Kevin;
Sorry for the delay had to move and then move family members from San Antonio Texas.
Let's see what's going on with our silent partner.
Profile; Canadian National Railways is North America's sixth largest railroad; 4.1 billion in '96
CN operates Canada's largest railroad system. It is North America's sixth largest
railroad, based on 1996 revenues of 4.1 billion (Canadian). CN operates appoximately
18,000 route miles of track across Canada and the United States.
The railway's revenues are derived from the movement of a diversified and
balanced freight portfolio, categorized into six business groups; industrial products,
forest products, grain and grain products, coal, sulfur, and fertilizers.
Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, CN employs 26,900 people.
News article;
HDS Nuclues Series helps Canadian National Railways
1995 was a time of major transition for CN, Canada's largest railroad system and an HDS customer for 12 years.
After 76 years of government ownership, CN was privatized through the largest IPO in Canadian history.
Much of CN's success in an extremely competitive marketplace--its 1996 revenues of 4.1 billion Canadian make it North
America's sixth biggest railroad--had been achieved by making the highest possible levels of personal productivity a key part
of its informational systems strategy. This made CN a perfect early prospect for the HDS nuclues Series, which is based on a relational
database management system developed by Sand Technology Sysems International, Inc.
HDS marketing representative Lorraine Zocchi worked hard to understand the customer's need. To clear up problems its marketing
department analysts were having with delivery times from a data warehousing project, Lorraine proposed Nucleus.
Soon thereafter, CN's Vice President of support services Jim Metsos, after spending three days at the HDS Customer Executive Conference,
returned to Canada, where he had more discussions about Nuclues with Lorraine and the account team, ran more demos, and finally agreed to test
Nuclues.
"We were drowning in information and starved for knowledge." says Jim. "No CEO I know wants marketing folks to manage or predict based on gut
feelings. Confidence comes from the proven reliability of data."
To identify and validate revenue and customer issues, CN's marketing department must analyzel large quantities of data, often from incompatible sources,
"Providing or analyzing data within tight time frames strains everyone's resources, especially when there are data integrity issues to be resolved," says Steven White,
CN's Business Technology Officer for marketing information process services.
"As soon as the drill--down capability of the HDS Intelligent Storage Subsystem was introduced to marketing, we saw the potential. We decided to rent Nuclues for six
months to clean up our data integrity issues. Nucleus also let us address other revenue and customer issues," he says. "No other platform we've found delivers the same
fuctionality. Early test results have confirmed the product's ease of delivery and flexibility, and, most important, its new magnitude of processing speed in providing data
access regardless of current source."
Nucleus' two greatest advanatages are ease of use--especially minimal overhead to load and maintain databases--and the sheer speed at which data analyses can be
processed. Data availability is quicker, too. No special data preparations have to be done to load it into the database after extraction,
The conventional solution calls for a team of database specialists who crearte indexes for any topic to be searched. But that's costly and time consuming, especially if a
lot of queries that cross--reference multiple topics must be run. It also consumes enormous, costly amounts of computer memory.
The Nucleus subsystem works quite differently. It processes not the information itself, but a mathematical map of where in the database any piece of information can be found.
One hundred percent indexing with data compression enhances processing speed. Nucleus' data storage technique allows comparisons among varied data sources fron
different systems, and the resulting data requires less space than what was originally input. These two advantages let customer react fasteer to emerging issues and allows them
to be proactive to pricing and division anomalies before problems result.
When asked how CN will be using Nucleus a year from now, Steven White replies without hesitation; "Nucleus seems to be the right tool as a front--end product for the Internet.
Today, people want their data not only from their desktop but from anywhere they happen to be when traveling. There is only one answer--the Internet."
"The success we experienced at CN would have been impossible without the commitment, dedication, and flexibility of many people," points out Roger Roy, Vice President of HDS
Canada's Eastern Region. In addition to Marketing Representative Lorraine Zocchi, the list includes Charles Gervais from Customer Service and support; systems engineers
Richard Grondin and Jean-Jacques Raymond; Denis Houle, Gerry van der Knaap, and Pierre Asselin of National Technical Support; Pierre Raymond from Product Marketing;
and Dave Terry from Sand Technology.
What a glowing testimoniall for Sand and Aurthor Richie. We have all read what the potental of the Nucleus was and the possiblities of its use in the corporate world, but to see it in
print from a satisfied customer is great.
The one reference that was made about the Nucleus and the internet was very interesting,. Are they saying that the heat shield provides they with complete security to use the internet
at anytime and any place they want with complete confidence on security? It sure sounds like it to me.
This is just great news but it raises alot of questions. Dinner is cold and about to go in the garbage disposal. So to keep peace I better apease don't you think.
Will address the question issue after apeasement time is over. Which I don't think that will ever come about.
good trading.
Gary |
