Event Summary
"Montreal, Quebec--December 14, 1999 - Sand Technology Systems International
Inc. (NASDAQ: SNDT), a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions,
announced today that it is partnering with Acta Technology, Inc. (Acta) to
provide guaranteed and cost-effective BI results for users of SAP R/3. Acta
is a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for both internal decision
support and business-to-business eCommerce. SAP R/3 is the widely implemented
ERP (enterprise resource planning) system from SAP (NYSE: SAP). Both Sand and
Acta will be featuring the Nucleus RapidMarts as preferred solutions for the
increasing numbers of customers seeking effective ways to handle BI applications
with SAP. Using the power of Sand Technology's Nucleus Exploration, Acta's
RapidMarts,a suite of packaged data marts for analysis in specific business
areas, can be quickly implemented without ABAP programmers and without the extensive
expertise and hardware typically required for SAP BI implementations. Using
Nucleus, RapidMarts also allow for the full integration of decision support
applications involving both SAP and non-SAP data. The Nucleus-powered RapidMarts
are available for a broad range of SAP applications, including Cost Analysis,
Sales Analysis, Human Resources, Inventory Management, and Account Analysis.
RapidMarts are powered by ActaWorks, Acta's award-winning extraction, transformation,
and loading (ETL) platform (DBMS Magazine: Editor's Choice)."
Market
Impact
As customers increasingly realize how difficult it is to extract value from
the data in their ERP systems, the need for products that can move this information
into integrated, enterprise-wide data warehouses and tighter-focus data marts
has become increasingly evident. Acta has specialized in the Extract/Transform/Load
(ETL) of data from ERP databases for 5 years, and has active alliances with
SAP and PeopleSoft. Acta's SAP BW (Business Information Warehouse) interface
has also been certified by SAP. Sand Technology's vertical focus should allow
a tight integration between the products.
User
Recommendations
Customers considering data warehouses or data marts with a tight vertical focus
on enterprise resource planning should definitely consider Acta and Sand's technology
collaboration on a short list of vendor offerings. The stated lack of need for
ABAP (SAP's proprietary fourth-generation language) programmers is also a major
positive. Before any decision is made, both vendors should be closely questioned
on the level of integration between the products, and how tightly their code
bases are aligned. Sand and Acta have stated that they will provide "guaranteed
and cost-effective BI results for users of SAP R/3", and should be asked to
give this guarantee in writing.