Analysis & Commentary:

ALERI ADDRESSES THE QUERY PROCESSING SPEED BARRIER

Companies with high transaction volumes, such as banks and telcos, can now leapfrog the log-jam presently inhibiting the full use of their information with the help of a new vector-based processing system from Aleri. A prototype installation for a major utility has queried one month's data, comprising one billion transactions, with each record containing 30 attributes, in less than 5 minutes. This compares with the company's existing capability using advanced relational database techniques which are restricted to a maximum window for ad-hoc reporting of seven days' transaction volume at any one. Near real-time access to a month's data creates much deeper understanding of business performance characteristics, and provides new opportunities for customer service and feedback.

The prototype enabled the company to work with a comprehensive set of data, rather than a restricted sub-set. At present it is one of many companies who have so many transactions, and so much data within each, that they have to select what type of information to process within the time they have available. This selectivity downgrades the quality of information available for management decision-making.

Vector processing and storage has been used by Aleri to develop a new infrastructure, taking software proven in scientific computing and making it affordable for the commercial world, and delivering performances of between 100 and 1000 times faster than tradition relational database technology. Aleri's rules-based technology allows companies to formulate business and data definition rules according to their own requirements, including the ability to redefine and re-run processes and queries in real time -- without the necessity to rewrite code.

Technical Environment

Utility companies have a large amount of 'transaction' records (e.g. one for each meter reading, telephone call, or switch) These are currently aggregated for billing, fraud management, consumer relationship marketing etc. This aggregation provides a pre-determined result set that is costly to recalculate and unable to retain long histories due to the volume of data. Typically these applications are custom-built and held on large SMP/MPP servers with terabyte-sized disk farms and databases attached.

Aleri offers the ability to hold and process real-time transactional data in a distributed heterogeneous environment of low cost servers (for example, a mix of NT and/or Unix severs). This heterogeneity, plus rules-based metadata, significantly reduces the complexity of integrating multiple systems. Holding aggregated data is no longer required, allowing multiple physical datastores to be replaced by real-time virtual data marts. Aleri's overwhelming speed advantage is created as vector storage significantly reduces disk storage overhead, whilst vector processing does the same for CPU overhead.

Says Colin Osborne, Aleri's Chief Marketing Officer: "Companies in high growth areas are stressing their existing data management infrastructures to their limits, and need innovative solutions able to radically transform corporate ability to manage change, and to process complex business processes within data-rich environments. Conventional offerings, however sophisticated, are based on an aged design which does not enable the quantum increase in speed required -- hence the need for a new vector-based data infrastructure and flexible rules-based processes"

About Aleri

Aleri builds leading edge vector-based enterprise software solutions, enabling near real-time information management in the most challenging of business environments. This data management framework is designed for the needs of large organizations requiring ultra high speed data manipulation, and complex interrogation of transaction volumes into the billions, held in terabytes of storage.

The high-performance framework is complemented with sophisticated business rules, which allow business analysts to model & run business processes and data descriptions. These rules can be changed & re-run in real-time, allowing sophisticated business management controls that cannot be approached using conventional database & data warehousing strategies.

Aleri has recently acquired mpct Solutions Corporation, the leading banking solutions provider. mpct's products include the well-known Atlas international wholesale banking operations software used by over 30 leading banks, such as Deutsche Bank, Barclays, ABN-Amro, ING and Bank One.

Aleri Inc is a private software company, founded in 1999. It has offices in the USA & Europe and can be found on the Web at www.aleri.com.