Crystal Decisions is making a fresh assault on the business analysis software market, with a new lease of life after spinning off from parent Seagate Technology.
The ex-Seagate Software specialises in programs that help companies analyse data in separate databases, and is now branching into online analytical processing (Olap) software, which it said was its next engine of growth.
'The good old transactional data is not enough,' said Lee Boon Huat, vice-president of Asia Pacific, Crystal Decisions.
Not exactly new technology, Olap had not been widely deployed, Mr Lee said.
Olap enables a user to extract and look at data from different points of view. This means that separate databases can communicate. For example, a user can request that data be analysed to display the number of units of a product a company sold in July, compare revenue figures with those for the same product in September, and then see a comparison of other product sales in the same time period.
'Olap is also particularly good at creating what-if scenarios. You could use historical data to judge the effect of price increases on sales,' Mr Lee said. To facilitate this kind of analysis, Olap data is stored in a 'multi-dimensional' database instead of a relational (two-dimensional) database. A multi-dimensional database looks at each data attribute such as product, geographic sales region and time period as a separate element.