dynaSight (arcplan)

A wide ranging application building tool for both relational and OLAP databases

THIS PAGE REPRESENTS ONLY A VERY SHORT EXTRACT FROM THE FULL REVIEW.

TO VIEW THE FULL REVIEW YOU CAN PURCHASE THE REVIEW INDIVIDUALLY OR PURCHASE AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION TO THE OLAP REPORT WHICH ALLOWS ACCESS TO ALL OLAP REPORT CONTENT.

Contents

Vendor overview

arcplan Information Services AG is a small private German company that specializes in software for building analytical applications based on both relational and multidimensional data. It was formed in 1993 and grew out of a previous consulting company which was formed in 1988. There is one significant external investor, the Lindner Group, with the rest of the shareholders being the management and founders of the company. Two of the original four shareholders remain in the company’s management.

As a private company, arcplan does not publish financial statements, but we estimate that 2004 revenues were just under $20m, of which just over 40 percent were in the US and the remainder from Germany or distributors in other countries. Currently, the main growth is coming from the US. The company says that it has been globally profitable since 1997 and has no long-term debt. arcplan has always funded its product development internally and has no VC investors.

Despite its roots as a consulting company, arcplan now concentrates on software development, with consulting accounting for about 30 percent of the US revenues and only 15 percent of the non-US revenues (because distributors provide their own services).

arcplan initially targeted relational data sources using ODBC, which was a relatively new standard in July 1994, when arcplan shipped its version 1.0 product. ODBC and 32-bit Windows were two useful new technical developments that made application building products such as inSight feasible. The big advantage of ODBC was that it was a single interface that provided access to many different relational data sources.

Back then, there were no multidimensional equivalents, so every multidimensional database and application had its own, proprietary interface; many had no published APIs at all. This meant that when arcplan extended inSight to work with multidimensional databases, it had to support each one individually; sadly, despite the availability of Microsoft OLE DB for OLAP since 1998 and the promise of the Oracle/Hyperion backed JOLAP, this is still the case. Even when multiple databases claim to support OLE DB for OLAP, they do not necessarily do this consistently.

Despite this lack of consistency in the multidimensional world, perhaps the most striking aspect of arcplan is the sheer range of back-end multidimensional data sources that it supports. The company has always made a point of explicitly supporting the APIs for particular products and tries not to provide simply a lowest common denominator approach.

The first multidimensional products that arcplan supported were from SAP. SAP approached arcplan to develop an interface to EC-EIS (Executive Information System), the data mart predecessor to SAP BW, which segregated data into ‘aspects’, predecessors of BW InfoCubes. EC-EIS was the one R/3 module that could take data from many operational modules and store the merged data in a separate database. The plan was for arcplan to develop a business-oriented interface to EC-EIS, connected via a proprietary, unpublished RFC interface. Although the development was successful, EC-EIS was not a successful product, though it remains part of R/3.

This work with SAP EC-EIS led arcplan to support the successor SAP product, first called Reporting Server, then BIW (Business Information Warehouse) and subsequently just BW (when the BIW acronym turned out to be unavailable). SAP has long followed a policy of offering a service of formally certifying third party tools that connect to its products, and arcplan inSight was the very first tool to be certified with BW.

Since 1999, arcplan has added formal support for many more multidimensional databases and applications, including those from Applix, Hyperion, IBM, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, MIK, MIS and Oracle. Despite this remarkable range of back-ends, the user interface within arcplan products is very consistent, though additional functions are available, depending on the data source. The connectors for the different data sources are licensed separately.

arcplan is of course only one of many vendors that supply client tools for relational and multidimensional databases. But one important difference between arcplan and products like ProClarity and Panorama NovaView is that arcplan is focused purely on application building, not on an ‘out of the box’ client tool. It is true that applications can be built using ProClarity or Panorama components, but this capability is more of a by-product rather than the primary focus of those vendors. One obvious consequence is that all the applications built using, say, ProClarity components have a very similar look and feel, whereas arcplan applications are more controllable and each can be distinctly different. This is because the components are at a lower level than is typical in OLAP application building tools. This means, for example, that charts and tables in dynaSight do not all look the same as each other, which is often the case with other customizable OLAP client tools.

These screenshots from customer applications give an idea for the variety of screens that can be built using dynaSight.