Data mining, data warehousing, decision support and knowledge discovery make up the universe of D S * ( dsstar ), the only executive business newsletter supporting strategic employment of these technologies.

The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** November 17, 1998: Vol. 2, No. 46 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:

OPTIMIZING THE MARKETING MIX
BY STEVE WALDSCHMIDT
OPEN GROUP ADOPTS DRDA AS AN INDUSTRY STANDARD
SGI & MICROSTRATEGY INTEGRATE DATA MINING & OLAP

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

OPTIMIZING THE MARKETING MIX
by Steve Waldschmidt, modeling analyst, Trajecta Inc

Today's corporate leaders must direct their companies through an increasingly complex and risky business climate. Critical decisions often must be made very quickly and with incomplete information. The determination of pricing strategies, capital budgeting, sales force distribution, and marketing activity levels all fall within this paradigm. To complicate the decision-maker's problem, budget constraints and manpower limitations must also be carefully considered. How can these leaders make the appropriate trade-offs and drive their companies to success?

THE OPEN GROUP ADOPTS DRDA AS AN INDUSTRY STANDARD FOR OPEN DATABASE INTEROPERABILITY

The Open Group, an IT industry consortium for promoting open technologies, announced that its members have adopted the Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) protocol as an industry standard for database access interoperability. "The approval of the DRDA protocol as a standard responds to a specific demand by the customer members of The Open Group", said Allen Brown, COO and Acting President of The Open Group. "It represents another step in creating trust in multi-source interoperability and enabling customer choice with confidence."

SILICON GRAPHICS AND MICROSTRATEGY TEAM TO PROVIDE INDUSTRY'S FIRST INTEGRATED DATA MINING/OLAP SOLUTION

Silicon Graphics, Inc. and MicroStrategy Incorporated announced that they will jointly develop and market the first integrated visual data mining/on-line analytical processing (OLAP) solution. The integration is designed to accelerate time to discovery, or insight, for knowledge workers in such data-intensive industries as government, financial services, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, retail and manufacturing.

TEIRESIAS ON THE HACKER TRAIL

A computer algorithm used by scientists to unlock information from complex DNA strands has a new, more mundane role: detecting hackers as they try to penetrate networks. Developed at IBM's Watson Research Laboratory in New York, the algorithm looks for repetitive patterns in sets of data, such as a network's server logs. Dubbed Teiresias, after the blind seer in Greek mythology, it imposes no restrictions on searches and will spot any pattern that occurs two or more times, even those that are very faint.

PINE CONE SYSTEMS INTRODUCES THE INDUSTRY'S FIRST METADATA MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE BASED ON A DISTRIBUTED METADATA ARCHITECHTURE

Pine Cone Systems, Inc. introduced its Meta Exchange software which for the first time allows corporate enterprises to exchange, synchronize, view and manage both technical and business metadata across heterogeneous technologies in distributed environments.

IT ORGANIZATIONS GEAR UP FOR DATA BUILDING

The data warehousing market is enabling a new round of choices for IT organizations looking for ways to manage their data. Oracle Corp., Informix Software Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are rolling out products for designing, building and using data warehouses.

IBM ANNOUNCES RELATIONSHIP MARKETING SOLUTION FOR INSURANCE INDUSTRY

IBM has announced the worldwide availability of DecisionEdge* for Relationship Marketing, Insurance, a business intelligence solution for insurance companies that allows them to gain a comprehensive view of customers and helps determine how individual customer relationships can be maintained and enhanced.

USERS SEEK TO MAXIMIZE DW POWER, MINIMIZE PROBLEMS

Although many vendors may be preoccupied with Microsoft Corp.'s entry into data warehousing via the arrival of SQL Server 7, users attending the recent Data Warehousing Institute's Leadership conference in Orlando, Fla., were more focused on their own projects and problems.

SURVEY PREDICTS BOOM IN DW BENEFIT FOR UK TELECOMS

Many UK companies are on the verge of reaping commercial benefits from use of information that they are gathering and storing in ever larger data warehouses, according to a survey conducted by MicroStrategy.

ACTION ITEMS

Unica Forms Consulting Division
Unica Technologies, Inc. announced that it has formed a Consulting Division to help customers integrate advanced data mining technology into their marketing campaigns.

SPSS Announces SPSS 9.0 for Windows; New Data Access and Analysis Capabilities Boost Leading Statistics Software
SPSS 9.0 for Windows features enhanced graphical analysis capabilities, new statistics and new data access tools which combine to simplify the acquisition and analysis of these large amounts of data from an almost limitless number of sources.

SPSS Announces AnswerTree 2.0; Features Performance and Data Access Improvements
Heads or tails? Flipping a coin is one approach to decision making, but for people looking for more reliable results, there's AnswerTree 2.0, decision-tree software from SPSS Inc. AnswerTree identifies segments, patterns and results-driving factors in data to help users make better decisions. SPSS announced the newest release of its desktop data mining package, and expects to ship the product in November 1998.

auxilium Offers Early Adopter Program for SAP Software Integration
auxilium inc., a pioneer supplier of packaged Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) software designed to optimize interoperability between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and engineering management applications, legacy systems and critical supply chain partners, has announced an early adoption incentive program for companies who need to integrate an SAP application environment with other manufacturing applications across the enterprise.

American Software Announces Strategic Alliance with Pilot Software to Offer Intelliprise Data Mart for AS/400 Market
Pilot Software, a leading provider of Web-based and client/server Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) business intelligence solutions, and American Software have announced an agreement under which American Software will use Pilot's technology and OLAP engine to deliver Intelliprise data marts for the AS/400 market.

Oracle Announces Acquisition of One Meaning Inc
Oracle has announced that it successfully concluded the acquisition of One Meaning Inc., a privately-held technology leader for enterprise meta data management solutions headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. One Meaning Inc. was founded in 1989. This acquisition complements Oracle's Common Warehouse Meta Data strategy for enabling the sharing of data across multiple data warehousing products.

Carleton Announces Pure-View for Customer-Centric Data Warehousing and Customer Relationship Management
Carleton has announced Pure-View, a complete data integration solution for customer-centric data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Pure-View addresses the growing need for organizations to have a complete, integrated view of their customers in order to meet critical marketing, sales, and customer service challenges.

systemfabrik Launches One Hour Warehouse Program
systemfabrik, Inc. has announced that it has created and launched the industry's first One Hour Warehouse Program to provide IT professionals with a fast and simple way to begin building data warehouses. The new program coincides with the release of Warehouse Workbench Version 3.0, systemfabrik's data extraction and transformation (ETL) toolkit.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"(W)ithout comprehensive, synchronized meta data, your warehouse will die." Data Warehousing Institute.

• Wayne Eckerson, vice president of technology services,

CONFERENCES & SEMINARS 11.17.98

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