Morning thread!
SAP news announcement:
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Monday May 11, 9:06 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Pilot and Early Customers Embrace SAP Business Information Warehouse
Data Warehousing Solution Enables Companies to Leverage Built-In
Business Process Knowledge to Improve Strategic Decision-Making
Capabilities
WALLDORF, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 1998--SAP AG, the world's leading provider of enterprise client/server business applications, announced it has received strong support from its pilot and early customers using the SAP Business Information Warehouse(tm), its enterprisewide data warehousing solution.
The nine U.S. pilot and early customers participating in the program represent a broad range of industries from manufacturing to services and include Hercules, Georgia-Pacific, Digital, Bay Networks, Colgate-Palmolive Co. [NYSE:CL - news] and Dow Corning. Based on the success of the pilot and early customer program and significant customer input, SAP will expand its first customer shipment (FCS) offering to include support for both Microsoft Windows NT and UNIX platforms, and additional business content for built-in business process knowledge providing robust decision-making capabilities. FCS of the SAP Business Information Warehouse is scheduled for the end of June 1998 and will be delivered to more than 70 customers worldwide. General availability is planned for August 1998.
''We have already experienced an overwhelming demand from our customer base for the SAP Business Information Warehouse, proving a solid endorsement for the product and its offerings,'' said Paul Wahl, CEO of SAP America, Inc., and executive board member of SAP AG. ''To further support our customers we have initiated the Customer Update Program (CUP) consisting of more than 15 additional U.S. companies that are eager to take advantage of the SAP Business Information Warehouse. For this additional program, we have offered the CUPs consultants to help prepare them for the first customer shipment.''
About the SAP Business Information Warehouse
Companies can aggregate external and internal data, convert it into information, and respond with speed and accuracy to market changes. The SAP Business Information Warehouse solution combines state-of-the-art data warehousing technologies with SAP business expertise to create an end-to-end solution. It includes all the components required for installation, use, ongoing changes and maintenance: SAP Business Information Warehouse Server, automatic extraction capability, a new front-end reporting and OLAP tool called Business Explorer, the Administrator Workbench and Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs). The SAP data-warehouse solution provides users with a comprehensive view of data across the organization, including SAP(tm) R/3(tm) and non-SAP data.
Hercules, a chemical manufacturer and distributor with more than $2.1 billion in revenues, chose the SAP Business Information Warehouse because it complements its R/3 strategy. ''SAP provides a business content-rich architecture for its SAP Business Information Warehouse, taking advantage of the business processes that are part of R/3,'' said Peter Steiner, SAP project director at Hercules. ''With the SAP Business Information Warehouse, our company will be able to more easily analyze information and respond to specific business trends, greatly improving our strategic planning and decision-making capability.''
SAP Business Information Warehouse Provides Innovative Technology
The SAP Business Information Warehouse incorporates leading-edge IT technology such as the SAP Business Framework(tm). The SAP Business Framework, unlike traditional client/server architectures, allows SAP to deliver new R/3 capabilities, components and technology to its customers on a continual basis, independent of conventional upgrade release cycles. The SAP Business Information Warehouse Server represents an independent application environment and does not directly affect the transaction application systems when implemented.
SAP is focusing on adding additional business content in the SAP Business Information Warehouse, providing more information models, a production data extractor and report definitions to meet the specific needs of customers and deliver a solid solution with the FCS.
''We are very impressed with the preconfigured business process functionality anticipated to be delivered with the SAP Business Information Warehouse,'' said Cynthia A. Hartz, manager of SAP Business Information Framework at Dow Corning Corp. ''This will dramatically reduce the time and resources a company would have to spend to build and populate a data warehouse from its R/3 OLTP environment.'' Dow Corning is a world leader in silicon technology with $2.6 billion in global sales.
''Our company is excited to be able to benefit from the SAP Business Information Warehouse, which embodies all the infrastructure advantages offered by the R/3 System -- for example, security, job scheduling, integrity, scalability, high availability and interoperability,'' said Tony Theisen, director of information resources at Georgia-Pacific Corp [NYSE:GP - news]. ''We are especially impressed with the multidimensional reporting capability, which will reduce the demands on our information resource department. In addition, the SAP Business Information Warehouse will shorten the learning curve for those business resources that have used R/3, reducing the overall training, administration and software costs within our data warehousing initiative.'' Georgia-Pacific is a Fortune 100 company that manufactures and distributes building materials and paper products. The SAP Business Information Warehouse is being implemented within the paper division at Georgia-Pacific.
SAP Business Information Warehouse Availability
The SAP Business Information Warehouse beta testing program began in October 1997. First customer shipment is scheduled for the end of June 1998 and will support Microsoft Windows NT and UNIX platforms. General availability is planned for August 1998. The new solution is compatible with R/3 Release 3.0 and later and can be used as a standalone data warehousing solution for companies that have not implemented R/3.
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