DECISION-SUPPORT WARES CONTINUE TO SCALE

The decision-support market continues to grow in all directions as decision-support vendors Cognos, Seagate, and Information Advantage improve their products.

This week, Cognos released Version 6.0 of PowerPlay, a Windows client for Cognos' online analytical processing solution, with enhanced scalability and new formatting options such as unbalanced nesting cross-tabs. PowerPlay 6.0 now can handle as many as 50 million consolidated rows of data and as many as 500,000 categories.

Other new features include the capability to create rich columns and row headings, and to automatically generate logical subsets within a category, officials said. The Cognos PowerPlay 6.0 client is shipping for a price of $695 per user seat.

Seagate Software last week announced the availability of its midtier Unix Info Server for advanced report processing, with Seagate's Crystal Info reporting tool. The Unix Info Server is available for Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and IBM AIX.

Information Advantage announced it will expand the reach of its decision-support Web client and portal to SAP R/3 systems. DecisionSuite Eureka applies principles popularized by consumer portals, such as Yahoo and America Online, to access and analyze information via the Web from heterogenous sources, such as secure R/3 systems, company officials said.

Cognos Inc., in Ottawa, is at http://www.cognos.com Seagate Software, in Scotts Valley, Calif., is at http://www.seagate.com Information Advantage Inc., in Eden Prairie, Minn., is at http://www.infoadvan.com