Wave Gliders collect enormous amounts of data and crunch the numbers distilling 4 gigabytes of raw data to a kilobyte of relevant information a client wants, for instance and then activate their Iridium satellite link to beam the result to servers on land.
But he only offers vague assurances of "pull-through, " as the customers who load up on Compaq's industry-standard Web-servers and related equipment also turn to Compaq's services arm to link it all together.
Google's servers use similar logic, ranking Web sites according to how many other sites link to them and how lofty the referring sites are in the ranking.