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To: jocko who wrote (2765)	2/26/1998 5:28:00 PM
From: Mike Paulin	Respond to of 6076

Hey Guys try to put this next to Agora report. Sincerely, Michel, ============================================================= IBM aims for business intelligence with decision support software rollout By Paul Krill InfoWorld Electric Posted at 6:49 AM PT, Feb 26, 1998 IBM on Thursday boosted its profile in the decision support and business intelligence market by rolling out a slew of new software offerings. Included in the rollout is the formal introduction of DB2 OLAP Server, which supplements the DB2 Universal Database RDBMS with online analytical processing. Also, a new version of the company's Intelligent Miner data mining tool for the first time will be supported on other vendors' hardware. The goal of the announcement, which links IBM software, hardware, and consulting services, is to make IBM a dominating force in business intelligence and decision support. "There's not a part of the business intelligence solution that we cannot offer," said Dan Graham, strategy and operations executive with IBM's global business intelligence unit in Somers, N.Y. In addition to data mining and OLAP, the list of new products includes offerings in application-specific business analysis, data warehousing, predictive modeling, and data cleansing. IBM's DB2 OLAP Server, based on technology licensed from Arbor Software, is now shipping. The product complements the DB2 relational data store with complex data analysis. Pricing was unavailable. Intelligent Miner for Data will now be supported on the Windows NT and Sun Solaris platforms. Other features of Version 2.1 include scoring, to determine the importance of specific customers; integrated statistics and enhanced algorithms; a wizard-based interface; and the ability to support business process flows. The product will cost $75,000 on IBM AIX. It will be available April 24 on AIX, with beta versions for NT and Solaris support due in June and April, respectively. IBM in March will ship Intelligent Miner 2.1 for Text, which enables searching of new data sources such as customer correspondence, online news services, and e-mail. It will ship on AIX and NT in March, with AIX pricing starting at $75,000 and NT pricing beginning at $30,000. IBM plans to add support of analysis of audio and images in future releases. "In my opinion, Intelligent Miner is a pretty outstanding product," said analyst Teresa Wingfield, research director for Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass. "It probably has the best statistical algorithms of any solution out there." Also announced were DecisionEdge for Finance and DecisionEdge for Insurance, applications suites for determining customer attrition in the finance and insurance industries. The products are supported on IBM hardware platforms. The finance package is due this summer while the insurance offering is due by December. Pricing of both products will vary based on configuration. IBM also unveiled versions of its Discovery Series data mining applications for banking and telecommunications. Optimized for IBM platforms, prices vary. Discovery Series for Banking is due in April while Discovery Series for Telecommunications is available now. A new version of the Visual Warehouse software for building data marts and warehouses, Version 3.1, offers improved data loading and the ability to access a DB2-based warehouse via a browser. The package also includes front-end tools from vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects. Version 3.1 costs $36,950 for a data mart running on a uniprocessor system with 20 users. New versions of the IBM Business Analysis Suite support development of warehouses from data in SAP and JD Edwards applications. Also intended for IBM platforms, the products will vary in pricing. The SAP implementation is due by June while the JD Edwards package is shipping now. IBM also announced an arrangement to resell data cleansing software from ISV Vality. IBM Corp., in Armonk, N.Y., is at ibm.com. Go to the Week's Top News Stories Please direct your comments to InfoWorld Electric Deputy News Editor Carolyn April