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Sagent Launches DirectLink Integrated BI Solution

Sagent, a leading provider of enterprise Business Intelligence solutions, and Striva Corporation, a leader in infrastructure and database integration, announced the immediate availability of Sagent DirectLink for Mainframe and AS/400, a data extraction and integration solution. Sagent and Striva will launch Sagent DirectLink at two free, one-hour Web seminars on October 18 and 25, 2001, entitled "Business Intelligence and Legacy Applications: Code-Free Strategies for Mainframe Data Integration."

Sagent's business intelligence platform, combined with Striva's data connectivity technology allows disparate applications to easily share information-transferring and translating data from mainframes to real-time applications-without time-consuming and tedious programming. Through this partnership, Global 2000 companies with enterprise-class mainframes will now be able to utilize legacy data to strengthen their Web and client-based decision-making systems.

"Sagent DirectLink for Mainframe and AS/400 leverages the massively-parallel features in the Sagent data flow server to offer customers the best possible performance for legacy data extraction and integration," said Dave Henry, vice president of product marketing, Sagent. "Sagent DirectLink's streamlined installation and elimination of manual coding enables customers to obtain a positive ROI within the first 30 days of implementation."

"We're pleased to extend our relationship with Sagent and support the rollout of the DirectLink product line," said Paul Bach, president, Striva. "Sagent's incorporation of DETAIL into the Sagent platform allows them to extend their data integration and customer data quality solutions to an entirely new class of enterprise customers."

Sagent DirectLink for Mainframe and AS/400

Sagent DirectLink solves two difficult challenges. Because Sagent DirectLink understands native mainframe file formats, it eliminates the need to write "COBOL extract" programs. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on programmers to write custom extraction routines that filter data and prepare it for use in data warehouses. Sagent DirectLink eliminates this manual coding and allows developers to be redeployed to more productive tasks. In addition, Sagent DirectLink understands mainframe data structures and can automatically convert them into the relational model. Sagent DirectLink can also translate SQL into high performance native DBMS calls, thus allowing transparent access to mainframe and other complex data structures.

Sagent DirectLink offers access to a broad array of legacy data. Sagent's DirectLink for Mainframe connects to multiple data sources, including DB2, ADABAS, IMS, VSAM, IDMS and sequential flat files on disk or tape. Sagent DirectLink for AS/400 provides high-performance access to DB2/400 and AS/400 logical files. Support is bi-directional, allowing organizations to use less expensive SMP hardware to offload intensive mainframe data conversion tasks to the Sagent Data Load Server.

Sagent DirectLink Web Seminars

Sagent and Striva are presenting two identical free Web seminars in October 2001 to introduce Sagent's DirectLink for Mainframe and AS/400. The one-hour Web seminar, entitled "Business Intelligence and Legacy Applications: Code-Free Strategies for Mainframe Data Integration," will take place at 2 p.m. ET on Thursday, October 18 and Thursday, October 25, 2001. To register, visit www.sagent.com/seminars/bus_int_webex_info.html on the Web.

During the seminar, Sagent and Striva will discuss how vast amounts of corporate data are locked away in mainframe and legacy systems, and how companies can tap into this information to enhance their e-business systems and customer service applications. In addition, participants will learn how traditional mainframe gateway products and labor-intensive programming approaches have failed to keep up with the rising tide of requests facing even the most progressive IT departments.

The Web seminar will cover the latest developments in mainframe access and data integration techniques. The seminar will cover new advances that allow programmers to eliminate development backlogs and dramatically accelerate corporate business intelligence and e-CRM initiatives.

Key topics for this briefing include:

An intelligent access server that understands the complex data structures found in VSAM and IMS and eliminates the need for developing COBOL extract programs; automatic interpretation of metadata found in COBOL copybooks and IMS DBD files that supports easy mapping of arrays to the relational model; data visualization capabilities that allow the browsing and manipulation of any mainframe data source, regardless of it's internal complexity; an ETL case study showing data cleansing techniques for mainframe customer information; and rapid deployment strategies that get systems up and running in days rather than weeks or months.

About Striva Corporation

Striva Corporation is an industry leader in the fields of B2B infrastructure, heterogeneous connectivity and database integration. With headquarters in Silicon Valley and London, Striva was founded in 1998 and develops software to solve complex database integration problems for some of the world's leading software and hardware vendors. Striva's flagship technology is the first infrastructure solution to combine very high performance native legacy access with an easy to use and implement agent technology, thus enabling large companies to invest in new technology while maintaining the viability of their existing database infrastructure. Representative Striva customers include AAA, Alcatel, Aegon Insurance, Boeing and Chase. For more information, call 408-573-6798 or in Europe call 44-(0)-1895-876117 or visit the Striva Website at www.striva.com.

About Sagent

Sagent's suite of Business Intelligence solutions enables companies to measurably impact their business by implementing highly successful customer relationship and financial management initiatives. Through Sagent's powerful enabling technologies, organizations can easily and rapidly turn company data into relevant information that can be used for effective decision-making, analysis and reporting. Information can be extracted from multiple sources (internal and external), optimized for decision support and delivered in a customized format for Web-based or client applications. Even the most complex analytic application can be developed in weeks, not months.

More than 1,500 companies have selected Sagent software to enhance customer retention, cross-sell/up-sell, improve customer service, increase efficiencies of marketing campaigns, streamline business operations, analyze financials, and reduce costs. Customers include AT&T, BP Amoco, Boeing Employees Credit Union, Bristol Meyers, British Telecom, California State Automobile Association, Citibank, GPU Energy, Hughes Aircraft Employees Federal Credit Union, Johnson & Johnson (UK), Kemper National Insurance, Provident Central Credit Union, Safeway and Siemens. Sagent retains strategic relationships with partners such as Advent Software, Commerce One, Compaq, EDS, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, SAS and Sun Microsystems. Sagent is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and can be reached at www.sagent.com.

Contact Michael A. Piotrowski, Sagent, 727-725-9727 x2230, mpiotrowski@sagent.com.