Decisionism Announces Aclue for Oracle Financial Analyzer—OFA—; Aclue Decision Supportware Integrates Diverse Corporate Data Sources for Rapid Delivery of Analytical Applications

Business Wire, May 11, 1999

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 1999--

Decisionism Inc., a leading supplier of software and services for the rapid deployment of OLAP analytical applications and reporting solutions, today announced Aclue(tm) Decision Supportware for Oracle(R) Financial Analyzer (OFA). Oracle Corporation's OFA is a distributed application for financial reporting, analysis, budgeting, and planning based on the Express(R) OLAP server. Aclue enables the rapid creation, delivery, and management of analytical applications that share consistent, synchronized corporate data, and already supports Oracle Express(R) (Nasdaq:ORCL), Microsoft SQL Server(tm) 7.0 OLAP Services (Nasdaq:MSFT), and Hyperion(R) Essbase(R) (Nasdaq:HYSL).

Aclue for OFA integrates financial data from throughout the organization and delivers it to OFA, greatly simplifying the process of deploying OFA while maximizing its value and delivering better information for budgeting, planning, and analysis. Aclue's patented technology is an exceptional foundation for rapid analytical application development, cost effective deployment and efficient ongoing management. The combination of OFA's powerful analytical tools with Aclue helps organizations to control costs, analyze performance, evaluate opportunities, and formulate future directions.

"Most organizations have a variety of financial applications, including multiple general ledgers, from which they need to gather data to form a comprehensive view of their business for planning and budgeting," noted Gordon Rapkin, Decisionism's president and CEO. "Aclue for OFA responds to a number of customer requests for a solution that quickly and easily integrates data from multiple financial and operational sources to assist in the development and deployment of OFA."

"Strategic business intelligence has become a high priority for every successful organization, and Oracle Financial Analyzer delivers powerful analytical capabilities to users at all levels," said David Menninger, vice president product marketing OLAP products division at Oracle Corporation. "The combination of OFA with Decisionism's Aclue is compelling: it helps organizations speed up the process of integrating data from financial applications and data warehouses across the enterprise. Decisionism has been an Oracle Alliance Partner for several years with its support for the rapid deployment of Oracle Express applications. We are glad to see that relationship now expand to include a direct link to OFA as well."

Aclue is based on a centralized Business Information Model that becomes a self-documenting repository of the dimensions, hierarchies, and formulaic data items (FDIs) forming the foundation of an OFA application. Through a graphical interface, this model is easily changed and extended to support the ever-changing analytical needs of end users. Because enterprise data typically needs to be gathered from multiple applications (e.g., Oracle and non-Oracle general ledgers, spreadsheets and data warehouses), Aclue transforms, filters, and integrates financial data from all of these sources into a consistent view that is ready for delivery to an OFA application.

From the Business Information Model, Aclue Decision Supportware can directly populate one or more focused OFA applications. Multiple OFA applications are synchronized by Aclue, ensuring that users are working with the same corporate data for consistent decision making. In addition, Aclue provides the ability to initiate the distribution of targeted views of application data to budget and analyst workstations.

For the business professional, Aclue software provides powerful audit and drill-back capabilities. Full historic data lineage and aggregation details can be accessed from either Oracle Financial Analyzer or Excel front-end tools. This builds end user confidence in the data by answering "who/what/when/where" questions without time-consuming manual tracing or costly IT involvement.

Aclue enables project managers to deploy analytical applications much faster than with traditional custom-coded approaches, and allows easier maintenance of those applications as changes occur in data sources and user requirements. It also reduces project costs and risks, and delivers improved accuracy.

Essential for applications that combine data from many sources, such as balanced scorecards, financial consolidation, or E-Commerce Analysis(tm), Aclue enables deployment of analytical applications across the enterprise.

Aclue's "read-once, write-many" hub-and-spoke architecture eliminates multiple accesses of the source data, enabling consistent, synchronized exports to multiple applications while shortening the decision cycle.

Pricing of Aclue for OFA starts at $50,000 per server. Aclue for OFA will be available in June 1999.

About Decisionism

Headquartered in Boulder, Decisionism Inc. is focused on the mission of helping its customers to re-engineer their decision making processes using advanced OLAP technologies. Decisionism markets its product, Aclue Decision Supportware, to Fortune 1000 and mid-size organizations that are seeking to rapidly deliver analytical applications which require accurate, consistent, and timely information from across the enterprise.