Program Designed To Help Business Partners Tap Vast Market Opportunity

SOMERS, N.Y (February 23, 1998) – Demonstrating increased commitment to partners in the business intelligence arena, IBM today announced an initiative to assist leading solution providers with extensive technical and marketing support. The new Business Intelligence Partnership Initiative offers leading-edge products, services and solutions, powered by IBM’s award-winning DB2 Universal Database and its Visual Warehouse, DB2 OLAP Server and Intelligent Miner families. It is designed to help customers build state-of-the-art data warehouses from interactive on-line analytical processing (OLAP) analysis to sophisticated data mining applications.
Business intelligence — the gathering, management, analysis and distribution of data — enables companies to glean knowledge from information databases and external data sources and then use that knowledge to make strategic decisions about which markets to enter, which customers to court and which products to promote in an effort to increase profitability. Analysts estimate this market will grow to as much as $70 billion by the year 2000.
As part of this initiative, IBM will be packaging and/or integrating its offerings with technologies from many of the industry’s leaders, notably Arbor Software, Business Objects SA, Cognos and Vality Technology Inc. More than 150 partners, including at least 24 channel partners, will also offer their solutions with IBM solutions amid IBM technical and marketing support for solutions developed with DB2 and IBM tools. Through the Business Intelligence Partnership Initiative, offered through the Solution Developer Program and BESTeam, IBM business partners can provide customers with more complete solutions.
“This important initiative will open new windows of opportunity for industry partners, systems integrators and tool vendors, in the exploding business intelligence market,” said Tom Kendra, vice president, data management marketing, IBM Software Solutions. “The real measure of success is the benefit our mutual customers derive from the number of applications, and the number of trained services personnel in the marketplace, available to assist them in addressing their information requirements. IBM’s Visual Warehouse and Intelligent Miner families, along with the technology offered by leading industry software providers are the building blocks for complete and flexible solutions that satisfy customers.”
The Visual Warehouse family of software packages is designed to help companies quickly and successfully build, manage and analyze data warehouses and data marts. Included in the family are Visual Warehouse Version 3.1, Visual Warehouse OLAP Version 3.1 and complementary products from IBM and its partners. Most recently, the Visual Warehouse family has been extended to address requirements for sophisticated extract, cleansing and transformation needs through integration with products from partners.
IBM’s Intelligent Miner family helps customers identify and extract valuable information from their enterprise data assets. Intelligent Miner for Data Version 2.1 searches for hidden information stored in traditional files, databases, data warehouses and data marts. The newest version of IBM’s award-winning Intelligent Miner features a much improved user interface, increased parallelization, new platform support, statistical functions, a new neural net value prediction technique and optimization of algorithms. Meanwhile, Intelligent Miner for Text extends the reach of IBM’s data mining capabilities to harvest information from text documents and data sources.
As part of the Business Intelligence Partnership Initiative, IBM will conduct a no-charge technical education seminar series, FAST START, from March 31 through April 2, in Santa Clara, CA. There, partners will be able to learn much more about IBM’s leading-edge business intelligence products, including Visual Warehouse, Intelligent Miner and DB2 OLAP Server, work with key IBM developers, and also present their own solutions. Other no-charge technical hands-on sessions will be held worldwide throughout the year.
The initiative includes partner informational services, technical support services such as access to workstation software, seminars and other educational materials. It also includes product beta programs, the IBM Technical Advocate initiative, and teleconferences. Partner marketing services include sales and marketing kits, product marketing and sales training activities, discounted DB2 Magazine advertising, and other joint marketing initiatives

Source: IBM