IBM Introduces New Business Intelligence Solutions for the AS/400 - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, March 13, 2000

IBM Tuesday announced new business intelligence (BI) support and solutions for AS/400 targeted to small- and medium-sized businesses and designed to offer an immediate return on investment.

Survey.com projects the annual worldwide investment in BI will soar to more than $148 billion by 2003 -- an annual growth rate of 43 percent. IBM anticipates that small and mid-sized companies will begin to get on the business intelligence bandwagon -- seeking ways to sift through their data to spot trends that will help them improve their products and services to their customers.

The new offerings include DB2 OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) Server and QMF (Query Management Facility) for Windows, along with a new supply chain-targeted BI solution from Silvon Software, plus the SPSS BI product now available on the AS/400. This announcement further enhances the integration of BI applications with core application suites, such as enterprise resource planning, on a single multi-function server.

IBM will offer DB2 OLAP Server for AS/400, a key platform joining DB2 OLAP Server offerings for IBM and non-IBM platforms. DB2 OLAP Server enables users to quickly build analytical applications using built-in math, financial and statistical functions; and to easily deploy Web-based analytical applications.

Combined with IBM's DB2 family of relational databases, it links the widely accepted Hyperion Essbase OLAP technology with IBM's award-winning scalable database. DB2 OLAP Server will be available worldwide in the second quarter. DB2 OLAP Server has been jointly developed with IBM by ShowCase Corporation.

QMF (Query Management Facility) for Windows for AS/400 is a multi-purpose query, reporting and updating tool for IBM's DB2 Universal Database for AS/400 relational databases. It allows users to access large amounts of data, share central repositories of queries and enterprise reports, and publish to the Web for viewing with a Web browser. QMF for Windows can be used to integrate with Windows OLE2 desktop applications, including spreadsheets, charting and analysis tools, executive information systems and desktop databases. It provides extensive end-user governing and tracking, as well as resource controls. QMF for Windows, which is DBCS enabled and available in 13 national languages, will be available worldwide later this week.

New Offerings from Business Partners Silvon Software, Inc., a leading AS/400 business intelligence application vendor, adds CategoryManager to its suite of BI applications for AS/400, available immediately worldwide. CategoryManager is designed to help consumer packaged goods companies strategically analyze and manage product categories, brands and mixes. The product allows companies to view key business indicators such as sales growth, product and customer profitability, budget achievement, forecast accuracy, effectiveness of trade and market spending, and market performance for both internal and competitive products.

"Using AS/400 for business intelligence provides the support necessary to process the large volume of data generated by e-commerce transactions," says John Hughes, senior vice president, sales and marketing, Silvon. "CategoryManager leverages the power of the AS/400 even further to give food and other CPG companies easy access to and analysis of mission-critical business data."

SPSS Inc. has made its statistics-based data mining and analysis solution available in native mode on the AS/400. AS/400 users will have access to SPSS BI functionality including data preparation, tabular reporting, basic statistics and advanced analytical methods.

SPSS partners well with IBM's Intelligent Data Miner data mining software by providing analytical data preparation and complimentary data mining capabilities to turn raw data into information for all types of customer relationship management applications, including customer loyalty programs and fraud detection.

SPSS applications were ported to the AS/400 using AS/400 PASE (Portable Application Solutions Environment), the technology announced in January that enables ISVs to more easily port UNIX applications to the AS/400.

"The AS/400 is a tremendous platform for business intelligence, given both its performance and the broad range of customers who are adopting it," says Jack Noonan, president and CEO, SPSS. "With the new PASE environment, the porting process was straightforward, enabling us to bring a unique and valuable BI offering from SPSS to the AS/400."

Other BI-Related Announcements In addition to the announcements made Tuesday, IBM recently signed a re-marketing agreement with BI software vendor Dimensional Insight (DI). The agreement enables IBM marketing representatives and IBM Business Partners to provide DI's customized BI solutions to customers in North America.

Trillium Software, the leader in global enterprise-wide data cleansing and reengineering solutions, also is offering their data cleansing solution on the AS/400 now. Trillium's architecture and technology is geared toward organizations that require rapid development and deployment of a data cleansing solution as a web enabled e-business solution on multiple platforms, including AS/400.