Prism Warehouse Manager 4.4 Increases Development Productivity, Supports New Platforms For Automated Data Warehousing; Now Supports Windows 95 and NT, DB2 Parallel Edition, Digital AlphaServer and Unisys OPUS Environments

Business Wire, June 11, 1996

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 11, 1996--Prism Solutions, Inc. today announced Prism Warehouse Manager(tm) 4.4, a new release of its industry-leading software that automates the process of building a range of data warehouses, from the enterprise level to distributed data marts.

New features include support for Windows 95 and Windows NT development platforms; DB2 Parallel Edition as a target parallel database option; Informix and Oracle as source and target databases on Digital's AlphaServer platform; the Unisys commercial MPP system, OPUS, as well as Unisys SMP servers; and several productivity enhancements to accelerate development time.

"Our partnerships with customers and key industry leaders such as IBM, Digital and Unisys have resulted in a robust new release of Prism Warehouse Manager that supports today's need for a high performance warehouse environment," said Cynthia Schmidt, vice president of marketing for Prism Solutions.

Expanded Platform Support for Development, Source and Target Processing

With the 4.4 release, Prism Warehouse Manager supports Windows 95 and NT development platforms, giving customers greater flexibility in choosing an environment that best suits their corporate standards and business requirements.

Now customers can use Prism Warehouse Manager 4.4 to build a data warehouse on IBM's DB2 Parallel Edition running on the RISC System/6000 Scalable POWERparallel Systems (RS/6000 SP) hardware platform. The product's database load processing has been enhanced to support the data partitioning and parallel loading capabilities offered in a DB2 PE environment.

In addition, customers now can gather source data from, as well as build a data warehouse on, Digital UNIX-based Informix and Oracle databases on the Digital AlphaServer platform. The high-performance, 64-bit AlphaServer family of servers provides the scalability and processing speed needed in a large data warehouse environment. Prism's support for AlphaServer includes not only the initial loading of new warehouse tables, but also appending new data to existing warehouse tables, completely refreshing existing tables with a new set of data, or updating individual rows in the data warehouse.

Prism Warehouse Manager now also supports Unisys OPUS, the Open Parallel Unix Server, which provides the power and scalability of a massively parallel processing (MPP) system with the ease of management of a single UNIX system.

For those clients committed to maintaining open systems environments, and whose data warehouse performance requirements exceed the capacity typically provided by UNIX symmetric multi-processing (SMP) systems, the combination of Prism Warehouse Manager 4.4 and OPUS provides an ideal solution.

"There has been strong demand by Unisys clients for sophisticated data extraction software to automate the movement of data from their mission-critical operational systems to their OPUS-based decision support systems," commented Nick Derchak, Unisys vice president of OPUS product development.

"Prism Warehouse Manager automates the process of building and maintaining a data warehouse, making the development process easier and more reliable. Unisys is particularly pleased with the superior ease of use provided by Prism Warehouse Manager, including the new support for Windows 95 and NT development environments."

Customer-Requested Enhancements Increase Development Productivity

Underscoring its commitment to customer satisfaction, Prism has added several performance features to the 4.4 release in response to customer enhancement requests. These include:

-- Enhanced Source-to-Target Field Mapping - The Prism Warehouse Manager Turbo Mapping function provides a point-and-click interface for mapping source data to the target data warehouse tables. It now allows all fields with the same name in both the source and target environments to be mapped automatically via a "Move Corresponding" function. Its interface has also been restructured to help users more easily identify mapped fields and to scroll through field names and definitions from a single panel.

-- Enhanced Data Type Support - zoned decimal data types are supported as warehouse field definitions, providing additional flexibility in the processing of numeric data across heterogeneous platforms.

-- Enhanced User Exit Processing - user exit routines now can incorporate statistics to track the movement of data from source to target environments. This can be used to ensure the consistency and integrity of the warehouse maintenance process in support of complex, site-specific audit reporting requirements.

Pricing and Availability

Prism Warehouse Manager 4.4 will be generally available in August 1996. It is licensed for $130,000 for a typical configuration, which includes a transformation module with three concurrent developer workstation seats, one source database module and one target database module.

About Prism Solutions

Founded in 1991, Prism Solutions (NASDAQ: PRZM) is a leader in data warehouse management software for building, maintaining and navigating data warehouses. Prism Solutions' products and services enable a variety of projects, such as building decision-support systems, enhancing client/server applications and migrating data between different computing platforms. Prism Solutions helps customers meet strategic business goals through data warehousing solutions that support customer relationship management, profitability measurement, market segmentation, risk management, procurement and other critical business applications.