The SEDONA Growth Strategy -- SEDONA Transitions From a Hardware-Based Company to an Internet/Network-Based Business Intelligence Software Provider
LIMERICK, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 13, 1999--At SEDONA's Annual Meeting held on June 23, 1999, Laurence L. Osterwise, CEO of SEDONA Corporation (NASDAQ: SDNA), announced that SEDONA is in full transition to becoming a significant provider of internet-based business intelligence software. Mr. Osterwise stated that "Our experience in the marketplace, with customers and with partners, has increased our confidence, accelerated our focus and increased our commitment to the strategies we established in 1998."
According to Mr. Osterwise, "The key strategy is to develop and distribute software components for inclusion in solutions provided by others. To paraphrase concepts employed by others; 'we don't make their products, we make their products better'. Specifically our first new product brings the ability to geo-spatially visualize (on a map background) one's data and to ask interactive questions of that data, again using spatial (geographic) constraints (for example, within a specified radius) enabling better decisions to be made faster and more efficiently."
In support of this component strategy, SEDONA first developed an end-user application, Sedona SpatialVision. SEDONA verified the power of this concept in several ways. SpatialVision received excellent response at Oracle Open World98 this past November, and we received outstanding feedback from our Beta test customers. While SpatialVision is now being employed by several organizations, the real purpose of this application and these activities was to introduce the capabilities and benefits of spatial visualization to the marketplace and gain commitment for inclusion in industry leading applications. To that end, we have been assembling a set of building blocks (components) to enable application vendors to seamlessly include our leading-edge SpatialVision software components in their product offerings. These components are designed for both network and web-based applications. The first implementation of these components is in Acxiom's Solvitur CIMS, a product that is being very well received by Acxiom's target market in the banking and financial services industry.
The marketplace has indicated that these capabilities are very valuable in several key application areas, for example, customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation (SFA), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain (SC), data warehousing (DW), and business intelligence (BI). Similarly, the capabilities meet the needs of many key industries, again, for example, banking and financial services, insurance, telecommunications, utilities, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, and government.
Currently, based on Oracle's architecture, work is underway to expand the markets of opportunity for our growing family of Sedona SpatialVision software components, with the next capability to be IBM's DB2. For customer planning purposes, this capability will be available within sixty days. Extension to other databases, including Microsoft's Sequel Server, is not far behind. Clearly Oracle support is first to market and the Oracle architecture is the most advanced in the spatial information management arena.
Similarly from a content vantagepoint, we have built support for the Acxiom Data Network with our SedonaLink product and Acxiom has the greatest capability to provide customers with consumer and business information. With SedonaLink, data content will be able to be drawn from numerous providers and essentially any database based on customer requirements.
Mr. Osterwise concluded saying; "We at SEDONA are very excited with the reception being given our software products in this rapidly emerging, fast growth industry. Our ability to deliver these capabilities to major application providers, and through them to their customers, to the desktop user, to the laptop user, to the network enabled user (Internet, Intranet, Extranet), interactively through applets and browsers, and through pre-defined reports, provides virtually unlimited opportunity for us and our partners." |
