BMC SOFTWARE SHOWS SOLUTION FOR INTEGRATING APPLICATIONS AND ENABLING NEAR REAL-TIME DATA WAREHOUSING

Houston-based BMC Software Inc. has unveiled the next wave of the company's Application Service Assurance (ASA) strategy for ensuring availability, recovery and performance of business-critical applications. The company delivered an Enterprise Data Propagation (EDP) management strategy that delivers a new solution for integrating applications and enabling near real-time data warehousing. As part of that solution, several unique products from BMC Software including ChangeDataMove and DataReach also were unveiled. The new EDP solution ensures optimal data availability by ensuring the quality, currency and integrity of data for customers with very large databases, high transaction rates and 24x7 availability requirements.

Added Bill Inmon, founder and chief technology officer of Pine Cone Systems, "The performance and efficiency of these new BMC products enable data warehousing and operational data store solutions that were not even possible before. These products have the potential to change the way that very large customers do data warehousing."

Until today, large-scale Information Technology (IT) organizations had no way to easily integrate business-critical legacy data with the explosive rise of new data in distributed systems environments. BMC Software's EDP solution ensures the performance and availability of existing operational applications while integrating, coordinating and managing the movement of bulk data, changed data and schema across the enterprise. As a result, data from existing legacy applications can be integrated with new enterprise applications including purchased applications and even Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. BMC Software's EDP solution gives these organizations the ability to capitalize and exploit the growing demand for rapid application integration and near-real time data warehousing efficiently and effectively.

In many enterprises, data warehouses are evolving into mission-critical, real-time decision support systems where it is critical to refresh information on a daily basis. For some enterprises, the data warehouse (operational data store) must be kept within hours, minutes, or even seconds of the operational databases. BMC Software's EDP products can be used to refresh very large data warehouses as frequently as the business requires and can be used to update a data warehouse with incremental changes within seconds of the updates to the operational system.

As part of BMC Software's data warehouse strategy, the company is forging new partnerships with data warehouse tool providers to deliver warehouse-enabled solutions for customers. BMC Software's solutions can move legacy data into staging areas for data warehouse tools provided by Ardent Software, Constellar, D2K, Informatica and Sagent. These vendors will release separate press releases on their plans to use this technology from BMC Software. In addition, Pine Cone Systems is a leading provider of data warehouse management solutions and is planning to release PATROL-enabled versions of their popular data warehouse management products.

"These high performance data propagation solutions from BMC Software are critically needed by our customers. In fact, several of our leading edge customers are already using BMC Software's EDP technology for data movement along with Informatica's PowerMart/PowerCenter Suite for data warehouse management. Combining our two solutions greatly simplifies and speeds the movement of legacy data into data warehouses," stated Diaz Nesamoney, president and chief technology officer at Informatica.

Two critical products to the EDP strategy include ChangeDataMove and DataReach. The products deliver unique functionality to the market. ChangeDataMove provides highly efficient, transaction-based change capture for DB2 for OS/390, IMS, CICS VSAM and VSAM batch applications with near real-time or scheduled propagation of the captured changes to DB2 for OS/390 and to Oracle on Unix. The product is a high performance solution designed to support operational applications executing hundreds of transactions per second. For IMS and VSAM, ChangeDataMove is unique because it does not use logs or require any changes to an existing application's logging strategy to capture changes. ChangeDataMove also can capture changes for batch applications with no logging.

DataReach Version 2.1 was developed through a partnership between BMC Software and EMC Corporation and provides a new approach for moving DB2 for OS/390 data to Oracle, Sybase and Informix databases on Unix systems. DataReach, while executing on a Unix host, uses EMC Symmetrix storage to directly access MVS DB2 data. The data transfers are performed at channel speeds, no mainframe overhead is involved and no network traffic is generated. As a result, DataReach accomplishes a move and load to the target system 10 to 100 times faster than typical network solutions.

"Customers are able to make critical business decisions in real-time knowing that the data is current and valid," stated Nancy Harris, director of data availability product marketing for BMC Software. "Our development team has created truly innovative and unique products to support data propagation from mainframe databases to open systems environments with maximum efficiency and speed."

The ChangeDataMove and DataReach products are available today from BMC Software and its agents and distributors worldwide. Pricing for DataReach is $100,000 (U.S. list). ChangeDataMove starts at $26,500 (U.S. list) and depends on source and target configurations.

BMC Software Inc. is an industry leader in delivering Application Service Assurance (ASA) solutions -- enterprise-level software and support that improves the availability, performance and recovery of critical applications and data in complex computing environments. BMC Software is the world's 12th largest independent software vendor and a S&P 500 company, with revenues exceeding $730 million in fiscal 1998. The company is headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices worldwide. For more information, see http://www.bmc.com