Products not covered

New products from small vendors are not normally reviewed until they have been on the market for a while and shown that they are likely to survive. Many apparently promising new products have failed to take off, either for product or vendor reasons: this is as likely to be due to weak marketing as product defects, and we prefer to wait until the product has moved to at least a second release and has a number of live customer sites.

Specifically, for a product to be reviewed it needs to have demonstrated commercial success in North America and/or the UK, as these are the most competitive markets for OLAP products. However, we occasionally make an exception if an interesting new product appears to fill an important gap in the market.

We also confine our reviews to OLAP products, so ETL, relational query and reporting tools and data mining products, for example, are not covered. Similarly, integrated end-to-end data warehousing or CRM products are only reviewed if they include a substantial OLAP component. This is not to deny their importance, but just to limit the scope of The OLAP Report.

A number of other products have been reviewed at some stage (see table on right) since The OLAP Report was first published in 1995, but no longer have enough market presence to justify continued inclusion. In some cases this is because they are no longer actively marketed, but they may remain under development largely for the benefit of the existing customer base.

In a small number of cases, products are not reviewed because the vendor refuses to cooperate. In the interests of accuracy, we do not review products in such cases: OLAP products are complex, and we could not do them justice in the absence of vendor interaction.

The main such vendor is SAS Institute which has consistently avoided having its SAS OLAP server reviewed, despite often claiming to be an OLAP market leader (though there were relatively few active SAS/MDDB users in The OLAP Surveys, far less than for servers like Essbase, Analysis Services, MicroStrategy, PowerPlay, etc). We did review CFO Vision for a period, but have now discontinued it as well, both through its lack of market success and because SAS Institute was unwilling to provide enough information for us to update the review.

SAS Institute did present its MDDB OLAP server to us, but our initial reactions were not positive. The same was true of its predecessor product. The company subsequently told us that it did not wish to be considered as an OLAP vendor and would not submit its products for review. This was apparently because it believes that it would not be in its interest for its OLAP products to be compared directly with those from other vendors. We must therefore advise buyers of OLAP products and applications not to consider the SAS OLAP offerings unless they are part of a larger SAS solution in which OLAP plays only a very minor role.

We do not normally review OLAP offerings from ERP and CRM vendors unless they are sold independently. This is because such products are usually weak and of no interest to anyone other than loyal buyers of the vendors’ operational applications, who often buy them in a bundled form. However, due to increased interest in SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), we now review it in The OLAP Report.

OLAP products no longer reviewed, with links to the final version of the discontinued reviews

We covered ShowCase Strategy for several years, until it was acquired by SPSS in February 2001. Since then, our dealings with SPSS have led us to conclude that it would no longer be advisable to recommend the ShowCase products, so the review has now been frozen.

The former Information Advantage was acquired by Sterling Software in 1999, and then Sterling itself was acquired by CA in 2000. We had reviewed IA Eureka until Sterling acquired it, but since the double change of ownership, the product has died and we would not recommend anyone to consider using it. Our review is therefore frozen.

Decision·ism Aclue was reviewed until April 2000, but we dropped coverage when it became clear that there was little market demand for the product. Broadbase Software acquired Decision·ism at the end of 2000 and discontinued Aclue.

Acuity/ES was reviewed until February 1998. We felt, however, that the new Rubicon product appeared not to have been launched with any conviction, so we dropped coverage. The company was subsequently wound up.

Kenan Acumate was reviewed until it became clear in 1996 that the product was not being marketed any more. The subsequent takeover by Lucent has not changed the position.

SAS CFO Vision was reviewed until February 1998, but coverage was dropped both because of its small market share and also the vendor’s unwillingness to cooperate. For the same reason, the newer SAS OLAP products are not covered.

EMS EIS-Eureka was covered until July 1997, but it was dropped after it became clear that the product was not being used by more than a very few customers. However, we may review the company’s new PocketAnalytix product.

IBI Focus Fusion was briefly covered for a short period, but the product never took off, so we dropped it. We do, however, cover WebFOCUS.

MetaCube was covered in the first edition of The OLAP Report in 1995, before Informix bought STG. Informix subsequently neglected the product, so we dropped coverage until version 4.0 in early 1998, when Informix persuaded us to reinstate it. However, the product continued to make no market impact, so we dropped it again later that year; the product was subsequently discontinued. IBM’s acquisition of Informix has not changed the position.

Pilot was a significant OLAP vendor in the 1980s and early 1990s, and we reviewed it from the first edition of The OLAP Report in 1995. But successive changes of ownership and cutbacks meant that by the end of 1998, the company had little market share or impact, so we stopped updating the review. Then, in August 2000, the now much-shrunken company was sold by PEH to Accrue, and we assumed that the Pilot Software name was destined to disappear forever. Surprisingly, however, in June 2002, Pilot Software reappeared in the guise of Pilot Software Acquisition Corporation, a new company formed by members of the Pilot management team backed by institutional investors. We currently do not plan to resume reviewing its products.

Speedware Media was covered for a while, but we have not updated the review since July 1998.

Show Business EIS was reviewed until July 1997. Although it had some limited success in the Lotus Notes market, we felt that it did not offer enough for mainstream OLAP users to consider, so coverage was discontinued.

Relational Matters Syntagma (now DecisionStream) was briefly covered for a period when it seemed likely to develop into a ROLAP engine. However, the vendor (now owned by Cognos) did not pursue this route, so we dropped coverage.

Track Objects was covered, as well as its predecessor product, but it never gained enough market share to justify continued inclusion.