Sagent Technology, developer of an integrated environment for building and accessing data marts, has announced Version 3.0 of the Sagent Data Mart Solution, its data mart software package. The Sagent Data Mart Solution Version 3.0`s Web OLAP component provides a customisable interface, along with the functionality and performance appropriate for "data explorers". "This represents a large and fast-growing community of Web users whose data access requirements, until now, have generally not been addressed by current business intelligence offerings," says Susan Andre, MD of newly appointed Sagent distributor 360 Solutions. "This group of users tends to access data using a browser and is comfortable interacting with data in their reports to find trends and exceptions in the business. This group does not generally create queries or perform complex data analysis," Andre adds. Version 3.0 of the Sagent Data Mart Solution represents a key component in Sagent`s product strategy to "democratise" corporate data access by providing tools that cater to the specific needs of different communities of end-users. Sagent plans to expand the base of users who can take advantage of corporate information stored in data marts. "Over the past year, we have become one of the leaders in the data movement marketplace, and with Version 3.0, we now have a robust offering that will allow us to compete aggressively in the Web access arena," says Ken Gardner, president and CEO at Sagent. "By providing data movement and data access capabilities, we will continue to fulfil our vision of delivering an end-to-end data mart solution." Version 3.0 has a familiar and simple user interface that allows data explorers to drill and slice-and-dice via a Web browser. Sagent has also included in its latest version a component-based, customisable user interface and very high performance to specifically address the data explorer market. "Sagent`s Web analysis product is very appealing because it offers a clean, simple user interface that exposes additional functionality when users are ready and able to take advantage of it," says Wayne Eckerson, director of the Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse Service at the Seybold Group. Customisable user interface Sagent has designed Version 3.0 with a component-based user interface that can be customised to create a specific "look and feel" for the end-user. When organisations implement a Web-based data access solution, they often want to make sure the Web pages look like their company`s Web pages, not the Web pages from their business intelligence vendor - especially if the users are customers and suppliers. With the Sagent Data Mart Solution Version 3.0, businesses can design a user interface that provides a comfortable and familiar environment for data explorers and other general business users. To make it easy for Web designers - who are not typically experts in data access or queries - to create a customised interface, Sagent offers a series of programmatic interfaces. For simple edits, Web designers can modify the sample application provided out-of-the-box by Sagent. Alternatively, designers can develop an application from scratch by using the simple programmatic calls available to Sagent`s ActiveX controls, or by editing Active Server Pages to customise HTML output. All of these tasks can be performed using popular Web development tools. For Microsoft development environments (Front Page 98 and Visual Interdev), Sagent provides a wizard-like Design Time Control to make the process easy. Web performance With Version 3.0, the Sagent Data Mart Solution has also addressed a common problem in Web access that can be a "make-or-break" issue for users at any level, but particularly for less technical users. Sagent has always treated performance as a multi-tier issue - optimising performance by doing most of its processing at the Sagent application server tier, with complementary processing at the other tiers. With Version 3.0, Sagent has extended this approach by leveraging the latest Internet technologies to optimise performance at the Web server and the Web browser tiers. Sagent supports the use of Active Server Pages to perform server-side processing, and employs ActiveX controls to present and process data at the browser tier. Sagent also uses the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the communication mechanism between the Web server and the browser.
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