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Bristol-Myers Squibb Signs with High Tower Software

Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, has signed a contract with High Tower Software, a leading provider of operational business intelligence solutions. High Tower Software's TowerView Clinical product will provide Bristol-Myers Squibb with a state of the art Clinical Laboratory Reporting System that offers the very latest in technology for managing clinical laboratory data and reports. This new capability represents the first of many being implemented as a part of a major Bristol-Myers Squibb informatics initiative to expand Exploratory Development capabilities. Through a combination of High Tower's award winning dynamic visualization technology, custom analytics and Web-enabled reporting software, High Tower's solution provides clinical laboratory personnel with immediate, flexible and reliable access to trial data from any number of projects in a manner consistent with the very best practices for laboratory reporting. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Bristol-Myers Squibb will use High Tower Software's TowerView Clinical to provide and manage hundreds of medical reports from each of dozens of simultaneous clinical trials. The reports are managed through TowerView's patented three dimensional CyberGrid environment that provides a comprehensive overview of all the data from any trial or protocol. In conjunction with this 3-D environment, TowerView Clinical includes extensive analytics that enable the automatic detection of any data element or trend that requires immediate analysis. TowerView Clinical can transform the way in which pharmaceutical development teams monitor, share and act on critical trial data.

Bristol-Myers Squibb is using TowerView Clinical to capitalize on its consolidated worldwide research and development function by enabling scientists, clinicians, project teams, and managers to undertake powerful monitoring, analysis, query, and reporting of clinical trial data, and to share this information with other development teams within its organization. Bristol-Myers Squibb hopes that High Tower Software will bring greater efficiency to its research activities, thereby helping to speed the delivery of breakthrough pharmaceutical remedies to patients around the globe.

"Technology has enabled scientists to generate information faster than ever before. Harnessing that information and turning it into shared knowledge, will help our R&D organization achieve its ultimate goal -- bringing drugs to market faster," said George Goldsmith, Informatics Co-leader, Bristol-Myers Squibb.

"Bristol-Myers Squibb joins the growing number of leading-edge organizations that are benefiting from the dynamic monitoring and analysis of key information through the adoption of TowerView as their operational business intelligence platform," said Dr. Ursula Schwuttke, CEO of High Tower Software. "High Tower Software is able to put relevant, accurate, and timely information into the hands of the right people where and when they need it, in a way that is impossible with traditional business intelligence software."

About Bristol-Myers

Bristol-Myers Squibb is an $18 billion pharmaceutical and related health care products company whose mission is to extend and enhance human life.

About High Tower Software

Founded in 1997, High Tower Software is a privately held company based in Orange County, California. High Tower Software provides the final component in the world of business intelligence -- the ability to track and react to business critical events and opportunities occurring between transaction processing and analytic applications. High Tower's TowerView product suite was developed over ten years specifically to handle high volume, real time or relevant time data; TowerView monitors any specified business metrics, analyzes for trends or problem conditions, and presents a total view, visually, using TowerView's award wining CyberGrid technology.

Capespan Migrates from Informix to Oracle Database

Oracle Corp, one of the world's largest enterprise software companies, announced that Capespan, South Africa's largest exporter of fresh fruit products, has completed its migration from the Informix database to the Oracle Database and has already demonstrated clear advantages of standardizing on the Oracle Database. Capespan moved its legacy mainframe systems and financial and accounting systems to Oracle in less than six months enabling the company to be ready for the 2001 fruit season in South Africa. By migrating to the Oracle Database, Capespan has seen dramatic performance improvements, including an increase of 66 percent transactions per minute of their pallet tracking application and a decrease from 80 to eight minutes of sales data in Europe.

The company had four databases and four hardware platforms covering a vast range of Information Technology (IT) processes. Soon after their corporate merger, it became clear that updating the company's IT systems was essential to the efficiency of the company's business. Capespan decided to standardize the company's IT systems on open systems and chose the Oracle Database, after briefly considering Microsoft SQL.

The project was divided into two parts, the first moving from Unifruco's Unisys 2200 mainframe and proprietary Unisys database and Outspan's AS/400 environment. The second saw Capespan consolidate its Sage Enterprise Solutions' Sage Enterprise from Informix to Oracle. Leon Smith, Capespan database manager and project manager for the mainframe migration assignment, cited a variety of reasons for the move, including the standard arguments against mainframes, such as costly upgrades and their proprietary nature.

"If we had remained with the mainframe, we would have been forced to embark on substantial upgrades, which did not make strategic business sense due to the rapid growth in Capespan's business," explained Smith. "Capespan was developing software internally to handle pallet tracking and we had difficulty getting our Unisys 2200 mainframe to communicate with the new development environment."

Portability, robustness and the level of local support were strong factors in Oracle's favour. Shortly after the new environment went live in September, Capespan saw significant improvements across its network. Capespan PLC, the European subsidiary, standardized on Oracle and Windows 2000 and has already seen a dramatic improvement in the loading, validation and processing of daily sales data from Europe.

Because it became essential for its business to improve the speed of deployment, the user experience, and reduce expenditure, Capespan consolidated its Sage Enterprise financial systems, moving away from Informix to Oracle. PQ Tetra, which managed and implemented the 1.3 million rand project, claimed that this is the first implementation of financial and accounting systems on a Windows 2000/Oracle platform in the world.

"Following IBM's acquisition of Informix software, their future product strategy became unclear and the comparative lack of robustness, reliability and data integrity standards added to our concerns," said Johan Muller, Capespan application manager. "The Oracle Database has given us simpler access to data with a higher degree of integrity than previously was possible."

"The management feedback was also very positive and Oracle has already proved itself, because the project came in on time, met all expectations, and has allowed the company to move forward," said Leon Smith. He adds that the users' response has been very positive, citing "a phenomenal improvement in performance."

About Oracle

Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle visit our website at www.oracle.com.

Contact Amy Swanson, 650-506-0114, or amy.swanson@oracle.com.

Los Alamos Selects Vendor for Integrated Business Management

The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory has selected Oracle Corp of Redwood Shores, Calif., to supply software that will help integrate, unify, modernize and streamline Los Alamos' administrative operations. The contract is worth nearly $4 million over four years.

The Laboratory is in the process of standardizing its operations through an Enterprise Resource Planning system -— a computer-based system that will improve the way the Laboratory handles administrative functions, including financial records, time-and-effort reporting, project management and facility maintenance. Choosing Oracle as software vendor for the ERP system is the first step toward improving Laboratory administrative functions.

"We are looking forward to having Oracle as a key player in our efforts to re-engineer the Laboratory's business practices," said Director John Browne. "Oracle has an outstanding record and we believe they will provide important assistance to us."

The Laboratory began the process of implementing an ERP system in August. A team of Laboratory employees led by Charles Slocomb, ERP Project director, has been evaluating how best to design and implement an ERP system. Selection of the software vendor is the first milestone in the process.

"The ERP Project team has done a remarkable amount of work since it was given the go ahead in August," said Slocomb. "Oracle was unanimously selected by the team, which included representatives from the Laboratory's Human Resources, Business Operations, Facilities Management, Project Management and Information Management divisions.

We had the right people involved in the selection process -— people who represent the primary users of the ERP system. We look forward to moving ahead rapidly in the ERP system implementation process."

The next step for the ERP system project team will be to select computing hardware that will modernize the Laboratory's administrative computing infrastructure and will maximize the performance of the Oracle software. The hardware selection will be made in the near future. Following this step, the project team will go through the process of selecting an external integrator to work side-by-side with the Lab project team.

Implementing an ERP system will help the Laboratory meet its objective of being a customer-focused, unified laboratory. An ERP system will allow the Laboratory to integrate business practices and financial controls and give managers access to timely data and facts.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Sand Technology Awarded $2M University Hospital Contract

Sand Technology Inc -- the provider of Information Integration solutions that help leading organizations worldwide cope with data overload with its Nucleus Analytical Suite of solutions for data mining, data marts, data warehousing and CRM Analytics -- has been awarded a contract in excess of $2 million to construct a healthcare analytics infrastructure for the Centre de Recherche Clinique and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CRC-CHUS) in Quebec. The research team is led by Dr. Andrew Grant, MD, PhD. This "infostructure" is part of a multi-center provincial research project coordinated by the McGill University Hospital Center and is supported by an award from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.

Sand's solution will support clinical and biomedical research, including epidemiological and longitudinal studies; identification of population health indicators, risk factors, practice patterns and variability studies; decision trees; clinical and medical administrative performance indicators; and development of resource management models, health economics, cost-benefit studies.

The Centre awarded the contract after Sand successfully completed a "proof of value" engagement which made a full year's worth of electronic patient data available to researchers. Based on this actual patient data (denominalized to protect patient privacy), the research team headed by Dr. Andrew Grant, MD, PhD, was able to determine that the 30% generally recognised unnecessary fluid and electrolyte testing could be redirected to other resources. As a result, they recommended that physicians justify each test rather than invoke the full battery of tests for each patient by diagnosis. It is expected that this type of discovery, with a proper transfer of knowledge into practice and multiplied many times over when the analytic capabilities of the Sand solution are made available to a large number of researchers, will result in enormous financial payback and productivity gains, by allowing rapid validation of new hypotheses and reducing the time for new discoveries.

"Electronic patient records are extremely valuable for our clinical researchers as they attempt to discover relationships among diseases, treatment modalities, and costs," explained Dr. Guy Bisson, MD, MSc, Directeur des dossiers Clinique Informatique at the CRC-CHUS.

"Sand offers us something we have not been able to find until now: a way to easily query historical data and quickly receive responses, all with minimal help from the IT department. Sand's Nucleus Analytical Suite is easy to use, so that each researcher can construct and test hypotheses. And Nucleus is fast -- responses to complex queries are returned in seconds -- so that our researchers can refine their hypotheses practically as fast as they can think," he added.

"It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this project to our evaluative clinical research," Dr. Bisson concluded.

"We are delighted to be building this new infostructure for the CRC-CHUS over the next few months," said Arthur Ritchie, Chairman and CEO of Sand Technology. "Thanks to our revolutionary technology and expert services, we can deliver this project cost-effectively within three months -- something that is unheard of with traditional approaches. While the Nucleus Analytical Suite is very easy for non-IT users to understand and use, Sand's expert Solution Architects will be on hand to help the researchers rapidly gain value."

Enables data mining on 12 years of historical patient data

Sand's solution includes its patented, high-performance Nucleus Analytical Suite which provides data warehousing and data mining solutions, and expert Solution Architect services.

Sand will build a production data mart, continually holding the most recent 12 years of historical patient data (denominalized and encrypted to protect patient privacy) extracted from multiple sources, including the Patient1 computer-based patient record system from Per-Se Technologies. More than 75 researchers -- located both at the Centre in suburban Montreal and at the northern Quebec Centre de Medecine Genique in Chicoutimi -- will use Sand's RoughSets Web-based data mining tools to conduct their research. Sand's expert Solution Architects will implement the system and then help train and support the researchers.

The final system that Sand delivers will also include dashboards and specialized reports for the administration of health services and health care units such as Laboratories, Emergency room, etc.

Analytics increasingly important to healthcare organizations

Analytics is becoming increasingly important to healthcare organizations, according to Joanne Galimi, the Gartner Group analyst who advises more than 10,000 healthcare clients on the appropriate and effective use of CRM and Business Intelligence technology.

"Business intelligence and analytics has really started to become a business priority. Getting information out of the data is key," Galimi notes. "In the nineties, healthcare organizations started to build large, complex, costly data warehouses. Unfortunately, many of these projects did not reach completion or often didn't return measurable value because no one knew how to access the data and more importantly, how to use the data to receive any value."

"Today, the emphasis is on getting value out of the data, on speedy implementation, on ease of use and on services to quickly bring users up to productive levels. Sand seems to be delivering on all of these important points for the Centre de Recherche," she observed.

About the Centre de Recherche Clinique

The Centre de Recherche Clinique, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CRC-CHUS) was founded 20 years ago to develop clinical research within the hospital. Researchers conduct research into Immuno-inflammation, Oncology, Cardiovascular Pharmacology, Digestive Physio-pathology, Endocrine Physio-pathology, Osteo-articular Physio-pathology, Pulmonary Physio-pathology, Radiology, Telemedicine and Clinical & Evaluative Research. The Centre, under the directorship of Dr. Jean-Marie Moutquin, MD, MSc, works closely with the Universite de Sherbrooke and its Faculty of Medicine, as well as with private industry. For more information, visit www.crc.chus.qc.ca.

About Sand Technology

Sand Technology is much more than just a software company. True, we offer a unique, innovative data management technology, with a level of analytical functionality that qualifies it as part of the "next generation" of computing software. However, we know that software is only one of the components that a business needs to realize value from corporate initiatives.

Therefore, we have structured Sand Technology as a new kind of software solution provider, with a philosophy that is strongly focused on the delivery of business-driven solutions and a corporate culture centered on integrity and customer service. This is embodied in the Sand Guarantee, which links our commercial rewards to the delivery of real business benefits to our customers.

We help leading organizations across Europe and North America cope with "data overload," by giving them rapid access to the exact information they need to make the right business decisions. Our solutions are extremely powerful and highly scalable; they empower legacy systems and data access tools; they leverage existing IT investment, require no additional human resources, and deliver business value quickly, resulting in a rapid return on investment(ROI).

Organizations across Europe and North America use Sand's solutions for both analytical and operational purposes, including among others, CRM and CRM analytics, Web analytics, healthcare analytics, supply chain management, inventory & production optimization, financial analysis, and strategic planning.

Sand Technology is headquartered in Montreal, with offices in the United States, United Kingdom and Central Europe. Sand Technology has commercial relationships with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, KPMG, Ab Initio, Brio Technology, Business Objects, Information Builders, Acta, Soza, Sema/Schlumberger, Equifax and BTG. For more information, visit www.sand.com.

Contact Hellena Smejda of WordsWorth International, 815-736-9902, hsmejda@theramp.net, for Sand Technology.