Kalido Launches New Adaptive Enterprise Data Warehousing Suite to Solve the Board's 'Frequently Unanswered Questions'.

BURLINGTON, Mass. & LONDON -- Groundbreaking KALIDO 8 Brings Speed, Agility and Strength to Enterprise Data Warehousing to Enhance Performance Management Throughout Business Change

Kalido, the leading provider of adaptive enterprise data warehousing software, has launched the KALIDO(R) 8 application suite designed to eliminate 'frequently unanswered questions' that Global 2000 management executives constantly have about the performance of their complex and ever-changing companies. KALIDO 8 offers the industry's most advanced solution for providing vital performance management information rapidly and throughout business change. It is also the first enterprise data warehousing solution that enables business people to collaboratively manage corporate master data for more accurate performance reporting.

Unlike KALIDO 8, custom-built and ERP data warehouses typically take as many as 12-18 months to implement, are costly to change, and can struggle to consolidate disparate data from multiple operational systems. As a result, the past, current and predicted performance across the enterprise is unclear, leaving executives with frequently unanswered questions such as: "Why are product margins falling if sales volumes are rising?" and "How would merging two divisions affect costs?" In addition, the lack of consolidated information impedes the organization's ability to adhere to regulatory compliance.

In contrast, KALIDO 8 automates the creation and lifecycle management of enterprise data warehouses and associated master data for builds in 75 percent less time (typically 2-5 months), rapid adaptation to changes and 55 percent lower maintenance costs. This speed and agility enables companies to quickly derive true, actionable responses to "What is," "What was," and "What will be" types of questions even throughout major business transformation such as mergers, reorganizations and market consolidation. This ground-breaking approach enables companies to improve compliance initiatives as well as derive millions of dollars in incremental business opportunities by acting upon the clearer enterprise information provided.

New KALIDO 8 functionality includes Web-based master data management, improved support for very large KALIDO data warehouses and a preview edition of a KALIDO Visual Modeler. These enterprise-strength data warehousing capabilities provide improved performance reporting integrity as well as the ability to implement very large, single instance and federated (linked) data warehouses without any considerable performance degradation.

Well-managed master data such as products, customers, suppliers and brands provides a consistent context against which business performance is measured in the data warehouse. However, many companies struggle to reconcile master data because it is duplicated or conflicts across multiple source systems. KALIDO 8 introduces a unique, workflow-driven solution to this problem that enables business people to collaboratively harmonize, manage and authorize master data from their web browsers. KALIDO 8 stores the information in a master data warehouse, from which it is delivered to data warehouses and other analytic and operational systems resulting in more accurate and consistent business performance reporting.

Through architectural enhancements, KALIDO 8 further extends its support for large-scale data warehousing, allowing individual instances to scale to tens of terabytes in size. Whether customers expand a single data warehouse or link multiple data warehouses through federation, KALIDO 8 provides the most cost-effective industry option for scaling data warehousing across the enterprise while keeping central and local views of business performance well-reconciled.

KALIDO 8 includes a preview edition of a new Visual Modeler, designed to enrich and simplify the creation and validation of business model representations in the data warehouse. It is the first graphical tool to integrate master data into business model visualization, thereby making models very easy for business people to understand, validate and exchange with IT teams.

The KALIDO 8 application suite is offered in three editions aligned with how Global 2000 companies deploy data warehousing solutions. KALIDO 8M is a master data warehousing solution for harmonizing, storing and managing business reference data. KALIDO 8E is an enterprise data warehousing solution for creating and maintaining data warehouses and associated master data. KALIDO 8E+ is a federated data warehousing solution for deploying and linking multiple enterprise data warehouses and their master data.

Michael Waclawiczek, vice president of marketing and product management, said: "Boardrooms around the world remain full of frequently unanswered questions. Spreadsheets and sweat have bridged the gap between the capabilities of the enterprise's information infrastructure and the ever-changing corporate performance management requirements for too long. KALIDO 8 is our response to a very real problem. For Kalido as a company, it also represents another great leap forward to add to our recent customer, partnership and funding successes."

Klaus Mikkelsen, Global Development Leader, Information Systems, Supply Chain, at Owens Corning said: "Our KALIDO implementation is helping us to derive detailed information about sales, margins and profits, using data that spans all of our products, sales territories and customers. We welcome the release of KALIDO 8, and it is particularly exciting for us to see the inclusion of a master data management capability. We see this as not just a way of imposing order to our data but also for empowering end users; letting them define and maintain product hierarchies and classifications. As KALIDO is essentially a business model-driven product, it helps close the gap between what the business needs and what IT is able to deliver."

Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research, The Data Warehousing Institute, added: "Many current master data management applications focus on matching, movement, and mapping technologies. Few focus on empowering end-users in a workflow process to edit and manage master data on a continuous basis in support of data warehouses. This is a major focus of KALIDO 8. As such, it plays a key role in any enterprise data warehousing solution."

Frank Buytendijk, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said: "Business is getting more complex and faster. Research strongly suggests that in almost all verticals, organizations are adopting real-time enterprise principles. They compete on responsiveness in all front- and back- office domains, and invest in agile decision-making processes. Enterprise data warehouses are a strategic foundation for those decision-making processes, and it is imperative that they be equally agile and adapt to business changes in real time as well."

About Kalido

Kalido provides adaptive enterprise data warehousing software to Global 2000 companies. The KALIDO(R) application suite (KALIDO) delivers consolidated views of enterprise performance and can rapidly adapt them to major changes in the business such as mergers and acquisitions, reorganization, market consolidation, or new regulatory requirements. This improves the speed and accuracy of management and financial reporting without the cost and delay of operational system standardization. Kalido customers who have measured the business benefits of their projects have typically found they have derived annual savings of millions, and in some cases tens of millions, of dollars through improved management of their company performance and reduction of IT costs.

With KALIDO, companies can rapidly create and manage adaptive data warehouses and associated master data throughout their lifecycle, benefiting from the software's strategic flexibility, low cost and speed of deployment. An independently audited study shows that KALIDO saves as least 55 percent in ownership costs compared to custom-built approaches, a figure surpassed by real-life customer experiences. A typical KALIDO data warehouse implementation takes 2-5 months, as opposed to 9-18 months for conventional methods.

Kalido customers include some of the largest companies in the world, such as BP, Cadbury Schweppes, HBOS plc, Intelsat, Labatt Breweries of Canada, Owens Corning, Philips, Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (Shell) and Unilever. These companies and many others use Kalido's award-winning software in over 100 countries for their enterprise-wide data warehousing and master data management projects.

A privately-held company, Kalido is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. and London, UK and has regional sales offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and France. More information about Kalido can be found at: http://www.kalido.com.