D2K Inc duly announced its wider ERP Empowerment Alliance yesterday, following its partnership with Influence Software Inc (CI No 3,471). The alliance is intended to rope together a set of software houses on the OLAP, query and reporting side of data warehousing that have agreed to use D2K’s data extract, transformation and loading utility, Tapestry. Aside from Influence, the members of the alliance are Infospace Inc, Microstrategy Inc and Seagate Software Inc. Tapestry opens up access to large-scale ERP applications such as SAP AG’s R3 and Peoplesoft, with more under development. It can access MVS mainframe and relational sources. Microstrategy intends to combine Tapestry with its new DSS Broadcaster product, which delivers personalized analysis from a data warehouse via mobile phone, fax, email and pager (see separate story). It will also integrate its DSS metadata with D2K’s metadata. Seagate is working on turnkey reporting and analysis tools for ERP applications. Infospace is working on web- based ERP reporting tools.
