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MITS Embarks on an Era of Growth with New Technology Advancements, an Eager Market and Assertive Reseller Channel

Introduction
Successful, thriving companies take business analysis seriously, driving the growing need for business intelligence (BI) and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. Management Information Tools, Inc. has taken advantage of this mounting industry trend, answering the cry from end-users and VARs by continuing to enhance its MITS BI/OLAP product suite. Today, MITS Discover is firmly established as the MultiValue market leader and provider of an easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, business analysis solution.

Since its inception over seven years ago, Management Information Tools, Inc. (MITI) has remained faithful to its formula: to provide relevant data in a thoughtfully constructed format, within an easy-to-access system. The company has dedicated itself to making information easy to understand and manage for businesses using MultiValue systems. It has remained steadfast in providing a mainstream-like tool without the need for high-end servers, a host of programmers, extensive training, and subsequent financial outlays that make most OLAP and BI solutions cost-prohibitive.

This low cost, high performance MITS solution seems to be in the right place at the right time. Today, the company finds itself in a high-growth mode with a market eager for the power of business intelligence and an expanding reseller channel excited about the product's new advancements. And now that a two-year marketing relationship with IBM is shifting gears, MITI finds itself back in the driver's seat of its own destiny.

IBM Marketing of MITS
MITI began like most MultiValue software firms in the mid-1990's: a small but dedicated group of developers working day and night from one release to another; from its first beta installations to servicing many new installed sites. With a core set of customer successes under its belt in 1999, MITI caught the attention of Raining Data in Irvine, Calif. MITI worked closely with Raining Data to study marketing ideas for D3 and the MITS tool. MITI created a hypercube of all the D3 sites sold over a several year period, enabling Raining Data to quickly analyze the D3 sites by country, state, VAR, platform, add-on product, etc.

"Within a month after creating the MITS hypercube for Raining Data, we were in negotiations with Informix about the marketing rights to MITS," he said, adding that part of that negotiation was a test of what the MITS system could do. "The test was to create a MITS hypercube of all the UniData and UniVerse sites sold worldwide over a several year period. Ironically, this was very similar to the same MITS hypercube created for Raining Data just weeks before. The test for Informix went well enough for them to take on the product."

Although both companies were impressed by the discoveries made when looking at their own data with MITS, it was Informix that signed an exclusive agreement to market, sell and distribute the MITS tool within the MultiValue market. Very soon afterward, IBM acquired Informix and MITI officially began its IBM marketing relationship in January, 2000. IBM retained the MITI group of experienced engineers as its development team, while IBM's U2 resellers took over MITS sales and support. With more time and resources to dedicate to MITS development, MITS engineers were able to add key components and greatly enhance all aspects of the product suite over the last two years.

Coming Full Circle
Prior to assigning the exclusive marketing rights of MITS to IBM/Informix two years ago, MITI worked directly with its end users, handling all aspects of the implementation from initial installation, consulting, hypercube creation and on-going support. The "exclusive" clause on MITI's marketing and sales agreement with IBM ended as of December 31, 2002, and Gilbrough is enthusiastic about the future growth of the MITS business intelligence product line.

"The good news is that in addition to having resellers like IBM, we have the freedom to once again work with the MITS marketplace directly," Gilbrough said. "We've always enjoyed servicing our customers and know we do it well-so we are looking forward to doing this again. We're also eager to work more closely with MITS VARS and help them manage and maximize the potential of their MITS projects."

Gilbrough also said it was an enlightening experience to work so closely with the U2 group at Informix and then IBM. "The caliber, financial power and in some cases, the market share of MultiValue VARs is very impressive, and gave us a feeling that the MultiValue marketplace is on solid ground for the foreseeable future," he commented.

MITS Matures
During its development drive over the last seven years, MITS has evolved into the robust OLAP/BI solution it is today. One of the most strategic product developments came early last year, with the introduction of MitsWeb, a Windows-based gateway and set of extensions that allow a user to explore MITS applications in a standard browser environment. Within the last year, MitsWeb has also evolved from a standalone browser server to a solution that interfaces with Microsoft Internet Information Server and/or Apache on Windows or UNIX systems, using either web server as a proxy.

MITS developers have also been busy developing the new jBASE port-with a planned release for early 2003. jBASE joins UniVerse, UniData, D3 and mvEnterprise as the list of MultiValue databases on which MITS is ported. MITS runs with all of these databases in a mature Windows desktop or Web browser environment.

"Now that MITS is firmly established as the standard Business Intelligence tool for MultiValue databases, we have been working on taking the product one step further and opening it up to any ODBC compliant data source," he said.

Gilbrough revealed that the company has even more enhancements planned for 2003, including a new reporting product available on both MultiValue and non-MultiValue systems.

"This new product, with an internal name of `Report Tool,' will have many features for MultiValue and non-MultiValue users," he explained. "These include report generation, PDF generation, use of any report as a data source, MITS hypercube interface, report archiving, Web, XML, Excel, desktop report viewing and manipulation, desktop dispatch, data extraction and movement, among others." Although MITI will market Report Tool as an add-on product like MITS, Gilbrough said it would also be structured as a solution that VARs can easily tightly integrate into their vertical offerings.

What MITS Discover is, and What it Isn't
Pat Gilbrough believes that MITS Discovers' unique architecture has been a blessing, yet sometimes a curse. "MITS Discover s definitely a one-of-a-kind product within the MultiValue marketplace, but this has its advantages and disadvantages" he said. The advantage is that there are no other products that perform the same function on a MultiValue system, so if someone needs a native OLAP solution, MITS Discover is it. The disadvantage is that there is no other product to directly compare it to and that makes it harder for us to explain exactly what MITS Discover does."

Gilbrough said that a common misconception is that MITS Discover is a report generator like other products entering the MultiValue market. The difference, he explained, is that MITS Discover is a true online analytical processing tool, whereas a report generator will simply perform a query on an existing file and present the results.

MITS Discover extracts data from a MultiValue system and places this extracted data into a specially designed OLAP file structure (a hypercube) -all of which is native to MultiValue. This OLAP file system is usually on the same system as the source data. The MITS Discover GUI tools (MitsView or MitsWeb with a browser) are then used to present "FLASH" screens from the OLAP data. The biggest differences? With MITS, data is presented in a matter of seconds, even when dealing with source files that have millions of records, in addition to the ability to drill down into the results in an interactive manner.

"When using a report generator, presenting information usually means establishing a query to sort, select and format a report at the time the user needs it," Gilbrough said. "The problem with this, as we have all experienced, is that it can take several minutes to several hours to produce a single output. Once the output is delivered, the user makes another query based on information just learned from the first report. This whole cycle may take days when dealing with significant amounts of data. MITS handles this kind of information reporting within seconds and does so in an "interactive reporting" manner that is intuitive and very easy to use."

How does MITS Discover differ from other OLAP products used in the MultiValue market? Gilbrough explained that the other products, like Cognos PowerPlay, need to extract data through an ODBC interface, then move the data to a different system using non-MultiValue databases. "MITS Discover performs a native extraction using the data dictionary processing features of MultiValue, requires no ODBC and is usually hosted on the same computer as the source data, thus requiring no additional hardware or foreign databases," he continued. "Setting up access to the MITS OLAP data is as simple as any other connection to the MultiValue system."

And finally, pricing sets MITS Discover apart from its competitors. "We intentionally priced MITS Discover for the MultiValue marketplace, so the investment is a fraction of the cost of non-MultiValue solutions offering less functionally and much more complexity," Gilbrough concluded.

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