Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Comshare Inc has come out with Detect & Alert, software agents for use with its decision support and executive information systems. Comshare has developed a variety of agents that sit at the database, selecting information according to rules users set and, using a company’s electronic mail system, send it back to the desktop. At the moment it has agents for Robot for OLAP, which monitors the company’s Commander OLAP Server, Local Robot for Dow Jones, to monitor Dow Jones News/Retrieval but lives at the client end, Remote Robot for Dow Jones, which also monitors News/Retrieval but resides at the server and can serve a number of users, and Robot for Reuters, which monitors Reuters Business Alert; by June it will have Robot for Lotus Notes which will reside on the same machine as the Notes client. Each agent, or robot as Comshare has decided to call them, has the capacity to search according to predefined rules, decide how to present the information and to whom it should be presented. The agents can also attach tools to the information sent to the desktop that might be useful to the end user, for example an Excel spreadsheet with some financial information. Depositing the data sent into something like Excel can be done in a variety of ways: Dynamic Data Exchange, Object Linking & Embedding. The alerts that are sent over electronic mail to the end user are wrapped in a shell of intelligence that contains information on which agent ceated the alert; the rule under which it was created; instructions on how it will appear at the desktop and to whom it will be sent. At the client’s end, the information is presented in the form of a newspaper using NewsAlert Desktop, with a front page of the most significant information and then pages devoted to subject areas that will have been predefined. Information can be presented in text, bit-maps or even video, the limits of this depend on the capacity of the desktop machine. It is up to the user to delete files once they have been read.
Pricing policy
The package Comshare is selling comes with a builder that can be used to define rules, however the company admits that the builder isn’t really robust enough for independent use so Detect & Alert is being sold only as adjunct to Comshare’s other products. This means that at the moment it’s not of any use to a company that doesn’t have Comshare’s other products. The total cost of a package, excluding Commander OLAP, which includes all the agents, 25 end user licences, the NewsAlert Windows client; detection rule builders and an administrator package is #28,500. Comshare says it is adjusting its pricing policy so that companies around the world are each charged the same price for products; it still hasn’t finalised how it will do this but says it is likely that at least companies will be charged in the currency of the country where they have their headquarters. The shake-up of the pricing policy is just one of the changes introduced by new chief executive Wallace Wrathall since he took up the the post 18 months ago. Other changes include the shift of the focus of development onto the markets the company serves, rather than developing products for their own sake. Development is done in Ann Arbor, and in Leicester in the UK. And the company, which likes to style itself The Decision Support Company, is now attempting to present a single front the better to address the needs of its global customers.
