On The Market:

Latest Release of OpenViz by Advanced Visual Systems

Advanced Visual Systems Inc has released version 2.2 of its OpenViz development system for creating highly interactive charts, graphs and analytics for use in the business intelligence, decision support, financial, bio-informatics and software development industries.

Highlights of the latest edition of OpenViz include powerful features for the presentation and exploration of OLAP hierarchical data; complete support for Java plug-ins; Microsoft .NET integration; innovative new "patch" charting techniques that enable rapid comprehension of multiple dimensions of financial data; highly customizable currency expression capabilities; and an array of features that improve the end-user analytic experience. Examples of new analytic techniques can be viewed at www.openviz.com.

Used by leading software companies to add interactive analytics to their business intelligence, financial, portal and data warehousing software products, OpenViz has also been deployed by global enterprises to provide powerful insight into all types of corporate data and the enhance decision-making by large populations of users.

According to Jeff Tingle, vice president of Product Development and Professional Services at AVS, "One of the key features of OpenViz 2.2 is its ability to present OLAP data structures in a variety of ways that permit end-users to quickly understand the relationships between multiple dimensions of data. Despite the increasing power of OLAP data formats, we found that few users were able to truly comprehend or exploit cubed content, so we developed several techniques that make the process both simple and intuitive."

In OpenViz 2,2, hierarchical data can be presented in familiar 2D or 3D "tree" presentations that empower users to drill down into the tree to expand or roll-up layers of data. For software developers creating applications with OLAP data, the trees can take on a wide variety of layout configurations; braches and nodes can be colorized by value and contain highly configurable text or numeric values. Three-dimensional and other charting techniques are also available for hierarchal data.

About Advanced Visual Systems

Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) provides industry-leading, interactive data visualization software and solutions that help business, scientific and engineering users gain critical insight from all types of data. AVS' complete line of software products speeds decision-making by bringing information to life using the latest in graphics, Web-based and interactive technologies on all major computing platforms. For more information on AVS visit www.avs.com.

ThinkFast Launches Vertical Industry Specific Solutions

ThinkFast Consulting Inc, a full-service provider of integrated business intelligence (BI) solutions, announced that it has launched four new industry practices focused on delivering high value BI solutions to companies within the consumer products, manufacturing, oil and gas and utilities marketplace. These new practices are in addition to ThinkFast's prominent retail practice created in 2001. ThinkFast's solutions are widely recognized for their ability to help give organizations access to information that helps them better plan and forecast to meet business goals and objectives that drive profitability, identify new customers and retain existing ones, expand into new markets and improve operational performance.

"We have worked extensively with a variety of organizations, however we identified a depth and breadth of experience within these select group of industries. The people that make up each of these practice teams are subject matter experts, individuals with real-world industry experience that are former controllers, marketing and sales executives and operations managers," says Tom Phelps, president of ThinkFast Consulting Inc. "We know the challenges faced within these industries and by leveraging best practices and reusable components of our experience, we can better serve both our existing and future clients by formalizing these vertical industry practices."

The company's new vertical practices will continue to rapidly get clients on the way to quickly and effectively developing strategic and tactical decisions and them help turn data information into a motor of productivity and actionable intelligence. ThinkFast partners with organizations that have an enormous investment in operational systems that produce an abundance of data. The challenge is turning that data into actionable information and putting it in to the hands of people who can effect change. ThinkFast's vertical experts, both functional and technical, leverage data hiding in disparate databases throughout an organization's enterprise, including historical, operational, Internet and customer to deliver structured, relevant information.

"This unique vertical approach establishes a common set of objectives and measurement criteria that results in more adaptable and flexible solutions that also better utilizes the most up to date and innovative products and technologies." says Sue Perkins, chief operating officer at ThinkFast Consulting Inc. "Our teams can then deliver on-time and in-budget high impact solutions that help put relevant and structured information at our clients fingertips for improved decision-making. These vertical, best practice approaches will deliver sustained return-on-investment to our client's bottom-line, as well as capitalize on market opportunities and top-line growth."

ThinkFast's influence within these key vertical industries are attributed to being named number 49 of the Inc.500 fastest growing private companies in 2001 and reflected by a short list of their clients, including:

• Consumer Products: Delta Faucet Company, Perrigo Company, Quaker Oats
• Manufacturing: Bosch Group, the Automotive Aftermarket Group of Dana Corporation, LDM Technologies
• Oil and Gas: Apache Corporation, Devon Energy, Ocean Energy
• Utilities: Citizen's Communication, Reliant Energy, Aquila Inc

With seven offices coast-to-coast, ThinkFast's vertical industry practices will focus on the delivery of BI and Analytical Application solutions, including data warehousing, financial management, sales and marketing management and customer analytics.

About ThinkFast Consulting Inc

ThinkFast Consulting Inc is a premier full-service provider of enterprise-wide business intelligence (BI) services designed to provide customers with real-time structured access to information for strategic and tactical decision making. Ranked number 49 of the 2001 fastest growing private companies by Inc. 500 Magazine, ThinkFast is headquartered in Chicago, and has local offices in Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City and San Francisco. For more information, visit www.thinkfast.com.

Contact ThinkFast Consulting Inc, Anne Stein, 864-244-9126 astein@thinkfast.com.

ProClarity Corporation Announces Release 5

ProClarity Release 5 enterprise customers benefit from the ability to capture and disseminate best analytic practices, collaborate on decisions and gain business advantage faster than ever before.

ProClarity Corporation, an award-winning provider of innovative analytic solutions for the enterprise, announced Release 5 of the ProClarity Analytics Platform. ProClarity Release 5 is the first analytic environment that expands the knowledge of the individual user with the best practices and collective knowledge of the enterprise. ProClarity Release 5 delivers smart, Web-based analytic solutions that are tailored to the individual user and align with the customers' decision-making processes. Now, individual users can harness the power of centralized business logic to conduct sophisticated analysis, make more informed decisions and improve business performance.

The introduction of Release 5 brings three key innovations to the forefront:

• Tools and capabilities to capture and propagate best analytic practices from analytic experts to the general decision making audience.
• Context-sensitive analytic capabilities allow knowledge holders, stake holders and decision makers to collaborate far more efficiently, and establishes links between quantitative and qualitative information contained in disparate systems throughout an organization.
• The ability to centrally distribute standardized management reports inside Microsoft Excel providing routine business reports in this preferred productivity tool.

"We are quite impressed with the new web-based analytic functionality of ProClarity Release 5 and believe that it will dramatically enhance business performance and scale to support Time's growing user base," said James Schumm, Analyst at Time Inc. "We have evaluated and tested Release 5 of the ProClarity Analytics Server and look forward to moving our users to the zero-footprint thin client. The server will enable us to avoid installation issues as well as centrally manage the secure distribution of data, views and customizations out to our users, which is extremely important to managing our data assets."

Release 5 of the ProClarity Analytics Platform, from which the entire product family is built, is a customizable software environment that optimizes enterprise information and existing investments to promote shared best practices, distributed collaboration and accelerated time to understanding. Upgraded within Release 5, is the ProClarity Analytics Server that expands the analytic capabilities and scalability of the ProClarity product suite. Release 5 also includes the introduction of ProClarity Selector and ProClarity Business Reporter for Excel, two core components that help ProClarity's customers gain competitive advantage.

Capture and Share Best Analytic Practices

The ProClarity Analytics Platform is designed on a 'publish and consume model' where the ProClarity Analytics Server acts as the middle-tier, connecting users with corporate data stores, and as a repository where business logic, reports and key performance indicators are published and consumed. Uniform definitions of how an analysis is performed and centralized performance measures promote alignment of organizational objectives, while customization capabilities help tailor software implementations to suit user needs.

The new ProClarity Selector product is designed to enable decision makers to extract actionable information from the massive amounts of data they collect and share among decision-makers in a timely, easy and efficient fashion. Through a simple series of steps, business users can quickly navigate into and isolate a relevant subset of data. A comprehensive feature set of comparison, filtering and selection capabilities can then be used to spot meaningful trends and patterns -- enabling timely, fact-based business decisions. The Selector's unique ability to build stepwise scripts that capture the analysis process facilitates the sharing of knowledge across a broad audience and helps build company-wide best practices. The analysis definitions that can be built using the selector and stored centrally within the ProClarity Analytics Server promote uniform methods of analyzing and understanding far-reaching aspects of the business.

The new ProClarity Business Reporter for Excel unites the familiar environment and features of Microsoft Excel with the power and flexibility of ProClarity's multidimensional data analysis capabilities. Wizards guide users through the process of importing or exporting data from ProClarity products into Excel, while maintaining a continual link to the data source. Reports saved as Excel workbooks can be distributed securely via publishing to the ProClarity Analytics Server.

Analytic Capabilities and Enterprise-Class Scalability

The ProClarity Analytics Server promotes the broadest range of analytic capabilities including collaboration to ensure that user action can be taken in a timely manner. Fully interactive query results and patented data visualization can be published to the server or emailed directly to relevant decision makers, knowledge workers and stakeholders to ensure action is taken as quickly as possible. Tested in some of the most demanding environments, the ProClarity Analytics Server scales to support very large databases and high numbers of concurrent users. It centrally supports the management of security and the distribution of software, customizations and views, including shared business logic.

"Release 5 of the ProClarity product family is designed to evolve with the ever-changing business and technology requirements of IT and business users over time, while ensuring broad user adoption and productivity throughout the enterprise," said Bob Lokken, president and CEO of ProClarity Corporation. "It is our goal to deliver world-class analytic solutions that ultimately make our customers more effective, productive, profitable and successful and we expect Release 5 to help our customers do just that."

About ProClarity Corporation

ProClarity Corporation delivers analytic software and services that increase the speed at which organizations can make informed decisions which are optimized to directly influence business performance. ProClarity has been delivering innovative analytic solutions to Global 3000 companies since 1995. ProClarity, a privately-held company, ensures maximum return on technology investment and widespread user adoption by delivering solutions tailored around business processes and decision-making workflows. Located in Idaho, USA, and with regional sales and services offices throughout Europe and Asia Pacific, ProClarity currently supports over 600 customers globally including, AT&T, CompUSA, Ericsson, GE Capital, Hewlett-Packard, Nabisco, and Verizon. ProClarity Analytics Platform OEM customers include ABC Technologies, Changepoint, comScore Networks, Epicor, FRx, Manhattan Associates, Manugistics, Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions and NetIQ/WebTrends. To learn more, visit www.proclarity.com.

Contact ProClarity, Angie O'Hara, 208-344-1630 x2133, aohara@proclarity.com.