IBM Delivers DB2 OLAP Server for OS/390 — Powerful Analysis Tool for e-business - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, April 3, 2000

IBM reaffirmed its dominance in the business intelligence market with the general availability of DB2 OLAP Server for OS/390 -- bringing sophisticated analysis capabilities to the thousands of e-businesses that rely on IBM's S/390 servers.

"DB2 OLAP Server for OS/390 gives us the analysis functions we need on the platform where we need it," said Greg Patterson, Data Base Administrator at JB Hunt, the diversified transportation company. "The data to be analyzed is already on the S/390 so we can lessen the network expense of shipping quantities of data. And we can do all this while leveraging our S/390 hardware, software investments and IT skills."

Multidimensional analysis is the fastest growing segment in the business intelligence market which, according to IDC, is growing at 43.7% annually from 1998 to 2003. Given the amount of business data which currently resides in enterprise systems, the DB2 OLAP Server family takes advantage of this significant market opportunity and provides flexibility and choice to customers through a broad range of platform, data storage and analysis options for business intelligence. The security, scalability and availability of the S/390 platform make it an ideal foundation for leveraging the huge volumes of data processed by e-businesses each day. In addition, by performing analyses on the S/390, the cost of maintaining additional analysis platforms and ongoing transmission of data can be avoided.

Jointly developed by IBM and Hyperion, DB2 OLAP Server has expanded to include S/390, joining version 1.1 which shipped in July 1999 on IBM AIX, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT. DB2 OLAP Server for OS/390 shares the functionality of the DB2 OLAP Server family. It gives users the option of storing multidimensional data in DB2 Universal Database or in the optimized Hyperion Essbase store -- delivering one product strategy that can handle a wide range of analysis requirements.

DB2 OLAP Server is designed for business professionals in various industries who require data analysis for competitive advantage. These include sales representatives who need to understand sales trends and outlooks, finance experts who analyze profitability and expenses, brand managers who must detect and solve issues in product sales, and marketing specialists who study campaign effectiveness. DB2 OLAP Server provides the technology to quickly build analytical applications using built-in math, financial and statistical functions. Through a number of intuitive interfaces, including spreadsheets and Web browsers, it speeds response by enabling users to interact quickly with the data without the need for a query language.

For additional information on IBM's data management solutions, visit http://www.software.ibm.com/data .