Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Show Business Software, the English developer of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino business-intelligence software, is working on new iSeries software that will allow administrators to create graphical reports detailing the performance of their iSeries Domino servers. Company spokespeople say the solution, which IBM employees hit upon during a live demonstration at this year's LotusSphere, in Orlando, Florida, is also paving the way for the company to more fully support native iSeries data.

Show Business, a London company barely into its second decade, has carved a niche for itself with its business intelligence software, which resides entirely within the Lotus Notes/Domino platform, as a Domino database. Its primary product, Cuber, fills a need for native Notes/Domino graphical reporting tools. The software features a multidimensional database engine and a collection of preconfigured charts and tables that let users slice and dice and drill down into their Notes data, as well as share data with Microsoft Excel databases.

The company's other product, the Action Driven Balanced Scorecard, goes beyond Cuber to provide decision management capabilities. These two products are sold worldwide through a reseller network and through ISVs (like Texas CRM software vendor Clear Technologies) that embed Cuber into their own applications. The company's biggest reseller is IBM, which also uses the software in-house, Show Business says.

Show Business has always supported the OS/400 server--the second most popular Domino platform behind Windows--as a source of Notes/Domino data. Cuber for Web Browser running on an OS/400 Domino box can also serve the charts and tables built from the multidimensional database. The company has many customers using Cuber with OS/400-based Domino servers, such as Dayton Public Schools, an Ohio school district that uses Cuber to track the academic performance of its 22,000 students.

Some of Show Business' AS/400 and iSeries customers have requested a native OS/400 version of the Cuber multidimensional database, says Cuber product manager Jon Wheeler. In response, Show Business has attempted to develop a wrapper for the C++-based Cuber engine to let it run natively on iSeries iron, instead of solely on Windows NT servers, as it does today. But getting the engine to run well on iSeries was easier said than done, and today the iSeries wrapper is in project limbo.

But in January, at the LotusSphere 2003 show, Show Business found another way to crack farther into the iSeries. Several IBM employees, led by Mike Gordon, used Cuber, running on a PC on the show floor, to build some graphs of performance data from the log of an iSeries Domino server located at the IBM labs in Rochester, Minnesota. The IBMers were interested in looking at data such as e-mail traffic, the size of files downloaded, login and replication information, and network and router traffic, Wheeler says.

To Wheeler's surprise, the IBMers say they had no other way to get some of these statistics; thus, a product idea was born. Show Business' iSeries Stats solution, for lack of a better name, should debut sometime in the third quarter, with a collection of ready-made report templates, Wheeler says. The plan is to give server administrators a single spot to view iSeries Domino performance data, without having to worry about building cubes or report formats, the company says.

But in addition to viewing Domino server information, the iSeries Stats solution could also provide access to other iSeries information stored in Notes, Wheeler says. Although there is still work to be done, this technique could provide the bridge Show Business needs to access native iSeries tables with Cuber. "We're interested in getting other iSeries data," he says. "We're now looking at what information in iSeries is stored in Notes."

Cuber is sold in three different licensing tiers, and the price is based on the number of users and the number of servers (normally one). An installation for 25 users with the Departmental Licensing, for example, would cost about $26,000 with a three-year commitment. For more information on the product, go to www.showbusiness.com.