NCR and BEZ Systems offer management tools to enhance data warehouse performance

Business Wire, June 27, 1997

DAYTON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 25, 1997--

BEZPlus suite of tools designed for parallel processing

environments

NCR Corporation announced today that it has signed a referral agreement with BEZ Systems to include the BEZPlus suite of performance and capacity management tools as part of NCR's complete data warehouse solution.

The addition of the BEZPlus suite extends the functionality of NCR's Teradata(R) RDBMS data warehouse engine and was specifically designed to run on NCR's WorldMark(TM) 5100 massively parallel processing servers.

BEZPlus is a comprehensive set of tools that can be applied to the construction, management, and growth of data warehouse solutions in a parallel processing environment. The tools were designed to address the leading cause of failure in data warehousing projects: poor planning because of difficulty in predicting where system bottlenecks will develop.

"We are pleased to have the opportunity to better serve NCR's customer base," said Dr. Boris Zibitsker, president and founder of BEZ Systems. "Our integrated family of tools help users plan performance so that they will see acceptable levels of response times from their systems, efficiently utilizing resources and enabling them to create an architecture that will readily accommodate a dynamic, growing business environment."

JCPenney, the nation's leader in consumer retail catalog sales, has used the BEZPlus tool suite to minimize the risk of `performance surprises' in its massive data warehouse catalog operation, which uses NCR Teradata RDBMS and NCR WorldMark 5100 massively parallel servers. According to Barry Hicks, Manager of Corporate Capacity Planning at the Plano, TX-based retailer, "Being in the highly competitive catalog merchandising arena, we needed to focus on data warehouse performance optimization including capacity planning, managing our existing environment and gearing up for growth to support more users and applications with our NCR data warehouse.

"Using the BEZPlus tools, we were able to identify architectural bottlenecks that needed to be corrected, without significant additional cost to JCPenney. In the process, we balanced the utilization of our high capacity EMC2 storage disks and improved the throughput of Teradata," Hicks said. He added "Since purchasing BEZPlus one year ago, we partnered with BEZ and NCR to achieve a sophisticated level of workload profiling expected at JCPenney. BEZ has incorporated our statistical process control (SPC) approach into the CORPVIEW product. This function gives us a strategic advantage that ensures the efficient use of our corporate resources. We are becoming as proficient with NCR/Teradata for capacity and efficiency management as we are with MVS."

Kmart, the third largest retailer in the U.S. with $32 billion in annual revenues and more than 2,100 stores across the U.S., is also among the NCR customers already benefiting from the use of the BEZPlus tool suite. Using them, systems analysts at Kmart were able to convince management that a two-phase, multi-million upgrade of their existing NCR data warehouse was necessary. According to Dennis Cooper, manager of database administration at the Troy, MI-based Kmart, "By going ahead with the upgrade to our NCR data warehouse, we got an overall boost in performance of about 22% exactly what the BEZ analysis had indicated we would get."

BEZPlus provides tools that model, evaluate, and predict performance levels for new installations and the impact of the introduction of new applications into existing NCR data warehouse environments. The suite also contains modules for compiling performance measurement data; tuning system performance; and optimizing database administration functions by identifying the best way to load large volumes of data within a small time window. It also identifies how to aggregate, summarize, and replicate data to support the performance requirements of specific applications.

"This agreement enables our customers to get the full benefit of massively parallel systems that scale to thousands of Pentium Pro processors," said Mark Hurd, Marketing vice president for NCR's Computer Systems Group. "The advanced set of tools from BEZ are a great asset for capacity planning and the efficient utilization of data warehouses based on our WorldMark massively parallel processing architecture."

The terms of the agreement will make it easier for NCR to introduce BEZ into customer relationships where data warehouses based on massively parallel configurations of NCR WorldMark 5100 systems exist or are planned. It is expected to be extremely beneficial for customers with established applications, users expanding applications, and users who are in the initial planning phase for a data warehouse.

About BEZ Systems

BEZ Systems is the developer of BEZPlus, a family of performance and capacity management software products for the NCR Teradata RDBMS and other database environments that run on massively parallel processing systems. BEZPlus products improve predictability, minimize the risk of performance complications, assist in improving system performance, save the time of analysts, increase confidence in recommendations, and help companies to improve their competitive position. BEZ Systems offers training and consulting services. The company is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois. -0- For more information on the BEZPlus tool suite, Contact: