February 21, 2000

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Vendors Offer New Ways To Analyze Data
Informatica and Ardent Software debut business-intelligence products

By Rick Whiting and Jeff Sweat

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Informix Makes E-Commerce Intelligence Push (12/6/99)

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nformatica Corp. and Ardent Software Inc. this week will expand beyond their offerings for building data warehouses with several business-intelligence products.

Informatica will offer three analytical application suites. Its eCRM suite will include modules for sales, marketing, and customer service and is designed to provide insight into customer trends by measuring areas such as sales performance. Its eBusiness Operations suite helps manage internal logistics, finance, and human-resources operations by examining order fulfillment and manufacturing rates, and budgeting effectiveness. The eProcurement suite for purchasing, auctions, and supplier and inventory management analyzes material acquisitions, return rates, and schedule reliability.

Utility company PacificCorp Inc., an early adopter of eProcurement, is using the suite to analyze materials-management application data in its SAP R/3 implementation. "It allows us to get a quick snapshot of where the inventory is," says Fort Holcombe, data warehousing manager for the Portland, Ore., company.

The suites are scheduled for availability before July, with pricing starting at $500,000 each.

Ardent this week will unveil E-business enhancements to its DataStage line for data integration and transformation. New capabilities include clickstream analysis, a methodology for building E-business data warehouses, and capture and analysis of customer E-mail messages. New additions also include Extensible Markup Language read/write and XML metadata export capabilities, near-instantaneous analysis of Web data, and support for the Linux operating system and the Perl development language.

Ardent will make most of its new offerings available by April, with the remaining products available by July. Pricing has not been set.

Informix Corp. is in the process of acquiring Ardent, and the companies plan to integrate their E-business offerings, says Mikael Wipperfeld, Ardent's data warehouse marketing VP.

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