Showcase Forms BI Alliance with Fiserv
In a move that matches the information-dense world of financial services with the number-crunching capabilities of business intelligence, Fiserv Inc. and ShowCase Corp. have announced a strategic agreement, according to published reports. Under the terms of the agreement, ShowCase (Rochester, Minn.) will market and integrate its Strategy business intelligence tools with the Fiserv International Comprehensive Banking Systems (ICBS).
"This agreement will extend the Fiserv solution, allowing us to offer new products which provide extensive management information analysis capabilities," says Alex Groenendyk, president of Fiserv CBS International. Fiserv (Brookfield, Wis.) is a provider of information management services and software solutions for more than 7,000 banks, credit unions, mortgage firms and savings institutions worldwide.
"ShowCase products enable Fiserv to provide world-class tools to satisfy the business intelligence needs of our customers," Groenendyk says. "This alliance [formalizes] a commitment between Fiserv and ShowCase to offer financial institutions a comprehensive set of management tools that enable them to uncover valuable information needed for critical business decisions."
The agreement is expected to offer both companies the ability to drill into an organization's information to clearly identify and measure which products and services are profitable. "Our companies have a similar commitment to leveraging technology to solve business problems," says Tom Rydz, worldwide director of ShowCase business alliances. "By combining the strength of Fiserv solutions with ShowCase Strategy, clients can perform analytical queries against their data using the power of the AS/400 and the flexibility of an OLAP-based tool."
The deal with Fiserv comes about a month and a half after ShowCase announced a reselling and technology licensing partnership intended to expand IBM’s business intelligence solutions to the AS/400 platform.
Under the terms of that reseller agreement, IBM offers customers ShowCase Strategy, including Essbase/400 for data access, information analysis and intelligence, as part of IBM's core business intelligence (BI) solutions offerings. ShowCase Strategy is designed to provide BI solutions through integrated technology, enabling developers to perform data extraction, transformation, distribution and analysis with the centralized security and maintenance of a server-based architecture.
--L. Greenemeier