Oracle Corp wants to cut the high price of entry into data warehousing tools with a set of packaged data mart suites. On Monday, Oracle announced two products, the Oracle Data Mart Suite and the Oracle Data Mart Suite-Sales & Marketing, which will both be available under Windows NT in around a month and a half, and under Unix, HP-UX, IBM Corp AIX and Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris in about six months. Oracle says that the suites have been received well by industry hardware vendors including Hewlett-Packard Co, Unisys Corp, Compaq Computer Corp and Digital Equipment Corp. Running on Pentium Pro systems, the suites come in one integrated package that includes the database, software, tools and data mart documents, along with initial training that will enable users to spot trends and patterns in their business. Both of the suites are based around the Oracle7 Enterprise Server, providing data management for the data mart, and what the company claims to be a sophisticated query and reporting tool used for determining the best data access path. The Oracle Data Mart Suite is intended to be used on a general basis, while the Sales & Marketing version is more specific and, according to Oracle the first of its kind to be integrated on to one compact disk. Via an analysis application, the product enables users to determine exactly what products are selling, where and why, with sales and marketing ‘knowledge’ contained within. A visual tool for designing the data mart has been included in both suites, along with a graphical tool that will enable users to extract information from data warehouses and operational systems. Oracle says that it’s not using the bundles as an excuse to sell an expensive set of services, something it claims many of its competitors do. Oracle will work with database marketing and warehouse specialist Acxiom Corp, which will provide external marketing data to businesses in the US wanting to build a customer-orientated decision support data mart, enabling additional access to information such as age, marital status, income level and occupation. Prices start at $50,000 for the base version, $125,000 for Sales & Marketing.
