GOVERNMENT

SOMERS, NY -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the industry's first database software to combine online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining technologies into one product. The new data mining functionality of DB2 OLAP Server, termed opportunity discovery, enables companies to quickly gather insight into customer behavior by automatically identifying fluctuations in large volumes of data. For example, customers will now immediately detect unusual results and conditions in budgets, forecasts, or sales figures. The new DB2 OLAP Server will also alert the user to abnormal trends -- both good and bad. It will allow executives to take action sooner by discovering unusual results blurred inside oceans of financial and CRM data that employees may not even know to look for. IBM is the only database vendor in the industry that offers these capabilities today. "Data mining enables enterprises to go far beyond 'naked-eye' analytics -- generating a far deeper understanding of trends, patterns and predictions that can be used to optimize business performance or uncover new business opportunities," said Doug Laney, vice president, META Group. "Bringing data mining to the masses has been the greatest challenge, but solutions like the new opportunity discovery feature of IBM DB2 OLAP Server, that reveal multidimensional data sources to these complex algorithms, will improve the reach of data mining and the return-on-investment in data cubes." ING Antai, a leading insurance company in Taiwan takes advantage of this innovative database software technology to quickly tackle fraud and process claims. "DB2 OLAP Miner adds an extremely useful and easy-to-use tool to our business intelligence environment. It is dramatically cutting our costs and enabling us to pay claims much faster. These capabilities provide us with a competitive advantage that improves our customer retention and acquisition rates for enhanced, long-term profitability," said Austin Wang, section chief at ING Antai. "For example, with DB2 OLAP Miner, it takes just two to three days to analyze fraud claims data, a process that used to take two to three weeks." The new data mining functionality will be available on December 7, 2001 as a new feature DB2 OLAP Server at no additional charge. For more information visit www.software.ibm.com/data