Nucleus Chosen by British Standards Institution

Sand Technology Inc announced that their Nucleus Exploration products, the award winning set of data warehousing tools, have been chosen by the British Standards Institution (BSI), the world's leading standards and quality services organization, to solve major reporting issues.

Video of BSI and Nucleus can be viewed online via www.sandtechnology.com.

Having implemented an industry-leading ERP system 18 months ago, BSI was becoming overly reliant on contract programmers with expensive specialized skills to produce reporting capability, such that cost and lead-times for end user reporting requirements had become unacceptable.

Nucleus was implemented in a matter of weeks and provided "off the shelf" RapidMarts with pre-packaged reports (such as Sales Analysis and Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable) and also gave the business users the ability to run ad-hoc queries and produce their own reports with astonishing performance. Today, user satisfaction has been dramatically improved as end users begin to realize the value of the data locked in the ERP system.

"Since the proof of concept pilot has been completed we have gained tangible results within a particularly short time frame," says David Cole, Head of IT at BSI. "Time is a valuable commodity at BSI and I am pleased to say that over 80 per cent of our reporting requirements have been met within two months, which is pretty impressive by any standard. Before Nucleus we had a substantial number of reports to be programmed. Since Nucleus has been up and running this has only increased by two, which means that we have avoided a potentially large expense."

"With relatively little effort we have been able to convert legacy data from disparate sources into this new platform, using whatever front-end reporting tools we want", says Steve Cargill, ERP System Owner at BSI. "Managers are now able to extract data from a much more open and flexible environment. The speed and efficiency with which it can retrieve complex and parameterised queries means that end users are very pleased with the results."

For all customers, Nucleus allows fast and simple data acquisition, assimilation, and validation. It allows analytical CRM environments to be completed within weeks, instead of the typical months or even years, and requires up to 70 per cent less manpower to complete a typical implementation. Further, using Nucleus, end users have access to the data throughout the process to allow the proposed reporting suite to be structured and refined from day one.

Nucleus can also be deployed as a powerful analytical processing tool for end users of existing data marts and warehouses. The product addresses the need to perform iterative, ad hoc, forensic queries of data, involving drill down often not envisioned during an original design of the data warehouse/mart. The patented data storage techniques of Nucleus allow any question to be asked and answered in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days.

Nucleus, which is available for both 64-bit Unix and 32-bit Windows NT and 95/98 platforms, has already picked up a succession of prestigious awards in North America and was voted the 1998 World Class Solution, Database Engine of the Year for data warehousing and data mart by DM Review, North America's leading business intelligence and data warehousing magazine.

About BSI

The British Standards Institution (BSI) is now the world's leading standards and quality services organization. Formed in 1901 and incorporated under Royal Charter in 1929, BSI is the oldest national standards -- making body in the world. Independent of government, industry and trade associations BSI is a non-profit distributing organization. BSI is globally recognized as an independent and impartial body serving both the private and public sectors.

BSI works with manufacturing and service industries, businesses and governments to facilitate the production of British, European and international standards.

Today BSI has annual revenues exceeding $250 million, employs 3400 people, and operates in over 90 counties. As well as facilitating the writing of British standards, BSI is one of the world's leading standards authorities representing UK interests across the full scope of European and international standards committees. Over the last decade BSI has evolved from being largely a standards-setting organization to one that develops a commercial portfolio of global products and services in the quality sector. In 1998 BSI acquired Inspectorate, a global commodities testing company, doubling both revenue and staff numbers.

About Sand Technology

Sand Technology Inc provides high performance, scalable software solutions for data mining, data marts, data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP). Sand's Nucleus product suite brings patented technology to the business user allowing for more timely and accurate decision processing within the disconnected client, desktop, workgroup, departmental and enterprise computing environments. Supporting industries like retail, finance, healthcare, transportation, telecommunication, manufacturing, government and insurance, Nucleus is used for corporate initiatives such as customer relationship management, risk analysis and management, product trend and profitability analysis, fraud detection, emerging markets, competitive analysis and quality control. Sand has commercial relationships with IBM, Oracle, Compaq Computer Corporation, Microsoft, SAIC, GE, Brio Technology, Information Builders Inc, and Wyle Systems. Sand Technology can be reached on the World Wide Web at www.sandtechnology.com.

Contact vice president, Finance & Administration of Sand Technology, 514-939-3477, info@sandtechnology.com.