Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

California Software, which controls a good portion of the market for midrange migration utilities, is now entering the business intelligence marketplace with the introduction of a new product called BABY/OLAP. The new software is designed to complement the company's BABY migration tools, and as such the target audiences for BABY/OLAP are users and software developers who have used California Software utilities to move their S/36, AS/400, and iSeries applications to Windows machines.

California Software President Carol Conway Dewees said the Irvine, California, software company started developing BABY/OLAP about two years ago, in response to demand from customers that use the company's migration utilities. "We did an analysis of the marketplace to find what those people are really looking for," she said. "One of the things that comes up, among software developers, is they want a better ability to access data, to integrate data, and to have better decision-making tools."

California Software looked at other multidimensional databases and OLAP products on the market and decided to develop a unique product from scratch, led by developer Ariel Iriarge, Conway Dewees said. She said the "80/20 rule" (otherwise known as the Pareto Principle, described by 20th century Italian economist Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto) is at work among other OLAP tools, in that about 80 percent of the output of business intelligence packages is created by 20 percent of their functionality. As a result, development of BABY/OLAP was concentrated in making it simple to implement, easy to use, and less expensive than the competition.

BABY/OLAP runs on Microsoft Windows servers and includes a multidimensional engine for creating data warehouses and a browser-based client for developing reports from that data. The software is able to extract data from DB2/400, DB2, Informix, Progress, Microsoft SQL Server, Excel, and other ODBC/OLE DB data stores, and then load it into its proprietary multidimensional database management system. The package also includes basic "shell" reports to get users started slicing and dicing their data. "It's a GUI representation of data, in addition to a GUI representation of datastreams," Iriarge said.

The 32-bit Windows application also shares a special affinity for the proprietary data stores created when California Software's migration utilities are used to move an RPG application to a new platform, officials say. California Software developed its own migration and rehosting tools for OS/400 and S/36 environments, BABY/iSeries and BABY/36. In January, the company also gained worldwide distribution rights over two similar migration utilities, Unibol400 and Unibol36, which were developed by a former UniComp subsidiary called Unibol. The Unicomp subsidiary maintains the distribution rights for the Unibol software in the Western Hemisphere, provided it changes the name of the software.

BABY/OLAP has been beta-tested by a California Software customer, a software developer who migrated an AS/400 loan production software package to another environment. Conway Dewees said this customer used BABY/OLAP to analyze data about loan rates, the credit-worthiness of individuals, and the source of loans, and to create reports that show how those different dimensions correlate with one another.

California Software offers training for BABY/OLAP at its headquarters in Irvine. The company says people can learn to use the software in as little as three days. BABY/OLAP runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000 operating systems. Licenses are available for the server and client components of the software and will typically range from $20,000 to $30,000 for a full implementation, company officials said.