On The Market:

IBM Delivers Innovative Business Intelligence Capabilities

IBM announced the industry's first database software to combine online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining technologies into one product. The new data mining functionality of DB2 OLAP Server, termed opportunity discovery, enables companies to quickly gather insight into customer behavior by automatically identifying fluctuations in large volumes of data.

For example, customers will now immediately detect unusual results and conditions in budgets, forecasts, or sales figures. The new DB2 OLAP Server will also alert the user to abnormal trends -- both good and bad. It will allow executives to take action sooner by discovering unusual results blurred inside oceans of financial and CRM data that employees may not even know to look for. IBM is the only database vendor in the industry that offers these capabilities today.

"Data mining enables enterprises to go far beyond 'naked-eye' analytics -- generating a far deeper understanding of trends, patterns and predictions that can be used to optimize business performance or uncover new business opportunities," said Doug Laney, vice president, META Group. "Bringing data mining to the masses has been the greatest challenge, but solutions like the new opportunity discovery feature of IBM DB2 OLAP Server, that reveal multidimensional data sources to these complex algorithms, will improve the reach of data mining and the return-on-investment in data cubes."

ING Antai, a leading insurance company in Taiwan takes advantage of this innovative database software technology to quickly tackle fraud and process claims.

"DB2 OLAP Miner adds an extremely useful and easy-to-use tool to our business intelligence environment. It is dramatically cutting our costs and enabling us to pay claims much faster. These capabilities provide us with a competitive advantage that improves our customer retention and acquisition rates for enhanced, long-term profitability," said Austin Wang, section chief at ING Antai. "For example, with DB2 OLAP Miner, it takes just two to three days to analyze fraud claims data, a process that used to take two to three weeks."

The new data mining functionality is currently available as a new feature DB2 OLAP Server at no additional charge.

For more information visit www.software.ibm.com/data.

SAS SRM Software Release Features Enhanced Analytics

SAS Institute, a leader in business intelligence, announced the release of its latest enhancements to the SAS Solution for Supplier Relationship Management (SRM).

Release 2.2 includes powerful new supplier ranking capabilities as well as enhanced spend analysis and scorecarding to help companies make the most of their supplier relationships.

The new release of the SAS SRM solution delivers intelligence on suppliers and procurement activities, helping organizations effectively manage relationships with their suppliers and achieve substantial savings in the process.

"Companies need to understand their supplier landscape in order to make improved purchasing decisions, negotiate better contracts and, overall, to realize significant cost savings," said Christine Kelly, SAS' global strategist for SRM. "That's what SRM is all about. The new supplier ranking capabilities, built on our leading analytics, extend our offering and enable our customers to reduce overall spending, mitigate supplier risk and improve their bottom lines."

What is SRM? All companies purchase goods and services, whether direct goods like electronic components and machined parts or indirect goods like office supplies and computers. Yet mergers and acquisitions, growing volumes of supplier and other procurement data, and disparate computer systems spread around the globe cloud the "big picture" of procurement practices and make it increasingly difficult for organizations to obtain an overall view of what they're buying and from whom.

More than two years ago, SAS anticipated this widespread need and responded with its SRM solution. "With SRM, organizations can collect, analyze and leverage all aspects of their supplier data and purchasing history to create an accurate overview of total spending," said Karen Peterson, research director at Gartner. "They can also rank their supplier base, match their business objectives with individual supplier performance, identify areas for cost consolidation, and predict optimal procurement strategies."

Ranking, Scorecards and Analysis Built on the flexible and open SAS Intelligence Architecture, the new release of SAS' fully Web-enabled solution offers several new capabilities:

• Rating and ranking supplier performance -- SRM Ranking, the latest addition to the SAS SRM solution, is based on SAS' 25 years of analytical strength and the company's awareness that not all suppliers are of equal value to an organization. SRM Ranking provides insights on supplier performance, quality and spending patterns so organizations can determine which supplier relationships are strategic and which are not. By rating and ranking suppliers, senior managers and procurement professionals can better allocate valuable resources to create and maintain supplier relationships that bring the greatest value and profitability to their companies.
• Strategy alignment and scorecarding -- The SRM Scorecard allows executives and others within an organization to select any key performance indicator shown in a procurement dashboard, pull together relevant supplier and purchasing data and perform detailed analysis. Through the SRM Scorecard, senior managers can quickly determine how well the sourcing process is functioning within a department, division or the entire organization. This helps them align their company's procurement activities with corporate goals, and measure the impact of these activities on specific key performance indicators.
• Enhanced spend analysis -- Procurement Vision, the SRM spend-analysis component, features increased security functionality as well enhanced in-depth analysis. With Procurement Vision, purchasing and commodity managers can review summarized supplier and commodity data and then reach through to more detailed data. Resulting findings can be exported to other applications, saved for further investigation, or ranked with the SRM Ranking component.

The SAS Solution for SRM leverages existing purchasing data -- data that an organization can't easily access -- and turns it into meaningful information that can be used strategically in procurement activities. The SAS Solution for SRM isn't simply focused on day-to-day purchasing decisions; instead, it provides all levels of management with both strategic and tactical views. The SAS solution helps enterprises collect, analyze and leverage supplier data and commodity purchasing history to make the most of their supplier relationships.

"Leveraging its strengths in data warehousing and advanced analytics, SAS has created an end-to-end SRM solution that gives us the power to know our supplier base," said Mike Cockrill, vice president of North American supply chain for Aventis CropScience. "With better intelligence about our suppliers and our purchasing operations, we expect to achieve significant savings from improved contract negotiation, better contract compliance, and other critical business drivers."

About SAS

SAS provides software and services that enable customers to transform data from all areas of their business into intelligence. SAS solutions help organizations make better, more informed decisions and maximize customer, supplier, and organizational relationships. Solutions from SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, are used at more than 37,000 business, government and university sites around the world. Customers include 98 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500, and 90 percent of the Fortune 500 overall. For 25 years, SAS has been giving our customers The Power to Know. For more information, visit www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute Inc, Cary Mike Nemecek, 919-531-5140, Mike.Nemecek@sas.com.

StarMine Announces Availability of SmartEstimates

StarMine announced the availability of its profitable earnings surprise predictions and quantitative investment models within the FactSet environment. FactSet users can now gain simultaneous access to StarMine and other data sources and download it directly into their spreadsheets and other applications.

"StarMine's approach to measuring Wall Street analyst performance and deriving meaningful forecasts for earnings and earnings surprises is attractive to our client base," said Mike Frankenfield, Director of Sales for FactSet Research Systems. "We are pleased to include their offerings amongst the many other industry leading databases we provide on our platform."

StarMine is fully integrated into the FactSet system, including the Universal Screening application and the FactSet Formula Library. StarMine provides over 200 different StarMine and analyst-related data items over FactSet, including its SmartEstimate earnings forecasts, predictions of earnings surprises and analyst revisions, and StarMine's quantitative investment models.

"Integrating the data sources from multiple vendors is one of the biggest challenges to testing and implementing investment strategies," said Joe Gatto, founder and CEO of StarMine. "FactSet's comprehensive, one-stop source of financial information is a natural fit for our high-end institutional clients."

About FactSet

FactSet Research Systems Inc is a leading provider of global financial and economic information, including fundamental data on tens of thousands of companies worldwide. Combining more than 140 databases into its own dedicated online service, the company also provides the tools to download, combine and manipulate the data for investment analysis. The company, headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, was formed in 1978 and now conducts operations from 13 locations around the world, including Boston, Chicago, New York, San Mateo, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and Frankfurt.

About StarMine

StarMine, www.starmine.com, provides independent, objective ratings of Wall Street securities analysts by measuring them on stock-picking performance and the accuracy of earnings predictions.

StarMine provides institutional investors with sophisticated Internet software to analyze, visualize, and mine current and historical analyst data and generate profitable investment signals. StarMine is a licensed redistributor of Thomson Financial I/B/E/S and First Call.

StarMine clients include many of the world's largest money managers, whose real-world feedback has contributed to the proprietary metrics that drive the software.

A privately held company founded in 1998, StarMine is based in San Francisco with offices in New York, Boston, and Denver. StarMine investors include American Century Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.