TSGA and ShowCase Build Partnership
With the 1998 Fall Common Conference and Expo as their stage, TSG Applications (Atlanta) and ShowCase Corp. (Rochester, Minn.) announced a partnership to integrate Lotus Domino and data warehousing on the AS/400.
Designed specifically for ShowCase Strategy clients, TSGA’s Domino Warehouse Conveyor/400 (DWC/400) is intended to provide users with the ability to extract information from data warehouses and deliver it to Domino.
“DWC/400 combines the strengths of an AS/400 data warehousing solution with a Domino database,” says Jeff Vance, principal, TSGA. DWC/400 is actually a form of database middleware that talks to both the data warehouse and Domino, within a single server, he adds. The solution is different from Lotus NotesPump in that the NotesPump interacts between a database and Notes, rather than a data warehouse and Notes.
DWC/400 works on the API level, rather than on the ODBC level, “which is not nearly as powerful or robust,” according to Vance. “Since APIs operate on a much lower, machine level, they provide a faster avenue for communication,” he says.
DWC/400’s capacity to interoperate with ShowCase’s Strategy is significant because, together, they provide a scaleable solution implemented on a single server, according to Vance.
With DWC/400, IT professionals can use Notes to distribute analyzed cube data throughout an organization, Vance says. The solution requires an existing Notes database, but in the future, TSGA hopes to offer on-the-fly Notes database building. The solution also requires native Notes to be on the same AS/400 as the database.
The partnership between ShowCase and TSGA plays to each company’s strengths, according to Tom Rydz, director of worldwide business alliances for ShowCase. “While TSGA has always been strong in Domino technology, ShowCase’s strength is in the area of data warehousing on the AS/400. [ShowCase Strategy users] can now take a snap shot of a cube and distribute that to Domino,” he says.
This alliance also provides another choice for the companies’ customers, whether they run in client/server or server-centric environments, Rydz notes.
DWC/400, which has minimum requirements of V4R2 and Version 2.0 of Strategy, is expected for general availability in January of next year, at a cost of between $25,000 and $35,000, depending upon processor size.