ShowCase STRATEGY Incorporates Hyperion Essbase 6.1

ShowCase, a leading provider of enterprise intelligence solutions and a division of SPSS Inc, announced the general availability of Essbase 6.1 through ShowCase STRATEGY 4.1, an upgraded version of the company's integrated data warehousing and business intelligence solution for iSeries 400 organizations.

ShowCase offers all the latest enhancements to Hyperion Solutions' OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) solution. In addition, ShowCase exclusively offers Intelligent Sparse Reporting, a feature designed to optimize performance for Essbase databases that contain a high degree of sparsity.

Combined, these enhancements make analysis virtually instantaneous, providing users with immediate access to information regarding business performance. In turn, corporations can make rapid, well-informed business decisions based on accurate data.

"This release to Essbase builds upon an already powerful, feature-rich analytical solution," says Paul Hesser, ShowCase vice president of marketing and operations. "We're pleased that our partnership with Hyperion enables us to offer Essbase technologies to meet our customers' needs for greater insight into their day-to-day business operations."

Key enhancements

The ShowCase offering features several key enhancements, including:

• Intelligent Sparse Reporting: Exclusive to the ShowCase offering, Intelligent Sparse Reporting is designed to speed up response time and optimize system resource usage in Essbase databases that contain a high degree of sparsity. This feature can help certain businesses address the following challenges:
  • Reports that take too long to produce or require too many system resources to process
  • Reports that return large amounts of missing data or that suppress missing values
• Custom Macros and Functions: Essbase 6.1 lets developers create and register custom macros and functions that can then be used within member calculation formulas or database calculation scripts. This saves time for Essbase developers while providing powerful custom calculations specific to the needs of their corporate environments.
• New Calculation Functions: The Essbase environment allows developers to define database calculations and formulas, ensuring that database values and consolidations are precise and accurate. With each new release of Essbase, Hyperion simplifies the calculation environment by providing developers more functions that can simplify Essbase formulas and macros. Essbase 6.1 features 15 new functions.
• Dynamic Calculator Cache: The Dynamic Calculator Cache is designed to improve the performance of dynamic calculations by enabling Essbase administrators to better manage memory that can be used during a dynamic calculation request.
• MaxL: Application developers can use MaxL to access the Essbase server. MaxL is a multidimensional access language used exclusively by Essbase.
• Improved Diagnostics: Essbase 6.1 surfaces additional performance statistics through the use of two new commands: GETPERFSTATS instructs Essbase to maintain and report detailed statistics related to threads, databases and applications, and RESETPERFSTATS resets the related statistics.

Pricing and Availability

STRATEGY 4.1, with Essbase 6.1, is available immediately in the United States and Europe. Pricing starts at $30,000. Intelligent Sparse Reporting is available for a separate license fee of $15,000.

About ShowCase

ShowCase, a division of SPSS, provides Enterprise Intelligence solutions to help companies discover and seize business opportunities in an evolving global marketplace. ShowCase offers the first integrated Web content management and business intelligence solution to help companies solve their strategic business information needs. Through a worldwide team, ShowCase offers reporting and analytic solutions in areas such as financial management and customer relationship management analytics (CRM). The ShowCase Web-site can be found at www.spss.com/showcase.

About SPSS Inc

SPSS Inc enables organizations to develop more profitable customer relationships by providing analytical solutions that discover what customers want and predict what they will do. The company delivers analytical solutions at the intersection of customer relationship management and business intelligence. SPSS analytical solutions integrate and analyze market, customer and operational data in key vertical markets worldwide including: telecommunications, health care, banking, finance, insurance, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, market research and the public sector.

Headquartered in Chicago, SPSS has more than 40 offices, over 1300 employees and 2000 pro forma revenues of $198 million. The company also has received the following honors: No. 77 on Forbes 2000 list of the "200 Best Small Companies" and No. 12 on the 2000 DM Review 100; placed No. 16 on the 2000 Softo letter 100, a ranking of the top 100 personal computer software companies in the United States; and No. 115 in the 2000 Software 500, a ranking of the world's largest software vendors by Software Magazine; listed on Working Mother magazine's "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" for 2000. For more information, visit www.spss.com.

Contact OUTLOOK Marketing, Tricia Spellman, 773-832-4074, tspellman@outlookmarketingsrv.com.