GOVERNMENT

SOMERS, NY -- IBM today announced the industry's first database software to offer customers a combination of business intelligence technologies that will allow them to both gather detailed answers to challenging queries in real-time and analyze trends from volumes of data to gain immediate insight into the performance of a business. The new version of IBM DB2 OLAP Server, version 8.1, will combine Hybrid Analysis, a powerful new (OLAP) Online Analytical Processing technology with data mining functionality offering significant improvements in the areas of scalability, performance, ease of use, and administration. Hybrid Analysis combines the high performance of multidimensional OLAP with relational scalability, provides users real-time analytics, and enables a broader range of applications while speeding up the analysis of data from as much as twenty to sixty percent. IBM's closest competitor in the database market cannot offer customers these combined capabilities matched with unparalleled scalability and performance. By combining hybrid analysis with data mining capabilities, customers can take advantage of metrics that drive their business. Customers can immediately spot trends and conditions in budgets, forecasts, or sales figures identified through DB2's data mining software features. A customer in the banking industry will be able to both analyze specific transactions made by one customer, and also do a broader analysis of a wide variety of data at a branch location like the total number of deposits for one year certificates of deposit or the number of new customer accounts in the last 90 days. Retailers will be able to determine the number of products sold by specific salespeople at a particular store and rapidly view dollar sales by region, by month, and by quarter. A retailer will also be able to view real-time data to get immediate answers to general questions about how sales may be performing on a given day in New York City versus San Francisco. The new hybrid analysis and data mining capabilities are available immediately in DB2 OLAP Server version 8.1 which will include DB2 database version 7.2 in the package to support the product.