IBM Corp has turned to Brio Technology Inc to fill the gap in its data warehousing product suite, Visual Warehouse. The computer and services giant has selected California-based Brio’s Enterprise product family as the front-end desktop application to enable users to interrogate and analyze information held in data warehouses and data marts. Brio’s VP corporate marketing, Nick Halsey, said there was a boom in the data warehousing market but that customers were increasingly demanding integrated solutions. Up until now, IBM has been able to offer the back-end products; the database, the extraction, cleansing and OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) tools, including the OEM-ed Arbor Essbase software, but it’s never had a front-end solution to allow users to access the data, he said. Under the agreement, IBM will bundle a five-user package as part of its Visual Warehouse. It includes: two client licenses of BrioQuery Explore, which enables users to access and analyze the data warehouse; three licenses of the web client, Brio. Insight, which has all the features of Explore only you can access the data over the Web; one license of Brio. Quickview, a slimmed-down version of Insight which only allows you to view and query data over the Web and BrioQuery Designer for an administrator to manage the whole environment. IBM will pay Brio a royalty for every license of the Brio bundle it sells. Halsey said the agreement was very significant for Brio. It’s a worldwide agreement for a start, and IBM’s customers are the ones investing the most in this kind of technology, he said, This gives us access to a market with a stamp of legitimacy we could never have had on our own. IBM’s marketing budget is bigger than our whole company! But it’s not the company’s first big win. Brio has already established a large number of partnerships and OEM deals with industry heavyweights such as Computer Associates Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Sybase Corp, all of whom use its software as the user interface to their back-end data warehouse solutions. And Halsey said the company would announce another partnership, with a major ERP vendor, in September. He added that Brio was busy working on the next version of its Enterprise product family, due early next year, and concentrating on customizing its applications for specific vertical markets such as education, healthcare and manufacturing.
