Offloading a legacy - Comshare's Commander Decision 2.0 and Commander Decision Web 2.0 - Brief Article - Product Announcement

Software Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Mathew Schwartz

Have a legacy database you'd like to access? Commander Decision 2.0 and Commander DecisionWeb 2.0 from Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Comshare Inc. aim to relocate number crunching from the IT data center to the desktop--transparently.

Commander Decision 2.0 is a client/server-based package designed for performance analysis and decision support; DecisionWeb 2.0 uses Java applets and server queries of the database to provide the same through a browser.

Michael Ippoliti, director of decision support and analysis for Bethlehem Steel Co. in Bethlehem, Pa., says the Decision tool is part of his game plan to replace legacy systems. Bethlehem has 250 users running Decision 2.0 to access a legacy database over 30 gigabytes in size with more than 100,000 items relating to 4,000 customers. Ippoliti says the ability to create multidimensional models on the fly enhances the geographical analysis of sales orders and the review of their customer-specific inventory.

DecisionWeb requires that users build applications to access its data, putting it in competition with products like Microsoft's Of. rice 97, which supports Web publishing. It may eventually need more of an automated Web front end. But the Decision products do offer a useful integration tool that takes data from a legacy database and cleans it, and then serves it up. Users can also implement multidimensional models with as many as 16 separate dimensions, allowing visual data mining --at the desktop. "We had a variety of tools that met all these needs," says Ippoliti, but they all had different front ends and required varying levels of hard coding. "Now we have an off-the-shelf product."