Companies need to make intelligent business decisions to differentiate and succeed so it follows they should want tools which can extract business intelligence from their data. Touting numbers such as a $70bn market by 2000 – so says Palo Alto Management Group – IBM Corp today gets the business intelligence bit firmly between its teeth, offering new integrated hardware, software, consulting and services for gathering, managing and analyzing data, plus a dedicated team of 2,500 business intelligence sales, marketing and service staff. IBM will offer vertical industry solutions, data mining and analysis tools, warehouse products, hardware and services. Solutions include DecisionEdge for finance and insurance; Discovery Series for banking and telecommunications; business analysis tools for JD Edwards and SAP users; and SurfAid data mining for analyzing web site use. Lead software partners are Arbor, Business Objects, Cognos and Vality. There’s a new version of the Intelligent Miner application with an enhanced interface, new algorithms and additional platform support; Visual warehouse packages for building, managing and analyzing data warehouses; plus DB2 OLAP Server – including Arbor Essbase. New algorithms under development by IBM Research include a FLASH Fast Look-up Algorithm for Structural Homology for identifying similar, but not identical data. Teiresias is a new pattern discovery algorithm. The new low-end SP servers will be pressed into service as ideal business intelligence hardware (CI No 3,350).
