Delivering real-time data analytics solutions

We are delighted to celebrate our 25th Business Anniversary in August 2022. A huge thank you to all the team at Meniscus, to our long term business partners and to our customers who have all contributed hugely to developing our core real-time analytics solutions.

The vision behind Meniscus of turning raw data into valuable information was the idea of the majority owner Mike Everest and developed whilst running a subsidiary of Anglian Water operating industrial wastewater treatment plant around the country. It was the Chemical Engineer in him that wanted to make use of all the data collected to identify problems early and to operate sites more efficiently and at lower cost…and so the idea of automatically calculating performance metrics from operational data was born!

Mike Everest

The original ‘mission statement’ for the company was “Meniscus – optimising the performance of process plant”. After 25 years, it is a testament to the business that this is still our mission statement. In that time, we have migrated from processing data collected by site operators on hand-held Psion Workabouts through to fusing/merging high volume, high velocity, complex real-time datasets with all varieties of operational data. Whilst the platforms and analytics have become more complex, we pride ourselves in delivering these solutions as a service where meeting, and exceeding, our customer’s expectations is our main focus.

MAP (Meniscus Analytics Platform ), our real-time IoT based analytics platform was developed in 2014 with part funding from InnovateUK. The fact that we secured funding from InnovateUK shows that the concepts we integrated into MAP are truly innovating and ground-breaking. In the last 6 years, we have won additional innovation competitions with InnovateUK allowing us to use MAP to build and develop our core solutions, MAP Rain and MAP Solar. MAP Rain is used by Water companies and Councils around the world, and we continue to innovate and build on these real-time data analytics solutions.

MAP is built on the expertise and experience gained in developing our original Meniscus Calculation Engine (MCE) over the previous 12 years. MCE has itself gone through two major iterations. Initially developed in 2000 in C++, and named IPMS, it was upgraded with a real-time calculation ability after winning an ANUBIS competition, and re-named the Meniscus Calculation Engine (MCE). In 2010 it was completely rebuilt using C# to deliver a much more powerful, flexible and robust solution. It is still completely web based and even easier to use following the development of the RESTful API.

For those who want to know, the company name Meniscus has nothing to do with knees (the Meniscus is a major cartilage in the knee)! Rather, it refers to the interface between data and information – that is the role of analytics. A meniscus is the curve in the upper surface of a liquid close to the surface of the container or another object, caused by surface tension.