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                        DSS News (tm)
                July 3, 2000--Vol. 1, No. 5
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     Check the new "look" at http://www.dssresources.com
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Featured:
* Ask Dan! -- What are the top ten DSS products by revenue?
* What's New at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Stories
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Ask Dan!
What are the top ten DSS products by revenue?
In Reply to: Mr. Carmin Scotti 29 June, 2000 Top DSS Products
: Mr. Power,
: Do you know of a source for DSS market information?  Specifically, 
: I'm trying to identify the top ten DSS products, by revenue, and 
: their prices and sales volumes.
You are asking interesting questions that are difficult to answer.
I track a wide range of DSS products in various categories including 
Data Warehouses, OLAP, EIS, Spatial DSS, Groupware, Statistics and 
Modeling, and Intranets and portals. The DSSResources.COM vendor 
directory lists more than 60 vendors and I am sure that there are 
hundreds of DSS products on the market so the task of tracking them is a 
major undertaking.
IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are trying to dominate segments of the DSS 
marketplace, but they have not yet succeeded.  A number of privately 
held companies and many smaller publicly held companies have significant 
market shares. Collecting market share data is hence very difficult.
I have not tried to do a detailed product analysis by sales.  For 
publicly held companies some data is available on broad product 
categories like business intelligence, data warehouses and OLAP.
I roughly estimate that Decision Support Systems market including 
products, consulting and other services is valued at more than $10 
billion in sales when broadly defined.  Pendse and Creeth estimate 
the OLAP market in 1999 was $2.5 billion and sales were growing at 
20-40% annually.
According to an article in InformationWeek (6/13/2000) titled "Business 
Intelligence On Desktops", the International Data Corporation (IDC) 
"estimates sales of business-intelligence tools were $3 billion in 1999 
and will grow at about 34% a year, reaching $12.7 billion in 2004". 
Check http://www.iweek.com/.
Hyperion, Oracle and Cognos are major OLAP vendors.  The other companies 
I track most closely are Brio, Business Objects, Comshare, 
Microstrategy, SAS Institute, SPSS, Pilot Software, Gentia and Informix.
In the past 12 months, Microsoft has had significant sales of its OLAP 
server. This is disrupting market shares in the OLAP segment. Modeling 
tools are sold by many vendors and Lotus and Microsoft are significant 
players in the groupware market.
For more details on market share for OLAP products I recommend you check 
the OLAP Report Web site by Nigel Pendse and Richard Creeth at URL 
http://www.olapreport.com/.
For information on product pricing, you will need to contact vendors.  
Another recent InformationWeek (6/13/2000) article title "Web-Based 
Tools: Not Always Cheaper" had some pricing information for a few 
popular Web-based OLAP/DSS products. Business Objects SA charges $1,195 
per user for either fat-client or thin-client software. The Web-based 
Brio.Insight is $495 per user. Cognos Inc.'s Impromptu Web Reports and 
Query are about $300 per user for 100-user licenses. 
 
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NOTE to DSS News Subscribers: If you have more information on this 
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What's New? at DSSResources.COM
07/02/2000 Posted Using E-mail for Decision Support Tutorial on 
Tutorials page.
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DSS News Stories
06/30/2000 President Clinton signed a bill in Philadelphia giving an 
online signature the same legal validity as a signature in pen and ink. 
Clinton said, "Online contracts will now have the same legal force as 
equivalent paper contracts." 
06/29/2000 Revenue Optimization Council formed by leading Business and 
Academic Organizations for the adoption of the Revenue Process 
Optimization Business Methodology. See press release. 
06/28/2000 Software Magazine published its 18th Annual Software 500 
ranking. A list of the Software 500 companies of 2000 is at 
softwaremag.com. The list can be searched and sorted by primary business 
sector, financial ranking and alphabetically. 
06/27/2000 Business Objects announced MDX Connect(TM), an interface to 
Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services. It is based on the OLAP@Work 
query engine that helps non-technical users answer questions based on 
multidimensional data. 
06/27/2000 IBM introduced IBM Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) 
Version 7.1. IBM EIP integrates information from a very broad range of 
sources (see figure). Heritage Mutual Insurance is testing IBM EIP. It 
plans a corporate portal that lets Internet users conduct secured 
inquiries for data, including documents, photos and voice. Check 
http://www.ibm.com/software/eip . 
06/26/2000 Sagent Technology announced a strategic partnership with ESRI 
to deliver real-time access to third-party content using Sagent's 
Centrus Real-Time Web-based information service. The partnership 
provides integration of a leading real-time information service and key 
GIS software. 
06/26/2000 Oracle announced a new software product called IPortal that 
enables companies to link databases across the Internet.
06/26/2000 Microsoft announced Microsoft® C# ("C sharp"), a modern, 
object-oriented programming language built from the ground up to exploit 
the power of XML-based Web services on the .NET platform. Check 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/ . 
06/23/2000 COMDEX/Fall 2000, LINUX Business Expo 2000, November 13, 2000 
to November 17, 2000 in Las Vegas. Three keynotes confirmed so far Bill 
Gates on Sunday, November 12, Larry Ellison on Monday, November 13, and 
Dick Brown on Wednesday, November 15. Check 
http://www.key3media.com/comdex/ 
06/22/2000 May 2000 Decision Sciences Institute Decision Line, Volume 
31(3), is in press and posted on the DSI website. For more information 
visit http://www.decisionsciences.org .  
06/22/2000 Microsoft Corp. unveiled the vision and road map for its next 
generation of software and services, the Microsoft(R) .NET platform. 
Bill Gates called it the most ambitious project since the Windows OS. 
The goal is to integrate software with the Internet and make it easier 
to swap information between computing devices. 
06/21/2000 Global Crossing Conferencing Division is offering real-time 
and on-demand Internet broadcasts of audio and video
conference calls. The Webcast service allows customers to broadcast 
meetings or conferences in a convenient, flexible and cost-effective 
manner to anywhere in the world. Webcast was developed with Akamai 
Technologies. Webcasts may be accessed live or archived for later 
retrieval. Visit http://www.themeetingson.com 
06/21/2000 Brio Technology announced that its Impact(TM) revenue 
performance optimization (RPO) application has been implemented by 
Hewlett-Packard. HP's Business Store for North America uses Brio Impact 
to analyze product bundles. 
06/21/2000 Gentia Software announced its expansion into central Europe, 
with the opening of a new office in the Vienna Stock
Exchange. Recently, Gentia signed contracts with new customers in 
Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands, including Karstadt, one of 
Germany's largest department store chains. 
06/20/2000 MicroStrategy® Inc. announced its customer, GE Capital Fleet 
Services, a subsidiary of General Electric Company, won DM Review 
magazine’s World Class Solutions Award in the category of Business 
Solutions and Analytic Applications. Check http://www.dmreview.com 
06/20/2000 Sybase, Inc. announced that Sybase® Enterprise Application 
Server (EAServer) won a Java Developer's Journal (JDJ) Readers' Choice 
Award for Best Java Middleware Product.
06/20/2000 AMCIS 2000 advance program is available in the Programs 
Section of the conference website, 
http://www.csulb.edu/conference/ais2000 . Conference is August 10-13, 
2000, in Long Beach, CA. Ten Tutorials and Workshops are scheduled on 
Thursday starting from 1:00 PM.
06/19/2000 The Data Warehousing InstituteTM (TDWI) announced the winners 
of its 2000 Best Practices in Data Warehousing Awards competition. Check 
http://www.dw-institute.com . See press release. 
06/19/2000 AlphaBlox announced a merger with Halfbrain.com. They hope 
merger will launch an entirely new way to deliver Web-based personalized 
decision making applications and will transform how data is accessed, 
shared, analyzed, and presented online. See Press Release. 
06/19/2000 SPSS announced Data Entry 2.0. It makes designing surveys and 
data collection easier. New features include drag-and-drop survey design 
and dynamic renumbering. 
06/19/2000 AMCIS 2000 advance program is available in the Programs 
Section of the website, http://www.csulb.edu/conference/ais2000 . 
Conference is August 10-13, 2000, in Long Beach, CA. Ten Tutorials and 
Workshops are scheduled on Thursday starting from 1:00 PM. 
06/19/2000 Information Builders announced the availability of its 
WebFOCUS v. 4.3 Business Intelligence Solution for the IBM AS/400.