The OLAP Report Authors

Nigel Pendse

Carsten Bange

Nigel Pendse is lead author of The OLAP Report and principal of OLAP Solutions and has had more than 30 years experience as a user, vendor and independent consultant in the areas now known as OLAP and Business Intelligence. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, and as a consultant, advises both users and vendors on OLAP product issues. He has degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering, and was international marketing director of a BI software firm until 1994. He is based in London, England.

He does not invest or trade in the stock of any OLAP vendors.

Carsten Bange is founder and managing director of Business Application Research Center (BARC), which publishes The OLAP Report. He analyses the market and tools for Business Intelligence and Data Management since 1995 and advices organizations in all questions of Business Intelligence strategy and tool usage. He holds a PhD in management information systems and was CEO of a consulting firm before starting BARC in 1999. He is based in Würzburg, Germany.

Richard Creeth, who wrote several of the early reviews in The OLAP Report, is president of Creeth, Richman and Associates Inc, a consulting firm that specializes in implementing financial OLAP applications and is a reseller of a number of OLAP and complementary products. Well-known as a conference speaker, he has a degree in physics, is a chartered accountant and previously worked for a leading accounting firm. He is based in Wilton, Connecticut.

Rod Newing, who wrote most of the case studies, is a chartered accountant. He spent seven years with one of the big six accounting firms, followed by eight with a large oil company and then seven as a management consultant. He is now a specialist writer on executive computing matters, based in London.

John Keeley is a specialist in Excel add-ins for OLAP who has his own BI consultancy based in Kent, England. His main focus is the insurance industry.

Frank A. Buytendijk, who wrote the sections on OLAP administration and the data delivery agreement, was at the time of writing, a consultant and project leader with Synergetics IT Consultants in the Netherlands. Before Synergetics, he worked for an OLAP vendor as an application developer and then for a large bank as co-ordinator of the internal management support systems group. Besides consulting, he researches and speaks on organizational, functional and technical aspects of OLAP.

Between them, the reviewers have experience of using, implementing, selling, marketing, specifying, product management and selecting OLAP products. They have experience of senior management and they are specialists in OLAP, rather than writers of research reports or general purpose industry watchers and, based on their own experience, are able to ask perceptive, difficult questions of software vendors. Typically, the grueling interview process lasts at least ten hours (often in several sessions), and involves a number of senior people from the vendors, representing senior management, engineering and marketing. As befits an international publication, the interviews have been conducted in a number of countries, often in the vendors' head offices or development centers.