Kenan Technologies Inc is the latest company to enter the ‘we can pull all your corporate data together out of disparate databases, in a user-friendly manner’ stakes. This week the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based developer launches Acumen ES for Windows, an executive information system-cum-decision support system-cum-database access tool. At its heart is a multidimensional database named Multiway, optimised for the swift presentation of a data in a number of views. The company publishes the front-end applications programming interfaces to this database, together with a Visual Basic toolkit for those who want to roll their own client applications, and also has an off-the-shelf executive information system browser for the less adventurous. Multiway is not designed as a replacement for existing corporate databases, instead it sucks in existing data and stores it for executive information system use; the company describes it as information retailing software – providing a place where customers can browse what is available in the big warehouses at the back-end. If that sounds like a lot of data duplication, the company says that only key data and views are actually stored – as the user drills down to get more detailed information, the system begins to generate ad hoc queries to the original data sources. Data can be gathered from DB2, Informix, Ingres, Sybase, Oracle, or DEC Rdb relational databases as well as any flat-file databases. If Multiway solves the problem of displaying different data views at speed, that still leaves the problem of linking in the original databases. For this, the company has come up with Focal Point Integrator, a tool that helps pinpoint data sources and map relational fields onto the dimensions implemented in Multiway. Apart from the executive information system browser, alternative front ends include Excel and Improv tool kits for analysts who want to view the Multiway-held data using their favourite spreadsheet, and Acutrieve, a generic decision support system workbench. If Multiway looks familiar, it is because the core database engine has been around for nearly 10 years in various guises. Back in the mid-1980s the Mars Group bought the rights to a multidimensional database named Stratagem which it expanded for in-house use. Kenan took the product on in 1990, since when it has been selling the product as Acumen, with a basic command interface suitable for hard-core analysts. The latest incarnation, Acumen ES, adds the executive information system capabilities, the open application programming interface set and the Focal Point Integrator. It also adds its own language to the Multiway database for server application development. The back-end runs under Microsoft NT; Ultrix and VMS running on DEC Alpha APX machines; OSF/1 and IBM’s OS/2 AIX MVS and VM. Client systems can be Windows 3.1; DECwindows; X Window, Motif and OS/2.
