Red Brick Targets Personal and Team Data Warehouses, "Datamarts" With Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups; Low-end Product a Key Component of Red Brick's Universal Data Warehouse Blueprint.

LOS GATOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 17, 1995--Red Brick Systems, The Data Warehouse Company, today announced Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups, a new low-end product for standalone or small, LAN-based data warehouses up to five gigabytes (GBs) and up to 30 users for analytic processing applications and ad hoc querying.

Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups, available immediately, is designed to satisfy the needs of enterprises that want to deploy "datamarts," or subsets of data warehouses, to be used by internal departments for extensive analysis. It also is designed to meet the increasing desire and requirement for enterprises to share certain parts of a data warehouse with external organizations such as suppliers, distributors, or regulatory entities.

"We also see Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups serving organizations testing the waters of a data warehouse," said Ram Srinivasan, director, product marketing for Red Brick. "This is an easy way to take a small subset of the total data in their organization and evaluate the benefits of a data warehouse application."

Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups is the low-end product component of today's announcement of Red Brick's Universal Data Warehouse Blueprint, the new architectural foundation for information technology (IT) managers and chief information officers (CIOs) who are planning and implementing data warehouse applications ranging from individual power user desktop systems to massively parallel processor systems serving thousands of users.

Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups

This new workgroup product now makes available the traditional strengths of Red Brick technology to individuals and small teams needing to analyze smaller subsets of data. Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups is designed for databases with tables less than five gigabytes, and user communities not to exceed 30 named users.

Administration is kept to a minimum by offering only a single segment implementation and by limiting the number of databases that can exist on that server to two data warehouses maximum. Parallel operations standard with Red Brick Warehouse VPT, such as parallel loading and parallel query processing, are offered as options in Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups.

"With these limited volumes of data, we believe our traditional algorithm will be powerful enough to provide the kind of functionality and performance benefits our customers need," said Srinivasan. "In addition, we believe the sweet spot for this product is going to be around 15 users.

"Additionally, we see this product as an opportunity for value-added resellers to get started in data warehousing today," said Srinivasan. "We plan to sell it through providers of vertical market applications in specific areas such as transportation, hospitality, insurance, retail, and financial services, as well as our own direct sales organization."

Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups is primarily positioned for "datamart" applications where a group of users or even a power user would use this in standalone mode, or in a mode where a divisional data warehouse is supplying it data that is already cleansed and is primarily meant for analysis. A key component of datamart applications is a flexible, easy-to-use tool for analyzing data, such as StarTrieve from SelectStar, Inc. of New York.

"Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups makes it easy to provide powerful decision support solutions at the department level," said David Grubman, president of SelectStar, Inc. "Red Brick on the back end with StarTrieve on the front end provides a flexible and complete multi-dimensional environment. StarTrieve also supports Red Brick Warehouse VPT 3.5, and provides crosstab analysis with drill-down capabilities."

Pricing and Availability

Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups is available immediately. Pricing begins at $12,000 for a single user implementation, and will be sold in packs of 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 named users up to $30,000. Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups is fully compatible with previous versions of Red Brick Warehouse.

Red Brick Warehouse for Workgroups can be purchased directly from Red Brick Systems. Red Brick also has joint marketing and licensing agreements with several hardware manufacturers. Information about the product can be obtained through Red Brick direct sales offices in the U.S. and United Kingdom, or by calling 1-800-777-2585 in the U.S.

Red Brick Warehouse Product Family

Unlike RDBMS products optimized for OLTP such as Oracle7, Red Brick Warehouse products enable business management applications to be developed and deployed quickly; to query very large databases of information gathered from disparate sources; to provide the best access to both consolidated and detailed business information in a single database; and to simply run fast.

Red Brick Warehouse runs on a wide range of hardware configurations from single microprocessor systems to the largest commercial parallel processors including AT&T GIS System 3400 and 3500, DEC Alpha/AXP, HP 9000, IBM RS/6000, Sequent, Sun SPARCservers and Unisys U6000 and OPUS. Red Brick's server-based relational engine is accessible by several popular front-end client application environments which support Microsoft ODBC, Sybase Open Client, and Information Builders, Inc. EDA/SQL interfaces.

Red Brick Systems

Red Brick Systems is the leading provider of relational database products and service for data warehouse applications. The company, based in Los Gatos, Calif., specializes in software products used for fast, accurate and confident business decisions where large client/server databases are the norm, from five gigabytes to a terabyte or more in size with hundreds of millions to billions of records. These applications require historical context, and accurate, timely analysis of complex data relationships for both consolidated and detailed business information. -0-

NOTE TO EDITORS: Red Brick and logo are registered trademarks and Red Brick Warehouse is a trademark of Red Brick Systems. All other trademarks, registered trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective holders.

CONTACT: Red Brick Systems

Ram Srinivasan, 408/399-3221

or

Mark Olson, 408/399-7140

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