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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 02, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 22
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Systems/Enterprise:
XMLA COUNCIL GAINS MOMENTUM AND ADDED INDUSTRY SUPPORT
The XML for Analysis (XMLA) Council has announced the success of the first
public XMLA Interoperability Event, which took place at The Data Warehouse
Institute (TDWI) conference in San Francisco, May 11 – 14. The goal of this
event was to provide more detail into the efforts and progress of the XMLA
specification, and to further demonstrate the importance of XMLA as a leading
open, industry standard in the Business Intelligence and Business Performance
Management marketplaces. The event, sponsored by the XMLA Council, showcased
early release versions of XMLA-compliant products from 18 Business
Intelligence and Business Performance Management solution providers, including
Applied OLAP, Arcplan, Aspirity, Brio, Comshare, Crystal Decisions, Hyperion,
Intellimerce, Microsoft, Microstrategy, MIS, Panorama, ProClarity, SAP, SAS,
Simba Technology, SPSS, and Temtec. The event followed the XMLA Council's
second successful Interoperate Workshop, hosted by Simba Technologies, in
early April 2003.
"The council's ability to show interoperability in a public forum signals that
they have reached an important milestone in the evolution of the standard,"
said Andrew Braunberg, senior analyst of Current Analysis. "It also highlights
growing momentum and market acceptance of the open, scalable, standards-based
specification among business intelligence and business performance management
vendors."
XMLA Support and Council Membership Continues to Grow
In addition to the Interoperability Event(s), momentum for and support of XMLA
continues to grow. The XMLA Council has received applications from over 60
companies from around the world to become members of the XMLA Council. Since
the first XMLA Council Interoperate Workshop, held last November, the XMLA
Council has added three new members, including Bandwiz, Informatica and
Intellimerce.
"We are excited to see the level of industry support and overall momentum that
the XMLA specification has gathered, and welcome the new members," said Rich
Clayton, vice president of Business Performance Management product strategy at
Hyperion. "XMLA has the potential to dramatically impact both the Business
Intelligence and Business Performance Management categories and drive the
development and implementation of new applications deployed through Web
Service architectures."
"The tremendous support for and momentum of the XMLA Council signals the
industry's desire for a single standard that allows multidimensional databases
to be accessed as a Web service," said Stan Sorensen, director of SQL Server
product management at Microsoft. "With the growing number of participants, the
XMLA Council will provide an industry standard that incorporates the
experience and best practices of leading business intelligence companies."
"We at SAS are excited to see interest in XMLA accelerating throughout the
business intelligence community. Businesses appreciate the Council's work in
building an open, cross-platform standard," said Jim Metcalf, director of
foundation technology strategy at SAS. "XMLA is allowing vendors and customers
alike to quickly solve business problems rather than being sidetracked by
interoperability roadblocks. These early results are driving the growth of the
XMLA Council, resulting in a stronger standard for all involved."
The new council members join a growing group of industry leaders who have
previously announced their support for XMLA. The importance of the growing
list of companies supporting XMLA underscores the need for Independent
Software Vendors (ISVs) to adopt XMLA as an open, industry standard, as well
as the importance of customers to evaluating the purchases they are making in
order to ensure that their investments will be able to interoperate with the
leading products in the industry.
The primary drivers of the XMLA specification include the founders Hyperion,
Microsoft and SAS. XMLA Council members also include Alphablox, ANGOSS
Software Corp., Applied OLAP, Applix, Inc., Aspirity Inc., ArcPlan, Inc.,
Brio, Business Objects, Cognos, Comshare Inc., Crystal Decisions, DSS Lab,
Inc., INEA, Lawson Software, MicroStrategy, MIS AG, MJM Consultant Corp.,
Panorama Software Systems, ProClarity, Inc., SAP AG, Silvon Software, Inc.,
Simba Technologies, SPSS Inc., Temtec and Vigilance, Inc.
Interoperability of XMLA on Display
As part of the recent Interoperability Event(s) the XMLA Council has not only
demonstrated the interoperability among the various ISVs that make up the
Council, but also the interoperability between XMLA and J2EE architected
solutions and other cross-platform technologies. Given that XMLA is built on
standard Web services technologies and is fundamentally a standard Web
services query and reporting interface for Business Intelligence platforms, it
is proving itself to be an open and cross-platform industry standard that
works well in either .NET or J2EE environments. As an example of the cross-
platform interoperability that is enabled via XMLA, one of the Council
members, MIS AG, demonstrated both Java and DHTML based Consumers that use
XMLA to seamlessly connect to XMLA Providers at the recent Interoperability
Event(s).
Next Version of XMLA Specification on the Horizon
In parallel with the recent Interoperability Event(s), the XMLA Council is
actively working on enhancements to the current XMLA specification. Such
enhancements include, support for mdXML, the standard linguistic interface
being defined as part of XMLA, and support for Data Mining Providers.
About XMLA
The XML for Analysis (XMLA) advisory council is made up of a number of leading
business intelligence software vendors that have announced their support and
backing of XMLA, a set of XML message interfaces that use the industry-
standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to define data access
interaction between a client application and an analytical data provider
working over the Internet. The council has jointly published an XMLA
specification that allows corporate developers, third party tool vendors, and
other partners to query analytical data providers in a standard way. The new
standard is expected to accelerate the adoption of Internet business
intelligence software and increase the market for those technologies. To learn
more about XMLA, please visit our Web site at www.xmla.org.
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