Excel Stars in Applix's Trinity and Capricorn Initiatives.

By Madan Sheina

Applix Inc has unveiled a couple of important development initiatives for its new-found performance management strategy that tighten-up integration with Excel spreadsheet environments and bolster support for planning and compliance processes.

Codenamed Trinity and Capricorn respectively, Applix expects the initiatives to reinforce the pivotal role that Excel plays in transforming its TM1 OLAP server as a primary platform business planning, analysis, and reporting.

Applix unveiled the initiatives at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) spring conference being held in Boston this week.

TM1 is one of the more mature OLAP products that has been carefully architected around key aspects of Excel, taking in particular, advantage of Excel's ubiquity and speedy cost-effective deployment benefits.

"We're bringing Excel to the back, center, and front of what we do," said David Menninger, vice president of marketing at Westboro, Massachusetts-based Applix, told ComputerWire recently.

Trinity is a development effort that introduces new user management software components that make Excel's planning and analysis capabilities more transparent to end-users.

"Trinity makes it more easy to work with TM1 data through Excel," Menninger said.

Trinity will introduce several navigation enhancements to its Excel integration, including support for the expansion/contraction of consolidated rows and columns, zero suppression, dynamic subsets, and more granular displays of consolidated values.

Significantly, these capabilities are now made available directly in the spreadsheet environment via a revamped floating or fixed TM1 action toolbar.

"In past you bought up the add-in and repopulated the spreadsheet."

Also new is an "Application Organizer" component that manages Excel workbooks that are typically implemented as part of a TM1 application.

The Organizer allows users to create logical folders, assign TM1 cubes, dimensions to Excel files, and implement folder-level security.

Menninger said the component removes the "myopic" view in which Applix previously presented TM1 objects in technical configurations. "Users can organize all the TM1 application objects in a logical and flexible way," Menninger said.

Also included in Trinity is HTTP/HTTPS support to the Excel client which makes all TM1's functionality available via the Web. "In effect we've made Excel a 'browser' for TM1 data," Menninger explained. Trinity is expected to ship this month.

Capricorn is a new compliance and planning module derived for TM1 that is expected to follow on the heels of the Trinity release.

The module introduces a host new control components for managing compliance and submission tasks such as re-usable planning task and review templates, versioning, email alerting, out-of-the box status reporting, and role-based security

The software is designed to work inside of Excel and with customers' existing planning applications in TM1.

"Capricorn focuses on enhancing the planning process itself by adding workflow and approval capabilities that will attach to Excel environments via integration wizards." Capricorn is slated for generally availability in the early summer Menninger said.

Applix is also focusing more heavily on third-party integrations and certifications, specifically to tap into third party channels and widen TM1's reach in the market.

Menninger said that Applix already has an extensive network of over 300 OEM partners that leverage TM1's open and fully published API.

"We're allowing TM1 customers to access data from more systems and also push data to more products," Menninger said. "Increasing the number of third-party products working with TM1 will be kicker that pushes us over the top."

To get the ball rolling, Applix has now unveiled a new formalized process for certifying partner products to work better with TM1.

Menninger cited BI vendors such as arcplan AG and Actuate Corp as among the first members to enter the program and expects new agreements to be signed with both these companies in the near future.

Applix is partnering on multiple fronts, driven by major enhancements to Microsoft's OLAP-specific extension OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) interface. The company is now expanding its existing OLE DB "provider" interface to include "consumer" support; which will allow TM1 to access (i.e."consume") data from greater third-party sources.

Menninger regards this support as instrumental in providing a foundation for moving towards support for the emerging XML for Analysis (XML/A) standard.

"Microsoft is wrappering more ODBO capabilities around XMLA...which will probably replace it in the future."

Menninger claims that a formal certification is "in process" with SAP AG's SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) BI platform. He also said the company currently "testing" against Microsoft Corp's newly released Reporting Services.

According to Applix, Reporting Services will be the first banded report writer to work with TM1, a capability that has been thus far lacking from Applix's performance management offering.

Confirming its attempts to get strategically closer to Microsoft technologies, Applix is also working on certification against Windows 2003. "We're promoting the coexistence of Applix in Microsoft environments," Menninger said.

Looking to the future Menninger outlined a road-map for the continued development and enhancement of components based on TM1. He expects the company to roll out more TM1-based planning modules, improve scalability (through migration to 64-bit Intel based Unix systems and exploiting grid computing architectures), drive greater enhancements to TM1's user interface, and forge wider ERP data integration.

"The notion of planning modules is powerful. There are a number of modules we'd like to add...to support things like journal entries, removing elimination, automatically identifying and handling income statement items and so on."

Applix claims to be acquiring new customers with its tools-based approach to planning.

"Well aligned around new analytics business," Menninger said, indirectly referring to the company's decision to drop its CRM business and focus on its TM1 platform.

"We're happy and comfortable being positioned as a planning tools provider," Menninger added, pointing to recent research from TDWI that shows nearly 60% of all business performance management applications have been built as opposed to bought.