Comshare adds software agents to its market-leading, client/server Decision Support applications; Detect and Alert helps business professionals conquer information overload.ANN ARBOR Ann Arbor, city (1990 pop. 109,592), seat of Washtenaw co., S Mich., on the Huron River; inc. 1851. It is a research and educational center, with a large number of government and industrial research and development firms, many in high-technology fields such as , Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 3, 1995--Comshare, the leading developer of Decision Support applications, today adds Detect and Alert(TM) software agents to its executive information system (EIS (1) (Executive Information System) An information system that consolidates and summarizes ongoing transactions within the organization. It provides top management with all the information it requires at all times from internal and external sources. ), financial reporting and retail planning, analysis and reporting applications that run on client/server networks. Detect and Alert software agents, termed ``robots,'' perform time-consuming, repetitive tasks, freeing business professionals to do more productive work. Detect and Alert robots monitor targeted databases -- textual and numeric, internal and external to the business professional's organization -- for changing values, patterns and trends that match criteria pre-defined by or for the user. When a robot detects a significant change, it sends out an ``alert,'' which can be displayed as a headline in a user's personalized NewsAlert(TM) electronic newspaper. The Detect and Alert software robots eliminate the need for business professionals to search through the data each time a database is updated looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. important changes, and helps them to conquer information overload A symptom of the high-tech age, which is too much information for one human being to absorb in an expanding world of people and technology. It comes from all sources including TV, newspapers, magazines as well as wanted and unwanted regular mail, e-mail and faxes. by monitoring a wide selection of data sources and alerting them to only the pieces of information that are of interest to them. Even if the users are away from their offices, they can be alerted through e-mail to anything important that happens in the data. ``Agent-based systems represent the next generation of strategic weapons for information management, and Detect and Alert establishes a new standard for enterprise-wide decision support solutions and the use of information for competitive advantage,'' said T. Wallace Wrathall, president and chief executive officer of Comshare. ``No one has enough time or staff to wade through all of the data coming from inside and outside the enterprise. Our Detect and Alert technology ensures that the data that reaches the desktop of executives, managers and business analysts is the key information they want to see.'' Detect and Alert has three major components: software robot servers, intelligent alert objects and an electronic newspaper desktop client. Its software robots usually reside physically close to the data being monitored and are capable of evaluating detection rules that can provide the complex analyses required to effectively reduce the information overload on business professionals. The first release of Detect and Alert includes a series of robots that monitor Comshare's Commander OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) Decision support software that allows the user to quickly analyze information that has been summarized into multidimensional views and hierarchies. OLAP tools are used to perform trend analysis on sales and financial information. multidimensional database See OLAP. server, Lotus Notes Messaging and groupware software from IBM Lotus that was introduced in 1989 for OS/2 and later expanded to Windows, Mac, Unix, NetWare, AS/400 and S/390. Notes provides e-mail, document sharing, workflow, group discussions and calendaring and scheduling. databases, and Dow Jones Dow Jones the best known of several U.S. indexes of movements in price on Wall Street. [Am. Hist.: Payton, 202] See : Finance and Reuters information services See Information Systems. databases. The Robot for OLAP applies detection rules to Commander OLAP multidimensional databases. It has a powerful calculating engine supporting users' typical requirements to monitor sums, ratios and variances that are not usually stored in a database. The Robot for OLAP can detect out of range performance; calculate variance, percent variance, trends and compound growth rates Growth Rates The compounded annualized rate of growth of a company's revenues, earnings, dividends, or other figures. Notes: Remember, historically high growth rates don't always mean a high rate of growth looking into the future. ; calculate absolute, percentile and positional values; and with its filtering capability narrow the scope of the search to only the most relevant data. The other agents are the Robot for Lotus Notes, which applies detection rules to searching Lotus Notes databases for keywords and phrases; a Robot for Dow Jones, which applies detection rules to newsfeeds and stock quotes from Dow Jones News/Retrieval; and a Robot for Reuters, which applies detection rules to Reuters news and stock quotes plus over 700 other sources provided by Reuters Business Alert server. Alerts are distributed over the enterprises e-mail backbone and displayed in NewsAlert newspapers. More than simple notification, each alert is wrapped in a shell of intelligence which contains: the identity of the robot that created the alert, the detection rule that caused the alert to be created, instructions on how the alert should appear in the recipient's desktop newspaper, who should receive the alert, and the exploratory tools that are available to take users to the source of an alert if they need more detail. The exploratory tools vary based on the robot, data source and user preference. The newspaper metaphor used for the NewsAlert client software fits with the concept of robots, thought of as reporters, scanning large volumes of information, and sorting out what is important for their readers. Alerts, the headlines and stories for the newspaper, are then sent to each user. Each electronic newspaper is personalized to the user, and if the users want to know more than is presented in a story itself, they can explore the source of the story without having to know the complexities of navigating the network to get there. In addition to the robots, any individual in the enterprise can be a reporter and contribute alerts to a user's newspaper using the FYI "For your information." See digispeak. FYI - For Your Information Reporter capability of Detect and Alert. Pricing and Availability ------------------------ Available now for Commander OLAP applications, Detect and Alert pricing starts at $38,000 for a 25-user version, and includes the Robot servers for OLAP (Windows NT (Windows New Technology) A 32-bit operating system from Microsoft for Intel x86 CPUs. NT is the core technology in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (see Windows). Available in separate client and server versions, it includes built-in networking and preemptive multitasking. and OS/2), Dow Jones, Reuters, Lotus Notes (available June 30); the NewsAlert Windows client software; FYI Reporter; detection rule builders; and an administrator package. Pricing and availability of Detect and Alert for Comshare's other applications -- ARTHUR applications for retail merchandisers and Commander FDC FDC - Floppy Disk Controller and Commander Budget applications for financial reporting and budgeting -- will be announced later in the year. Comshare -- The Decision Support Company ---------------------------------------- Comshare (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on :CSRE CSRE Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity CSRE Closed System Respirator Evaluator ) is a global, full-service software company that provides Decision Support applications for enterprise business management and decision making. One of the top 50 independent software vendors and the market leader in decision support, Comshare has 3,000 customers worldwide, many of which are Fortune 500 and Financial Times Top 1000 companies. NOTE: Comshare is a registered trademark; Commander, Commander OLAP, Commander OLAP Server, Detect and Alert, NewsAlert, Robot for OLAP, Robot for Dow Jones, Robot for Reuters, Robot for Lotus Notes and FYI Reporter are trademarks of Comshare, Incorporated. All other product trade names belong to their respective companies. CONTACT: Comshare Media contact: Ricia Hughes, 313/769-6068 Rourke and Company Media contact: Marianne Rigo and Karen Breehey, 617/267-0042 Comshare Sales contact: Chris Kelly Chris Kelly may refer to the following persons:
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