Sand's Nucleus Selected by Major Travel Operator

Nucleus, the award-winning data warehousing technology from Sand Technology Inc, has been chosen by a large pan-European holiday and travel organization to reduce the costs and delivery time of a revenue yield analysis data warehouse system.

"We are so confident in our solutions that we are implementing the 'Nucleus Guarantee,'" says Garry Neale, vice president Sales & Marketing for Sand EMEA. "We provide the customer a fixed-cost, fixed-time project plan. The customer signs off on the project only when satisfied that all acceptance criteria have been met."

"The client was looking at a significant investment in ETL (Extraction, Transforming, Loading) and data warehousing tools, and was anticipating a long implementation with large requirements for Data Base Administrator (DBA) resources," continued Neale. "Instead, we looked at the project from a total cost of ownership (TCO) model."

"By implementing a low-cost Microsoft SQL Server operational data store (ODS) and taking advantage of the built-in Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS), we eliminate the need for expensive ETL tools," Neale continues. "We pipe data directly into the Nucleus Data Mart, which can be freely queried by the customer's preferred front-end SQL tools, including Cognos. The result is an elegant, highly cost-effective and scalable solution."

"Nucleus' prototyping capabilities drastically reduce the time and resources expended in implementation, while Nucleus' 100% indexing optimization means that the finished system will out-perform other far costlier alternatives," explains Neale. "The facts that Nucleus performs exceptionally well on very inexpensive hardware and requires minimal DBA resources makes the TCO model too attractive to ignore."

Nucleus, which is available for the 64-bit Unix and the 32-bit Microsoft Windows NT and 95/98/2000 platforms, as well as the IBM AS/400, has garnered a succession of prestigious awards. It was voted the "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 Sand Technology

Sand Technology, with headquarters in Montreal, Canada and offices in the United Kingdom and the United States, 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, empowering more timely and accurate decision-making. Nucleus is being used in the Retail, Finance, Healthcare, Transportation, Telecommunication, Manufacturing, Government and Insurance sectors to support strategic corporate initiatives including: e-Business; CRM (Customer Relationship Management); SAP and other ERP reporting; SCM (Supply Chain Management); risk analysis and management; new business; product trend and profitability analysis; fraud detection; emerging markets; competitive analysis, and quality control. Sand Technology has commercial relationships with IBM, Oracle, Compaq Computer Corporation, Microsoft, Brio Technology, and Information Builders. For more information, visit www.sandtechnology.com.