking the thought processes that go into decision-making and translating them into software rules used to interpret data, Heatherly said.
For example, an intelligence agency tracking ship movements relies on the accumulated knowledge of analysts to spot suspicious activities. That knowledge can be digitized.

"An analyst might be able to make an educated guess that something's askew when you've got a boat out of the Dominican Republic delivering bananas to Vietnam," Heatherly said. "He might say in his mind, 'They have bananas in Vietnam, so why would they need a shipment?' What you're doing is replicating human chain logic thinking of how someone would come to a decision."

That's an example of how suspicious data are analyzed. But to find that data, a human analyst would have to sort through so much irrelevant data that it would be impossible to make timely decisions, Heatherly said.

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Bohica Associates Corporation (BAC), a leading systems integrator, is principally engaged in the design, deployment, integration and operations of advanced technology systems, products and services in the government and commercial sectors. BAC specializes in rapid deployment of best-in-class solutions to support data visibility, financial accountability and corporate performance management. The company provides standards based IT solutions— program executive leadership, innovative technology, and process efficiencies --- enabling immediate scalable access to mission critical information to fast track accurate decision making.

Incorporated in California, BAC is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, with locations in Scottsdale Arizona, St. Louis Missouri and the D.C. metropolitan area. Clients include the Department of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Justice, and State and Local administrations along with the Intelligence community.