Silicon Graphics Inc and Microstrategy Inc have teamed up to develop what they claim will be the industry’s first integrated data mining and on-line analytical processing product. The move, announced yesterday, is designed to supplement an organization’s existing enterprise reporting system by helping users drill even further into their corporate data. SGI and Microstrategy said the solution was aimed at data-intensive industries such as government, financial services, retail and manufacturing. Mario Schkolnick, director of engineering, strategic business applictions division said the two companies had got together because customers were requesting closer integration between their OLAP and datamining tools. Under the partnership, he said SGI will integrate its data mining software, MindSet, with Microstrategy’s DSS (decision support) suite, specifically its DSS Objects (server side) and DSS Agent (client interface) tools. He said it was still too early to say whether the tools would be combined into a brand new application or kept separate and tightly integrated. One possibility, he said, could be that SGI’s MindSet is integrated into DDS Agent. His comments came during the first day of Microstrategy’s DSS World show in Washington. At the show, the two companies put together a demonstration showing how a future, integrated product might look. Under the scenario, users would define the data and produce a report using DSS Agent and pass it on to Mindset for further analysis. But Schkolnick said it could equally end up working the other way round. He added that finding a common platform will be one of the problems the two have to overcome: Mindset is designed for SGI workstations, while the DSS suite sits on NT. But Schkolnick said he expects the development teams to have resolved these issues be ready to release a final product some time next year.
