Brio
Technology Enters the ETL Market
M.
Reed - November 24, 1999
Event
Summary
"Brio
Technology (Nasdaq: BRYO) today announced Brio.Impact 4.0, an upgraded version
of the industry's first analytic application designed specifically for revenue
optimization. Available immediately, Brio.Impact 4.0 includes an integrated
extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) capability for faster implementation
that reduces deployment time by as much as one third. In addition, Brio.Impact
4.0 provides new, more powerful personalization capabilities and an enhanced
user interface, enabling customers to more easily customize and administer their
application."
Brio
states that the product will help companies optimize their business model to
reach and sustain market advantage. Brio.Impact is designed to embed the knowledge
and best practices of a company's top performers together with the organization's
business model in an intuitive analytic platform. The product is designed to
allow business users to "see all the underlying factors that affect market growth
so that they can adjust assumptions, strategies, and tactics to better align
with market behavior."
To
provide the Extract/Transform/Load capabilities, Brio has partnered with systemfabrik,
headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. According to Gerrit Kalb, CEO of systemfabrik,
"Brio.Impact addresses a complex business problem that requires that the right
set of data be available in the right form at the right time."
Market
Impact
In addition to the integration of ETL capabilities, the product features a number
of new features that are targeted to enhance a user's experience. Brio has enhanced
and simplified the graphical user interface and allowed for customized news
pages. Brio states that the product "is the only off-the-shelf revenue optimization
application with integrated capabilities for assessing current revenue performance,
diagnosing all anomalies, enabling unified action, and evolving with the business
in order to continually meet corporate revenue goals."
User
Recommendations
Customers considering business intelligence tools with integrated extract/transform/load
capabilities should consider Brio on a long list of candidates. The vendor should
be questioned about the level of integration between the reporting and ETL capabilities
supplied by systemfabrik. Since the two vendors share different code bases,
there may be issues with the software's interaction. Companies in the manufacturing
sector should also consider this product, since it was initially targeted at
high-tech manufacturers, and includes a packaged library of industry metrics.