ShowCase Announces Essbase/400 Enhancements

Looking ahead to the new millenium, ShowCase Corp. (Rochester, Minn.) announces it will make enhancements to Essbase/400, a component of its STRATEGY suite of business intelligence solutions, available to the AS/400 market during the first quarter of 2000.

The announcement coincides with Hyperion Solutions Corp.'s (Sunnyvale, Calif.) release of Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server 6. ShowCase, which licenses Essbase/400 from Hyperion, upgrades the product each time Hyperion releases a new version of OLAP server. "We take their base product and port it into an AS/400 environment," says Roger Bottum, VP of marketing for ShowCase.

According to Bottum, ShowCase decided to add OLAP server functionality to the AS/400 platform three years ago. Since then, ShowCase has accumulated 300 Essbase/400 customers. "It's important for AS/400 users because the business intelligence and OLAP area is what most AS/400 companies are turning their attention to after focusing on ERP for the last five to seven years," he says.

Some of the enhancements in Essbase/400 will include: extended application breadth, for rapid deployment of AS/400-based OLAP applications such as e-business and customer relationship management (CRM); improved performance and scalability, for accessing and analyzing data while achieving instantaneous query response time over client/sever or the Web; and sophisticated analytics that perform profitability analysis, statistics and business forecasting.

-- J. Martin

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