Press: Prism and Cognos Simplify Meta Data Management

PRISM SOLUTIONS AND COGNOS ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC ALLIANCE TO SIMPLIFY DATA WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT Product Integration Provides Users with Single Source of Integrated Meta Data; Addressing Biggest Challenge to Data Warehouse Implementation SUNNYVALE, Calif. and BURLINGTON, Mass.- February 6, 1996 - Prism Solutions, a leading provider of data warehouse management software solutions, today announced that it has formed a strategic alliance with Cognos, the leading provider of business intelligence tools, to link their product technologies. As a result, Prism Directory Manager 2.2 will create a link for sharing meta data - business or technical "road map" information about the data in a data warehouse - with Cognos' Impromptu database reporting tool. Prism Directory Manager provides a customizable environment for integrating and managing the proliferation of both business and technical meta data into a single Information Directory - analogous to a library's card catalog system - for the data warehouse environment. This unique integration allows corporate business analysts to navigate data warehouses easily and independently, reducing the need for IS support and increasing the quality of business decisions. By establishing a common layer of consistent and accurate meta data between the two products, Prism and Cognos now allow joint customers to more effectively locate and use warehouse information and better understand changes to the information over time. In addition to their joint development work, these two key data warehouse vendors have also aligned their marketing efforts. 1996 plans include co-hosting a series of data warehouse seminars nationwide, featuring their integrated product solution. Additionally, both Prism and Cognos are involved in the Metadata Coalition, a consortium of vendors and users interested in defining standards for meta data access and interchange between different types of enterprise data management tools. "For Citibank, the partnership between Prism and Cognos is very exciting because it will provide a series of benefits for the users of our first corporate data warehouse," said Ken Shapiro, a vice president with Citibank N.A. "Our users will have the potential to fully understand the information in the warehouse with little or no IS involvement. From the end-user perspective, the business definitions and technical meta data, such as transformation rules, will be tightly integrated with the application's data and will be a point-and-click away from Impromptu. This type of functionality is a first for Citibank." According to Jim Ashbrook, president of Prism Solutions, "Among the challenges data warehouse users face is understanding what data exists in the warehouse, where to find the data, what queries can be used to access the data and what underlying business assumptions have been made about the data over time. Prism Directory Manager provides the meta data to answer these questions. By developing meta data links with the industry's key data warehouse vendors, we ensure that data warehouse users can access a single source of consistent and accurate meta data for more confident analysis and decision making. We are pleased to partner with Cognos, a pivotal player in the decision support arena, to jointly develop a real solution for integrating and sharing data." "This is a strategic alliance for Cognos," said Jean-Pierre Jauvin, Cognos' director of business development and strategic alliances, Business Intelligence Products. "By partnering with Prism, we are able to provide our customers access to shared meta data and deliver an integrated data warehousing solution." Data Warehouse Benefits Companies across multiple industries are building data warehouses as a solution for more effective management of their information assets. The data warehouse addresses the fundamental differences in operational and informational processing by extracti