IBM Corp has acquired decision support software technology from NexTek Software, a subsidiary of Denver, Colorado-based decision support consultants Tanning Technology Corp. NexTek’s aim is to commercialize technologies developed by Tanning in the course of client project work. IBM has taken, on undisclosed terms, NexTek’s IW*Manager query management tool for large data warehouses and data marts. It intelligently analyzes all information requests submitted to a corporate data warehouse and prioritizes them using criteria reflecting company business requirements. It also enables real-time workload management and analysis. NexTek introduced the product in April. It runs on Unix-based uniprocessors, SMP and massively parallel systems. IBM says it will integrate the technology into its DB2 Universal Database to strengthen its very large database offerings. Tanning doesn’t retain any rights to the product. Founded in 1994, Tanning has 140 staff and made $26m in revenues in 1997. Founder Larry Tanning claims to have sold and managed the first migration of an IBM 390 class mainframe to a system running Oracle on Unix symmetrical multi-processing machines.
