While Jon's team at RCA Corporate Staff was busy inventing the firm's first enterprise BI platform, they ran into a challenge attempting to manipulate all the multi-dimensional accounting and finance data from 31 global divisions. It was so big that traditional DBMS storage and retrieval was too slow, and at the time - extremely expensive.

Jon set up a side project to analyze the data and came up with new compression and storage techniques that pre-dated the ARC format (Phil Katz and PKXARC) and ZIP format by several years. When implemented as part of RCA's global BI platform being built under Jon's direction, these techniques allowed the financial and accounting data to be "deflated" by about 80%. It turned out that the processing to accomplish the compression was far faster than the time that used to be spent storing and retrieving the uncompressed data. The net result was data storage and retrieval in a fraction of the time, and a reduction in mainframe storage cost for the BI platform of close to 80%.