BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 1999-- The analytical software industry's leading vendors have joined forces to create the Analytical Solutions Forum (ASF), a non profit industry consortium whose mission is to establish solution-oriented performance criteria and interoperability requirements within and between classes of decision support tools (including but not limited to OLAP or On-line Analytical Processing, data mining, data visualization, text processing, and decision analysis). The founding members of the ASF are Applix, Brio, Business Objects, Chroma, Gepetto's Workshop, Hyperion, IBM, Informix, Intel, Knosys, Maximal, Microsoft, NCR, OLAP@Work, Oracle, Simba Technologies Inc., SPSS, Sun Microsystems, Visual Insights, and Whitelight Systems Inc. "Corporations can no longer survive on traditional transaction data-based reports." said Erik Thomsen, Chairman of the ASF and Chief Scientist at the DSSLab in Cambridge, MA. "There clearly needs to exist an industry body with participation of the end user community to ensure that analytical applications provide the level of interoperability and performance required for enterprise-wide deployment." "The Analytical Solutions Forum provides vendors with an opportunity to enhance the integration between their offerings," said Bruce Press, VP Systems Integration Operations, IMS Health. "Delivering more streamlined solutions that in turn result in lower maintenance cost and quicker deployment time, since we won't have to spend valuable time and resources ensuring the tools work together." The key initiatives for the Analytical Solutions Forum will be accomplished through special interest groups (SIG's) that are open to any ASF member. There are currently three ASF SIGs: a Benchmark SIG, a Conformance SIG, and a DSS Interoperability SIG. Their missions and near term deliverables are briefly described below: See http://www.tasf.org/news/nov1.html
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