Decisionism Commends Arbor Software for Recognizing the Challenges of Enterprise OLAP Deployment.

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 22, 1998

Asserts That Its Aclue Decision Supportware Best Addresses

Real-World Needs

Decisionism Inc., developer of the only data mart management software that integrates leading OLAP servers into a data warehousing architecture, today commended Arbor Software on its announcement of the Arbor Integration Server (AIS) for OLAP information delivery.

"We applaud Arbor for recognizing that Essbase, while a tremendous OLAP server engine, requires additional facilities to enable its deployment on an enterprise scale," said Gordon Rapkin, Decisionism's president and CEO. "However, we believe the broader range of functionality provided by our Aclue(tm) Decision Supportware(tm) is better able to address many important real-world customer requirements. While Arbor's AIS has yet to reach the market, the design and feature set of Aclue represents our experience delivering a commercial product and working directly with OLAP users."

"We have been and will continue to be an Arbor alliance partner, and we will continue to support Essbase as a major player among OLAP servers," Rapkin continued. "To best serve our customers, Decisionism will also continue to support the complete OLAP marketplace with our open solutions."

Aclue, which has been shipping for over a year and is now in its second major version, is the only data mart management software to meld enterprise data mart architecture with multidimensional OLAP technology.

Aclue gathers and transforms data from multiple production systems and data warehouses, and delivers it into multiple synchronized Oracle Express and Arbor Essbase OLAP data marts that can be highly focused to handle departmental or individual requirements.

David Menninger, senior director of product marketing for Express Technology with Oracle Corporation, commented, "Decisionism's Aclue complements the market-leading OLAP capabilities of Oracle Express, and is already helping our users more rapidly prototype and deliver Express data marts while ensuring the synchronized delivery of data from multiple source systems. We look forward to continuing to work with Decisionism in meeting the requirements of our mutual customers deploying Express as an integral component of their data warehousing architectures."

Decisionism will also deliver support for Microsoft's new OLAP server (code-named "Plato") upon its availability later this year, and is already working with beta versions of Plato. Steve Murchie, data warehousing product manager for Microsoft, said, "The new OLAP features in Microsoft SQL Server(tm) 7 are a scalable solution for deploying OLAP analytical capabilities, from the individual to the enterprise level. The Aclue product can manage delivery of corporate data to multiple, distributed Plato servers in a controlled, consistent manner, and we look forward to working together with Decisionism on their integration."

"We believe that Aclue, with its support for both relational and non-relational data sources and multiple OLAP data mart targets, including both Arbor Essbase and Oracle Express today and Microsoft's Plato when it is released, should have wide appeal in multi-vendor environments," said Michael Schiff, principal analyst, Data Warehousing Strategies, Current Analysis, Inc. "We anticipate that it will be more than competitive with some of the solutions being developed by OLAP server vendors, especially those that must rely on the source data being relatively clean and pure."

According to Deb Miller, vice president of research and development for Decisionism, Aclue's architecture differs from Arbor's AIS in several key areas:

-- Aclue supports multiple target OLAP platforms. In addition to Essbase, Aclue already works with Oracle's Express and will also support Microsoft's Plato when it becomes available. Most organizations have multiple OLAP server platforms, and thus appreciate the flexibility of an open solution that supports all of them.

-- Decisionism recognizes the reality of needing to support multiple data sources per cube. Unlike AIS, which assumes that all data required for an Essbase cube already resides in a single well-organized relational database, Aclue can read and integrate data from multiple sources - both relational and non-relational. Virtually every current and prospective Aclue customer requires this capability.

-- Aclue has built-in facilities to handle the majority of multidimensional data transformation and cleansing operations. Although third-party extract/transform products can be used to address this need with AIS, the result is a more complex environment and a higher total cost of ownership.

-- Aclue is based on a self-contained hub-and-spoke architecture, the importance of which has also been stressed by Arbor and leading analysts. Because Aclue incorporates a scalable staging area, it delivers a "read once, write many" solution in which synchronized data can be delivered to many cubes from a single read of the original data source. The "hub" of the AIS approach is the relational database itself, resulting in a "read many, write many" approach where the relational database is re-accessed on demand for each cube to be generated. This adds extra RDBMS overhead, and it is difficult to ensure cube synchronization, since the source database is subject to updating not under control of AIS.

-- Aclue provides a full audit trail facility, enabling users to instantly display the complete lineage of cube data back to the original source(s). In addition, Aclue delivers multi-source drillback, which allows end users to view detail data that was integrated from multiple sources prior to summarization into a cube.

About Decisionism

Headquartered in Boulder, Decisionism Inc. delivers the only data mart management software that makes OLAP an integrated part of a data warehousing architecture. Decisionism markets Aclue to Fortune 1000 and mid-size companies and government organizations whose employees require accurate, consistent, timely and highly focused information across the enterprise.

Decisionism customers span a variety of industries and include major sites such as U S WEST Information Technologies, AirTouch International, Citibank, Del Taco, Electronic Manufacturing Systems (EMS), and Duke Communications. Decisionism sells Aclue and its support, training and consulting services directly to end user organizations through its sales offices across the U.S., as well as through selected value-added resellers, systems integrators and business partners. Decisionism is a privately held company financed by a group of leading institutional venture capital investors. Additional information about the company and product is available from Decisionism's web site, www.decisionism.com, or by calling [phone].

Aclue, Decision Supportware, and Decisionism are trademarks of Decisionism Inc. Oracle, Oracle Express and Express Server are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation. Arbor and Essbase are registered trademarks of Arbor Software Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective companies.

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