By Anita Byrnes
Japan recently experienced its first data warehousing exhibition. Consultants and vendors vied to demonstrate new alliances and to educate the Japanese market on the possibilities of data warehousing. NTT Data Communications, the systems integration arm of Japan’s telecommunications major Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, appears to be trying to have a foot in all camps. It showed three data warehousing products, Red Brick Systems Inc’s Warehouse; Databridge, a data migration tool set product being developed by Stanford Management Group Inc; and relational On-Line Analytical Processing tool DecisionSuite from Information Advantage Inc. None of these companies have formal distribution relationships with NTT Data yet, although Red Brick said one was being negotiated with a view to being finalized in two to three months. Biaggio McPhee of Red Brick’s Colorado office, in Tokyo for the exhibition, said the Japanese market looked huge for data warehousing, and that he saw a pent-up demand for a software product that was easy to use and that would support a large data warehouse. NTT Data staff were demonstrating Information Advantage’s DecisionSuite, saying it was suitable for relational databases with many users, and tied in well with UniSQL, which NTT Data sells in Japan.
NTT’s specification
Stanford Management Group’s representative, Edward Thometz, project manager for the Pacific Rim, said that the company was developing a data migration tool set, according to NTT’s specification. It will be called Databridge in the US, but because of legal problems with that name in Japan, it is still nameless there. NTT Data will own the product but Stanford Management will have marketing rights in Europe and the US. Release is scheduled for this autumn. Mr Aoyama of NTT Data said the product would find most takers in the financial sector, including Japan’s commercial banks, where it could be used for better risk management. The product will permit huge data quantities to be handled, enabling managers to extract data as desired, the company said. The so-called father of data warehousing, Bill Inmon of Prism Solutions Inc, attracted a large attendance to his presentation on the basic strategy of data warehousing. Later he said that he felt that Japan was several years behind the US, but only slightly behind Europe in its awareness of data warehousing. In Europe some very good results had been achieved, especially in the UK and the Netherlands. [Japanese] users now have some appreciation of the problem and the systems available, and the market should develop quickly, he said. Arthur Anderson Japan has been the agent for Hyperion Software Corp’s Enterprise tool for several years now. From a slow start, sales really took off after the so-called Japanization was completed two years ago, and the number of people involved in software sales and support has grown from three to 35. Arthur Andersen has sold the software to more than 50 corporations, including Toshiba Ltd, IBM Corp and Fujitsu Ltd and users such as Teijin and department store Takashimaya. Enterprise is priced at about $138,000. The tool can map any data source and provide a range of management and statutory reporting functions, according to the company.
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