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Alterian's New Suite for Vast Data Repositories

Alterian, a provider of high-performance analytic technology, announces the availability of the Alterian Suite, version 2.3. A direct response to the needs of Alterian's global partner network and customer base, the Alterian Suite adds expanded data extract connectivity, localization support, and provides centralized administration to its analytic application development environment.

"This release of the Alterian Suite provides our partners with a platform to quickly build custom, enterprise level analytic applications, that offer ad hoc, iterative analytics against large volumes of business data. In addition, because the architecture is component-based it is flexible and expandable," said Kirk Fallbacher, vice president of marketing for Alterian.

The Alterian Suite runs on Windows 2000 / NT based servers and powers a wide range of analytic applications including campaign management, data mining, decision engines, analytic reporting, and fraud detection.

New features of version 2.3 include:

• New iLoader performs data extraction from any ODBC data source as well as from ASCII flat files
• New iLoader Wizards guides user through analytic mart definition, build, data transformations, and load process
• Centralized administration capabilities to manage all Alterian applications in the Suite: Engine, iLoader, Distributor, and Studio.
• Centralized message catalogs to facilitate product localisation

Carlson Marketing, a worldwide leader in relationship marketing and an Alterian Partner since 1977, uses the Alterian Suite to quickly deliver value to its clients.

Roy Barker, general manager, Carlson Marketing Group Ltd stated: "The Alterian Suite iLoader simplifies the load, audit, and data preparation time from multiple data sources including both external databases and flat files. This has reduced the amount of time and expertise it takes to develop systems and complete marketing engagements."

The Alterian Suite offers a new level of usability, flexibility, scalability, and extensibility and is highly cost effective:

• Usability - Unlike most current analytic solutions, the Alterian Suite provides a high-performance analytic environment that drastically eliminates user wait time between question asked and results returned. This order of magnitude performance improvement enables train-of-thought querying that supports the way people want to work with their data.
• Flexibility - The Alterian Suite is not another canned set of reports and a limited query tool. The component based Alterian Suite combines analytic data mart development tools with an integrated interface development environment based on VB to rapidly create custom analytic solutions for tough business problems.
• Scalability - Featuring column based analytic technology (CBAT), the Alterian Suite is designed specifically for analytic and decision support queries. With scan speeds of 90 million rows per second, data that was too large to query against before can now be made widely accessible using Alterian.
• Extensibility - The integrated analytic development environment is highly extensible. Based on Visual Basic for Applications, the Alterian Suite provides a number of open application interfaces including COM, DCOM, and ODBC. The integrated analytic development environment has available over 120 Alterian components with the capability to add custom or 3rd party components or to inject custom code as a dll.
• Cost Effective - The Alterian Suite provides exceptional analytic performance using common and less expensive Windows based servers and workstations. The Alterian Suite also requires very little maintenance since loads are automated; the data mart is self-tuning to support high-performance analytics; and the data mart is easily modifiable.

The Suite consists of the following applications:

• Alterian Engine: A high performance data engine powered by column based analytic technology (CBAT) for rapid, iterative analysis.
• Alterian Studio: An integrated analytic development environment with more than 120 analytic components and packaged modules enables the rapid development of custom analytic solutions.
• Alterian iLoader: A high-speed data extract application connects multiple data sources to the Alterian Engine for scheduled loads or updates. iLoader connectors work with operational and legacy ODBC compliant databases and flat files.
• Alterian Distributor: A work group manager, allows the sharing of Alterian modules, components, and reports across multiple users.

Availability

The Alterian Suite will be released this quarter to the Alterian Partner Network.

About Alterian

Alterian solutions are pragmatic analytic tools for extracting customer insight from today's expanding data sets. Since 1997, Alterian has focused on building technology to address the needs of companies within markets that require quick decision-making capabilities based upon rapid analysis of detail-level data. Alterian offers its technology through partnership arrangements via a worldwide partner network that uses Alterian technology to customise and enhance analytical solutions for many different markets.

Consulting practices, systems integrators and marketing services organisations using the Alterian Suite have built, delivered and/or managed large databases that require customised interfaces and detail-level analytical functionality. These "Alterian Powered" applications allow our partners' customers to better understand and use their data at the lowest level of detail, whether that data consists of millions or hundreds of millions of customers, prospects, products or transactions.

Alterian's international headquarters is located in Bristol in the UK and its North American Headquarters is based in Chicago, Illinois in the USA. For additional information, please visit www.alterian.com.

Contact Helen Jones, Alterian, +44 (0)117 970 3200, hjones@alterian.com.