OceanX is a nonprofit organization that was set up to develop a community around the ocean itself.
It's an organization that runs an enormous research vessel to explore the world's oceans, and we combine
scientific discovery and exploration with media.
I first became familiar with FileMaker years ago, in an academic environment. I found that there were
lots of things we needed to do, in terms of documenting, in terms of databasing, that simply weren't available anywhere.
And, I'm a sort of mid-level programming guy, I'm not, like, high-end like my colleagues. And so,
I got introduced to it, and we started building very simple applications that work with it, but those
things immediately grew into these very elaborate applications, and I'm still programming in it for the past ten years. I'm still
writing code for it, so I came to OceanX and I looked around and there were all these sort of high-end, enterprise,
cloud-based things that people kept trying--honestly, trying and then putting down. And I said, "You know,
I know this may be sort of different, but in our world, we work with this package."
Uh, Vincent Pieribone had developed a system in FileMaker. Um, it's with--it had a lot of really great tools, when we saw it
we said "Boy, this is a really interesting application he's building," and it was trying to work on the logistics for
planning where the Athena would be, uh, traveling and how the...season would plan out.
What makes Claris FileMaker so powerful is that it's at the very high end of the low-code experience, so
low code means you can do things rapidly, a lot of things are figured out, you're not fussing with nasty details to get things applied,
but at the same time, there's an extremely high level of power.
Claris FileMaker has been, um, sort of the--our platform of choice because it gives you the ability to, um, not only have a really solid
database infrastructure, but then, also the ability to customize that to our needs.
This application really manages all of the data for the ship, especially in the planning-to-execution phase of the agenda.
What we do is such a unique thing, OceanX. We combine operations on a vessel, we combine operations on shore.
A problem that I really had not perceived that FileMaker so beautifully solved was the fact that, on the vessel,
we have limited satellite communication, so all of the cloud-based programs are simply not gonna work on the ship.
So what we did is, we developed a package on land that contains the information and a package that's on the
ship--and when we do get good satellite communication, the guys at Kyo Logic created this amazing syncing platform between
the FileMaker implementation on the vessel and the FileMaker implementation on land, and it rapidly
syncs these two things together, and everybody's essentially working on the same set of data
so FileMaker suddenly was a hero, because they were able to do all kinds of fantastic things. As soon as we get in satellite range,
the two sync and that gives us the ability to go in and focus on actually doing what we want to do
and orchestrating these missions rather than, you know, um, spending all of our time thinking about ways that
would be to pop in information because it's too much to hold in your head, so you need somewhere
for it all to live, and that's what FileMaker does for us.