Epsilon Technology

The key to SoftCD's remarkable performance is its Epsilon Technology (patent pending), which will speed up download time by a factor of between 10 and 100 times compared to other competitive solutions.

A SoftCD Publication is any CD, directory or folder (which can be on a hard disk or a CD). SoftCD compares two versions of a Publication, identifies which files are different, and which parts of the modified files are not present anywhere in the existing Publication. SoftCD then generates an 'Amendment File' that contains a compressed version of these changes. This Amendment File is all that need be emailed or downloaded. The Amendment File's decompressed contents are stored on the end-user's hard disk and used to make the original CD appear to have been physically updated.

For example, in a PowerPoint presentation, if just one or two slides are changed and the presentation is saved under a new name, then only the parts which are different from the old file will be included in the Amendment File.

Unlike the frequently deployed previous generation technology, often known as 'delta technology', iOra's Epsilon algorithms allow updated data to be compared with previous data not only in the same file, but anywhere, in any previous version of the same Publication. This greatly increases the effectiveness of the technique by leveraging similarities between different files of a similar type.

Consider the following statistics for a new version of the 'Sales Support CD':

The sales person needs to download just 168 Kilobytes in order to have a completely up to date Sales Support CD. At typical modem speeds of 4 Kilobytes per second this would take less than a minute to download.

The technology employed in the SoftCD Client allows the amended information delivered using Epsilon Technology from the SoftCD Publisher to seamlessly merge with the original content of the CD-ROM. To the user it appears as though the CD itself has been updated - there is no need to copy updated files or to switch between the CD and a separate view of the updates. All this is done in a manner that is transparent to the user's applications as well - this means that SoftCD will work with any application that worked from the original CD. Consequently no application changes are required to work with SoftCD, minimising the publisher's costs.