OLAP Consulting

Creeth, Richman & Associates, Inc. has been designing OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) databases and applications for 10 years.  Our clients have included financial institutions, book and magazine publishers, telephone companies, internet service providers, commodity traders, television networks, insurance companies, consumer products' companies and more. Our founder, Richard Creeth, used this broad experience as a basis when he began doing research for The OLAP Report .

The pillars of our OLAP consulting practice are Microsoft Analysis Services and Applix TM1. While there are many exemplary OLAP products on the market, we believe these two products allow us to deliver the best value to our clients in terms of

Applix TM1:

Applix TM1 has proven itself over the years to be an extremely powerful tool for building financial applications. Typical applications include budgeting & forecasting systems, financial reporting & consolidation systems, and customer & product profitability analysis systems. TM1's support for write-back, ragged hierarchies and multi-cube architectures have made it easy for us to deliver powerful, flexible financial systems, that would have been extremely complex in relational, or less functional OLAP environments. Furthermore, the learning curve for both administrators and end users is not hard to scale, with familiar Microsoft Excel as the primary interface. A growing trend is to expand the audience to knowledge workers worldwide via the internet, using products like OLAPObjects for TM1.

Microsoft Analysis Services:

Microsoft Analysis Services, bundled with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is the successor to Microsoft OLAP Services which burst upon the scene in early 1999 when it was released with SQL Server 7. Since then there has been more awareness of the need for tools optimized to deliver analytical reporting capability to decision makers and corporate "knowledge workers". Analysis Services comes with impressive features including advanced calculation capability through MDX, write-back, support for different storage schemes including MOLAP, HOLAP and ROLAP, and a de facto standard called OLE DB for OLAP. OLE DB for OLAP is to multi-dimensional OLAP databases as ODBC is to relational databases. It is a standard for data interchange that allows third parties to develop client tools, and alternative OLAP data sources, that can all communicate seamlessly with one another.

CRA has hitherto deployed Analysis Services primarily for sales and marketing analysis applications. Examples include an application for analyzing subscriber demographics and churning patterns for an internet service provider, and another application for analyzing open positions for a commodity trader. We expect with time to use Analysis Services for a wider range of applications.

Of the many OLE DB for OLAP client tools flooding the market, we have identified a couple that have particularly impressed us, in terms of both technology and vision: They are ProClarity and Max from Maximal Business Intelligence . At present, these products span different kinds of needs, but have the following in common:

• They are all designed from the ground up for OLE DB for OLAP
• They all espouse extensibility, giving programmer access to their controls via an exposed object model
• They are all priced competitively, in line with Microsoft's commodity pricing model

About our Microsoft Analysis Services Consulting Services
About deploying Applix TM1 on the Web