ICL Plc has formed a new business stream aimed at securing a larger chunk of the data warehousing market in the UK and the US. ICL WarehouseInternational will provide a range of customized approaches to data warehousing, bringing together its existing data warehousing efforts under one roof, and adding some new services. The major business of WarehouseInternational will be systems integration services, with ICL choosing from its preferred list of warehousing technologies. These include the Oracle Corp database, Microstrategy Inc’s DSS three-tier data warehousing tool, the Erwin data modeling tool from LogicWorks Inc, ETI Extract from Evolutionary Technologies Inc for data extraction, transformation and loading, and the Clementine data mining toolkit from Integral Solutions Ltd. ICL says it’s also looking at business visualization software from the SAS Institute, and will integrate any other technologies requested by customers. Naturally ICL’s own Goldrush parallel processing hardware, which now supports the latest parallel implementation of the Informix Software Inc database in addition to Oracle, is on the corresponding preferred hardware list, but ICL says it will work with whatever hardware is appropriate. ICL has also set up a partnership with Amdahl Corp, which will be using ICL’s Santa Clara, California-based data warehousing center, and working with ICL Retail on data warehousing contracts. The new services are the try-before-you-buy Business Discovery and Data Discovery services, the first a theoretical business analysis for customers, the second taking a sample of real business data to run on ICL’s own data warehousing set ups in Manchester, UK and Santa Clara, California, in order to illustrate the benefits. ICL is also offering a data warehousing managed service for those companies happier with facilities management, especially its retail customers, for which it has written some custom software under the name Corema. ICL announced that music and video retail business Camelot Music in the US and the UK government’s Customs & Excise, along with a major retailer are its first three customers under the new scheme, all three using Goldrush MegaServer hardware.
