ShowCase Corporation Provides Infinium Customers With Quick-Start Template For Smarter Financial Analysis Of Enterprise AS/400 Data

Responding to market demand for a fast, effective financial data mart solution, ShowCase Corporation has announced that its Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator now supports Infinium Software's transaction systems. The Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator augments ShowCase STRATEGY, the only end-to-end enterprise business intelligence solution on the IBM AS/400 platform, by providing organizations with an analytical business template that accelerates the implementation of financial data marts, resulting in effective data analysis in just weeks versus months.

With nearly 90% of Infinium customers leveraging the AS/400 platform for their OLTP systems, ShowCase's Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator is the logical choice to enable these organizations to minimize their total cost of ownership, reduce implementation risk, and provide a solid, extensible foundation for building analytical applications.

"Organizations recognize that the AS/400 is a leading platform for enterprise business intelligence/business performance management," said Elizabeth Shahnam, program director, Application Delivery Strategies, META Group. "As these organizations implement a broader range of analytical applications that allow users to perform richer functions, such as forecasting and profitability analysis, they will require robust business intelligence/business performance solutions that effectively satisfy organizations' growing analytical demands."

ShowCase's Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator enables business managers to interactively explore their financial information and address critical business issues such as product profitability, business segmentation, income statement and balance sheet reporting, and financial variance analysis. Additionally, the Deployment Accelerator reads Infinium chart of account structures to provide critical synchronization between an organization's underlying business structures and its business intelligence environment.

"The Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator gives our customers an effective tool for implementing best practice solutions that focus on a specific business function: financial decision-making. With ShowCase's Deployment Accelerators, data marts that used to take months to deploy now take only weeks," said Roger Bottum, vice president of marketing for ShowCase. "The Infinium integration responds to customer demand for access to more enterprise data sources, enabling more accurate and effective financial decisions."

About ShowCase STRATEGY Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator

ShowCase's Infinium Financial Analysis Deployment Accelerator expands upon ShowCase STRATEGY, the only end-to-end data warehousing solution on the AS/400 market. The integration uses three critical components to accelerate the implementation of financial data marts:

• Configurable data model: The solution's pre-defined "best practice" data model optimizes management analysis by combining industry-standard reporting needs with the customized financial analysis requirements of individual organizations. With the data model, customers can quickly meet both common, key financial reporting requirements, such as income statements, balance sheets, and profitability and variance analysis, and unique financial decision-making needs by extending the model to create customized applications.
• Extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) routines integration with Infinium transaction system: By mapping to the specific data fields and account structures in the Infinium General Ledger, these pre-defined ETL routines enable rapid implementation and provide proven integration that promotes consistency and accuracy of management information.
• Customizable business views: The analytical views provided in the Deployment Accelerator capture key performance indicators for financial analysis and address the critical financial reporting needs of most organizations.

About ShowCase Corporation

ShowCase Corporation is the leading provider of business intelligence solutions for AS/400 customers. ShowCase products enable enterprise-wide distribution of information and allow end-user access and analysis through familiar applications and Internet browsers. Founded in 1988, ShowCase has more than 200 employees worldwide, and serves over 2,000 active clients. ShowCase sells its products in the U.S. and internationally through a direct sales force and channel partners, including IBM, software application vendors, distributors, and resellers. The ShowCase Web site can be found at http://www.showcasecorp.com.