Pine Cone Systems Announces "Pine Cone Enabled" Partner Program
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Pine Cone Systems, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing administration and management solutions, has announced an innovative partner program that allows leading OLAP vendors to integrate Pine Cone's Usage Tracker software, which monitors and reports on data warehouse activity and usage, into their data access and analysis software. The announcement was made at DCI's Data Warehouse World conference in Orlando, Florida.
Industry leading OLAP vendors, Brio, Business Objects, Cognos, and Information Advantage, are the first partners to join the program and enhance their products by being able to directly access the results generated by Pine Cone's Usage Tracker software. Pine Cone Enabled OLAP products now have the ability to analyze and report on data warehouse or mart activity at the table and column level, adding a powerful new analytical dimension to the capabilities of OLAP tools.
Usage Tracker Assists IT and End-Users
Pine Cone's Usage Tracker software is designed to monitor decision support activity of the data warehouse, reporting on what data is being used, who is using it, when they are using it, and what kinds of activities are occurring. Knowing usage patterns and who is using the warehouse makes possible significant improvements in warehouse structure, scheduling and performance. For example, in the case of frequently accessed data, the administrator may add indexing, re-index, or move the information to a data mart to improve efficiency. Likewise, for remote locations that consistently transfer large volumes of data over a wide area network, the administator can restructure the warehouse architecture to relocate the data or redesign the data structure to improve access and usability. Usage Tracker software also helps improve warehouse efficiency by identifying dormant data, hot spots and performance bottlenecks.
In addition to the warehouse administrator, Usage Tracker benefits end-users as well, providing them a unique view of the warehouse and how efficiently and effectively it is being utilized. Usage Tracker provides an audit trail, which monitors and tracks individual user or department activity, including when the warehouse is utilized, and provides both response time and the number of rows returned per query, as well as other key usage statistics. The software tracks activity at the user or workstation level, as well as by department or location, and summarizes the activity on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, providing powerful new insights into data warehouse usage.
Pine Cone Enabled Program
The Pine Cone Enabled Program is designed to add new application functionality to today's leading OLAP tools and promulgate the attributes of Usage Tracker for data warehousing management. A demo version of the Pine Cone software will be bundled with Pine Cone Enabled partners' OLAP tools which will provide sample reports that could be generated if Usage Tracker were installed on the client system. Enabled partners will work on joint sales opportunities, as well as receive supporting collateral and promotional materials from Pine Cone. In addition, Enabled partners will also reap the diverse benefits of the Pine Cone Partners Program.
Specifically, Pine Cone's OLAP partners' software that has been Pine Cone Enabled will display the Pine Cone icon which, when selected, will generate detailed reports and analyses of a warehouse's usage statistics. Enabled partners will increase their tools' value to warehouse administrators by providing important usage information, thereby allowing them to manage their data assets more efficiently and to greater corporate advantage. Understanding usage patterns, active times and areas, decision support execution times, and details of who is using the warehouse and how they are using it, contributes to improved warehouse or mart structure, better scheduling and performance, lower costs and increased ROI.
"As the data warehousing market matures, the industry is now addressing the management and maintenance aspects of data warehousing," said Dennis McCann Pine Cone's President and CEO. "Getting the most out of the substantial financial investment most companies have made in their data warehouse has become a corporate mandate, which is why it so important for Pine Cone to make usage statistics readily available through best-of-breed access database analysis tools like those marketed by Brio, Business Objects, Cognos and Information Advantage."
"Led by data warehousing innovators, such as Bill Inmon at Pine Cone and Katherine Glassey at Brio, Pine Cone and Brio have been technological leaders in the data warehouse and business intelligence markets," noted Chris M. Grejtak, Executive Vice President of Marketing for Brio Technology. "Bringing the strengths of Pine Cone's warehouse administrative software together with the power and flexibility of the Brio Enterprise suite of business intelligence reporting and analysis products gives the warehouse administrator an unparalleled set of capabilities to understand, analyze and report on the activity of their data warehouse users. With data warehouses and data marts becoming increasingly important in organizations, managing them proactively with the combination of Brio and Pine Cone will help warehouse managers ensure their users have access to the most relevant and important data."
"This partnership between Business Objects and Pine Cone enables us to provide joint customers with a way to measure the return on their data warehouse investment," said Paul Doscher, general manager of Business Objects Americas. "Using award-winning integrated query, reporting, and analysis tools from Business Objects against valuable Pine Cone data, customers will be able to measure usage, assign cost to different departments and prove the value of the corporate data warehouse."
"Tracking usage of data assets is an important next step in the creation, deployment and management of a data warehousing project," said Paul Hill, Vice President, Strategic Partners and Marketing Programs at Cognos. "As the leading vendor of business intelligence tools, Cognos is always looking for ways to extend the depth and breadth of the capabilities of our award winning reporting and analysis tools. With Impromptu and PowerPlay, customers can easily access the data in Pine Cone's Usage Tracker and present it meaningfully."
"After spending the past six months with Bill Inmon and Pine Cone Systems on a seminar tour focused on Building the Intelligent Enterprise, we are pleased to continue to strengthen our partnership by connecting our product lines," said Richard Tanler, Chairman of Information Advantage. "Our combined experience in data warehousing has proven that data warehouses and data marts require superior administration tools and proactive system management to deliver peak performance. Together, our products can help organizations achieve this goal. For example, Pine Cone's monitoring and administration tools can identify commonly accessed reports, then DecisionSuite's agent and broadcast capabilities can be used to automatically generate and distribute these reports to the user."
Pricing and Availability
Pine Cone's Usage Tracker software is generally available and is priced starting at $60,000.
One of the fastest growing providers of enterprise business intelligence solutions, Brio Technology develops powerful, easy-to-use software that helps organizations dramatically improve business operations and decision making processes. By combining anytime, anywhere information access with flexible IT control, the Brio Enterprise product family gives the broad array of end users across an organization access to critical business information which adapts to their individual needs. Brio has strategic partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and Oracle, and is committed to the success of more than 4,000 customer sites in 20 countries. The BrioEnterprise product family is available in four languages on ten platforms. Brio Technology is based in Palo Alto, California, and can be reached on the World Wide Web at http://www.brio.com
Business Objects is the world's leading provider of integrated enterprise decision support tools. Business Objects products provide non-technical business users with access to information stored in data warehouses, data marts, and packaged business applications. Business Objects provides a complete suite of decision support tools including query, reporting, online analytical processing, data mining, and DSS administration for both client/server and internet environments. Business Objects has sold more than 700,000 licenses to over 5,800 organizations in more than 60 countries worldwide.
Business Objects may be reached by phone at 408-953-6000 or on the worldwide web at http://www.businessobjects.com The company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbol BOBJY.
Cognos is the leading strategic supplier of enterprise business intelligence tools, allowing users to easily extract critical information through data access, reporting, analysis and forecasting. Cognos products consistently deliver the highest productivity gains to the user, the most manageable solution to the administrator, and the fastest return on investment (ROI) to the enterprise.
Cognos also develops, markets and supports software tools for enterprise application development.
Founded in 1969, Cognos is a publicly held company with offices around the world. U.S. operations for the company are headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit Cognos' World Wide Web site at http://www.cognos.com
Information Advantage Inc. (NASDAQ: IACO) develops and markets DecisionSuite, a leading enterprise OLAP software applications and toolset. DecisionSuite, an award-winning solution, allows everyone in the organization to make more informed decisions with advanced business analysis tools, detect and alert agents, liberal sharing of dynamic information for collaborative decision making, and a suite of personalized applications for executives, professionals and analysts. Additionally, WebOLAP, DecisionSuite's codeless desktop for the Web, gives users the ability to perform OLAP analysis over the World Wide Web. Information Advantage products have been proven in production environments since 1991 across industries such as retail, financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, government and manufacturing. For more Information, see http://www.infoadvan.com
Pine Cone Systems, based in Colorado, is the leading supplier of software for data warehouse and data mart management and administration. Founded by Bill Inmon, the father of the data warehouse concept, Pine Cone's mission is to help organizations realize the full potential of their data by providing solutions to address the complex issues and unique challenges of managing the data warehouse environment. The company's market partners include NCR, Information Advantage, FISERV, Cognos, Hewlett-Packard, Intelligent Solutions, Business Objects, Brio Technology, Digital Equipment Corporation, Evolutionary Technologies International, Informix Software, Oracle, Prism Solutions and Sybase. Pine Cone's products are available on most hardware platforms and support Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2/PE, Red Brick and NCR/Teradata databases. For more information, see http://www.pine-cone.com