Seagate Software Releases Free OLAP Tool
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Seagate Software Inc. is upping the ante in the burgeoning OLAP market by offering a free download of its new front-end tool for online analytical processing.

With the product, called Worksheet, Seagate is elbowing its way into the skirmish surrounding the release of Microsoft Corp.'s Decision Support Services, an OLAP server code-named Plato that will be bundled into the upgrade to Version 7 of the SQL Server database later this year.

In keeping with Seagate's "Open OLAP" strategy, Worksheet will operate with Plato and other OLAP servers that support the OLE DB for OLAP API, which is emerging as an industry standard. It will also work with IBM's DB2 OLAP Server, Essbase from Arbor Software Corp., and Seagate's Holos and Crystal Info software.

Seagate's move is aimed at competitors such as Cognos Corp., which is attracting attention for its new front-end tool optimized to work with Plato. Called Aristotle, the Cognos tool uses technology by the same company from which Microsoft acquired Plato --- Panorama Software Systems, of Tel Aviv, Israel. Cognos late last month offered a download of Aristotle Beta 3 for $99; pricing on the final product, slated to ship in conjunction with SQL Server 7, has yet to be announced.

Worksheet is a component of the Holos OLAP server and Crystal Info, a reporting and analysis system, that was sliced out to stand alone, Seagate officials said. A beta version now available supports Beta 3 of Plato, issued late last month. The final product, also free, will be available later this year.

"What we decided to do with all the hype and wave caused by Microsoft's Plato is to make data browsing free," said Andrew Handford, the product manager for Crystal Info. "We may be the first to make client-side tools free -- we don't think we'll be the last."

Another developer, Knosys Inc., last month released Beta 3 of a front-end tool called Socrates that the company says is optimized for Plato as well as the Microsoft data warehousing environment. It is designed in an ActiveX and Component Object Model component-based architecture that enables easy integration with Microsoft Office applications, officials said.

"I think it's a bold move. Seagate has a track record of doing things like this," said Richard Creeth, a principal of the Creeth, Richman & Associates Inc. consulting company in Norwalk, Conn., and co-author of the OLAP Report. "Clearly it raises the bar for people who are developing browsers and expecting to sell them -- in fact, it puts them in quite a pickle."

Creeth said he did not expect that Worksheet would be as powerful as Aristotle and Socrates, although he expects its functionality to increase in future releases.

Seagate's Handford said an upgrade due by year's end would support reporting and ad hoc queries. Support for Oracle Corp.'s Express server and Informix Software Inc.'s MetaCube should be forthcoming as well, said Seagate officials in Scotts Valley, Calif.

Seagate's gambit complicates matters for Cognos, which already faces product positioning issues between Aristotle and its widely deployed PowerPlay front-end tool, according to Creeth and other analysts.

Seagate is at http://www.seagatesoftware.com
Cognos, in Burlington, Mass., is at http://www.cognos.com
Knosys, in Boise, Idaho, can be reached at http://www.knosysinc.com