IBM’s Visual Warehouse and Coglin Mill’s RODIN Data Warehousing will be integrated to bring the strengths of each product together to deliver a highly sophisticated tool set that will create and maintain simple to extremely complex, small to very large, departmental to enterprise-wide business intelligence systems.

IBM’s Visual Warehouse version 3.1 was released in February 1998 and encompasses significant enhancements over previous versions.  Notably the integration of IBM’s industry leading metadata repository, previously known as DataGuide, was part of the new version of Visual Warehouse.

Coglin Mill’s RODIN has been enjoying significant success since being introduced to the USA from Australia just over 2 years ago, especially among the larger and more complex AS/400 sites.  In September 1998 Coglin Mill released its latest version of RODIN (V2R2) that raised the bar for all others to follow in the areas of data acquisition and data management.       

"IBM's business intelligence solutions are based on best-of-breed technology integration," said Janet Perna, general manager of data management, IBM Software Solutions Division.

"Our customers must have confidence in the integrity of the data stored in their data warehouses.  The combination of IBM's DB2 products with Coglin Mill's RODIN will provide IBM customers with a complete set of data warehousing tools on the AS400 that can meet that need and that can work together efficiently and effectively.”

Coglin Mill’s CEO, Allen Perry, says “This integrated offering will deliver a level of simplicity and sophistication not available in any other offering on any other platform, at a price that is within the budget of every small, medium and large business.  This new offering will take Visual Warehouse, a fully functional datamart builder, into the category of a highly sophisticated enterprise-wide solution for all businesses.”

The integrated product will be able to source data from a large number of different databases and file systems, across most of the popular hardware / operating system platforms, to create and maintain the central data repositories on IBM’s extremely popular and successful AS/400e Series computers.  The latest release of the AS/400, with its integrated operating system and DB2 database, has established it as the leading technology in the business intelligence marketplace.

Customers can already implement either Visual Warehouse or RODIN, or both, today in their existing forms and will be able to implement the integrated solution as an automated upgrade when it becomes available.

IBM Global Services, Intelligent Solution Inc. of Boulder CO, and other certified business intelligence specialists are already fully trained and available to assist customers implement these products either individually or in an integrated environment.

The first release of the integrated products is expected to be available in the first quarter of 1999 and will be promoted and marketed by IBM and Coglin Mill through new and existing channels.