Pine Cone Systems: Data-Warehousing Experts

By John Foley

n data-warehousing circles, few authorities are as well-known as Bill Inmon. A co-founder of Prism Solutions, featured speaker at industry events, and author of three dozen technical books, Inmon is sometimes called the father of data warehousing. Given his fame, it's surprising that this database guru's latest venture has received virtually no buzz. It's a startup called Pine Cone Systems Inc.

Inmon founded Pine Cone in Englewood, Colo., in 1995. The company now has about 35 employees. Pine Cone introduced its first products earlier this year, a suite of tools for managing data warehouses. They include soft ware modules for tracking data-warehouse content and usage, charging departments based on usage, and monitoring data that gets refreshed or updated. "We haven't found anybody that doesn't recognize the need for administration and management tools in the data-warehouse environment," says Inmon. "All we care about is whether a company is feeling pain with its warehouse-performance pain or cost pain."

Pine Cone's products have been snapped up by a few large companies that seek ways to ease the management of their fast-growing warehouses. Early users include MCI, Tele-Communications Inc., Texas Instruments, and US West.

"We definitely see demand for these products," says George Ferguson, program manager for Hewlett-Packard's OpenWarehouse products. "The place we see real interest is with enterprise customers-large corporations who have a certain level of sophistication and a higher degree of complexity in their data-warehouse environments." Ferguson expects the market for Pine Cone's products to broaden as smaller companies join the warehouse phenomenon. "The midmarket will catch up," he says. HP has an informal relationship with Pine Cone, but a distribution agreement could be around the corner. "Stay tuned,"advises Ferguson.

Ready For Challenges
Pine Cone intends to be ready. The private company has received venture-capital funding, and in April it appointed Dennis McCann, formerly president of Business Object's Americas subsidiary in San Jose, Calif., to be its president and CEO. "Our biggest challenge is a budget issue more than anything else," says McCann. "Nobody has data-warehouse-management tools in their IT budget."

Pine Cone's marketing partners are a winner's list of data-warehouse suppliers. They include Informix, Oracle, Red Brick Systems, and Sybase.

John Ladley, an analyst with Meta Group, rates Pine Cone's chances for success as good. "The database companies haven't delivered anything anywhere near what's required to manage a data warehouse environment," he says. "It' s a sorely needed part of the data warehouse environment."

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