INFORMIX ACCELERATES DRIVE TO CAPTURE
HIGH-END DATA WAREHOUSE MARKET
Informix Corporation, a leader in enterprise database-powered solutions, has unveiled further details of its aggressive data warehouse strategy with important new products and services. Informix has asserted that it intends to dominate the high-end open systems data warehouse space by providing the most powerful platform for developing successful decision support systems and significantly expanding the Informix data warehouse consulting team as a delivery vehicle for analytic solutions.
Helping to drive the data warehouse strategy, Informix Decision Frontier Solution Suite intends to feature analytic applications from Seagate Software and a new version of Informix MetaCube ROLAP Option that provides connectivity to Oracle databases, enabling customers to better leverage disparate sources of data for competitive advantage.
Informix is also expanding its consulting services with the new Decision FastStart Program for advanced enterprise resource analysis. The new offerings build on the momentum generated with this month's announcement of Informix's intention to acquire Red Brick Systems, Inc. and are significant milestones in Informix's plan to provide the industry's most comprehensive decision support solutions.
"Informix is serving notice that we are serious about being the best data warehouse company in the industry," said Bob Walters, vice president, business development, Informix Data Warehousing Division. "Proof of our commitment is demonstrated through our solid installed base of existing data warehouse customers, the competitive edge of our Decision Frontier Solution Suite, our anticipated acquisition of Red Brick Systems -- and now these powerful new additions in products and services."
Enhancing the value of its customer solutions, Informix is planning to provide data warehousing applications for specific business problems through an expanded strategic relationship with Seagate Software. Seagate Holos, a market-leading analytical development environment, will natively connect to Informix Dynamic Server with MetaCube ROLAP Option to power analytic applications as part of Decision Frontier Solution Suite.
With this anticipated expanded partnership, Decision Frontier Solution Suite will be able to deliver business-focused analytic applications such as Customer Profiling, Budgeting and Forecasting, KPI analysis, Balanced Scorecard, Sales Automation, and Fraud Management.
The new analytic applications will go beyond the capabilities of packaged query and reporting tools to reflect the unique aspects of each individual organization and provide truly responsive, interactive and accurate pictures of enterprise data. The powerful Seagate Holos application development environment ensures that complex business processes are modeled and represented to business users in ways they can use and understand, enabling the analytic applications to be precisely customized to understand a user's business. These analytic applications are expected to be available in the first half of 1999.
Decision Frontier Solution Suite, the embodiment of Informix's solutions focus, includes a powerful database engine (Informix Dynamic Server); a sophisticated data extraction, transformation, and loading tool (InfoMover); the most complete ROLAP environment for multidimensional data analysis and administration (MetaCube ROLAP Option); and an enterprise reporting and distribution tool (Seagate Crystal Info) -- delivered with Decision FastStart consulting services for rapid implementation.
Partners agree that Decision Frontier Solution Suite provides the powerful development environment they need to quickly develop applications for their customers. "Decision Frontier Solution Suite is specifically designed for rapid deployment of business-critical decision support applications and is an ideal platform that we can use to expand our business," said Emergent CEO, Ken Rudin. "This set of products combined with our services will allow Emergent to more quickly build sophisticated analytic applications and enables us to expand our customer offerings via data warehouse templates and applications." Emergent is a leading professional services firm in the area of scalable application design and development.
ComSoft, with its TelcoMind marketing-oriented data warehouse solution for telecommunications organizations, is another partner leveraging Informix data warehouse products and tools. "We rely on the scalability, parallelism, and high load performance of Informix Dynamic Server to support our customers' multi-million call volumes combined with the analysis flexibility of MetaCube for our ROLAP analysis and reporting," said Dovik Peer, president of ComSoft. "We look forward to Informix Decision Frontier Solution Suite, with the added data transformation capabilities of InfoMover, to enhance our solution."
To expand its high-end, open systems offering, Informix is for the first time offering Informix Dynamic Server with MetaCube ROLAP Option for non-Informix databases. This will enable customers in multi-vendor decision support environments to fully maximize the return on their overall data warehouse investment.
For more information, see http://www.informix.com