Informix Announces Next Generation Business Intelligence Servers And Its Suite Of Customized Solutions - Informix Red Brick Decision Server 6.0, Informix Extended Parallel Server 8.3, Informix Decision Suite data warehousing software - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Sept 27, 1999

Demonstrating its commitment to help customers leverage and exploit their valuable data assets with high performance business-critical warehousing solutions, Informix Corporation Tuesday announced new releases of its world-class business intelligence server technology, and Informix Decision Solution Suite, a portfolio of industry-specific solutions.

The new releases of Informix Red Brick Decision Server 6.0 and Informix Extended Parallel Server 8.3, together with Informix Decision Solution Suite, establish Informix's commitment to continue to improve price and performance, and satisfy customers' needs for pre-defined and pre-tested solutions, and leading business intelligence engines for the highly complex decision support environment. These servers are being unveiled for the first time today at the Data Warehousing Institute's Best Practices and Implementation Conference in San Diego.

"Customers need comprehensive Business Intelligence solutions to maintain competitive advantage. Red Brick Decision Server 6.0 and Extended Parallel Server 8.3 are the ideal foundations for these solutions. Together with Informix Internet Foundation.2000, these servers solve the most complex business challenges in the marketplace today," said Charles Chang, Vice President and General Manager of Informix's Business Intelligence Group. "Having focused servers allows customers to choose the right technology to drive their Business Intelligence solution optimally," continued Chang. Red Brick Decision Server 6.0

For business intelligence solutions where data can be best represented by star schema, the Red Brick Decision Server 6.0 delivers the ease of implementation, scalability, and reliability requirements that are critical in allowing companies to more effectively deploy analytical applications, and to leverage the Internet. The new Red Brick Decision Server 6.0 will be available in October, highlighting:

* Easy Implementation: With Red Brick Decision Server 6.0, customers report that little, or no, DBA support is required, and that Red Brick Decision Server is easier to install, implement, and use than any other data warehouse server.

* Superior Performance: The optimized star-schema design within Red Brick Decision Server delivers uncompromised performance for business problems where data can be best represented with that schema.

* Web Enablement: New features in Red Brick Decision Server add the capability to store clickstream data for analysis.

Extended Parallel Server 8.3

Extended Parallel Server 8.3 is targeted at Global 2000 companies for business problems where data can not be represented optimally through star-schema. Extended Parallel Server 8.3 imposes no limits in terms of size, users, query complexity, schema design, or management approach. The new Extended Parallel Server 8.3 will be available next week, highlighting:

* No Limits: Extended Parallel Sever 8.3 provides a "no ceilings" approach to data warehousing, with no limit to database size, number of users, type, or complexity of query, or schema design.

* Fast Everywhere: Extended Parallel Server 8.3 delivers faster performance in real-world environments. Predefined joins, precomputed results, and single-purpose indexes are not required for fast queries. In addition, Extended Parallel Server 8.3 performs faster loads and can transform and manipulate data faster than any competing product.

* Warehousing Optimized Design: Extended Parallel Server 8.3 was built from inception to be a high-performance data warehouse engine.

Informix Decision Solution Suite

Informix Decision Solution Suite is a portfolio of complete pre-defined and pre-tested solution offerings which address a number of vertical and horizontal markets. The portfolio will include strategic partners from around the world and leverage their analytic applications to deliver complete solution sets to the marketplace.

"Our customers tell us they need customized solutions, and they need them quickly, to solve specific business intelligence needs. The Informix Decision Solution Suite has been designed to respond to that demand in the marketplace," continued Chang.

One solution already available is Informix Decision Solution Suite for Telecommunications. Based on Informix's recent partnership with Paragren Technologies, this is the first of several telecommunications specific solutions to be released.

"The Informix Decision Solution Suite provides us with one of the most powerful yet targeted business intelligence solution environments available," said Dan Lackner, Chief Operating Officer of Paragren Technologies. "Combining the Informix Decision Solution Suite with our One-by-One software suite, will enable marketers to execute complex customer acquisitions, expansion, and retention strategies more quickly and easily."

Also available is the Informix Decision Solution Suite for Financial Services offering, which is delivered in partnership with Cytek, Inc. Cytek's Banker's Edge technology provides a solution for cost and profitability analysis, and risk management.