ProClarity is the pilot fish of third-party software vendors. But pilot fish know how to swim with sharks and use them for protection This will be a big year for ProClarity, predicts , MD of Systems, the local distributor of ProClarity.

He`s not just being unquestioningly loyal or glib. `s long-awaited 2005 update of SQL Server, the first version renewal in five years, is expected to have hugely improved business intelligence qualities, which will either strangle competitive BI vendors, or make them. In ProClarity`s case, it is betting everything on its relationship with Microsoft.

SQL Server "Yukon", out this year, will build on the native OLAP (online analytical processing) capabilities of its 1999 predecessor, and will continue to give them away free of charge.

This strategy is typical of Microsoft`s all-things-to-all-men value-add, but it has the unfortunate tendency to commoditise the wares of other vendors into oblivion, in this case up-ending many a BI vendor`s value proposition.

So is ProClarity dancing with death? Maybe, but for now it seems the company has a handle on how to swim with sharks, and use their might for protection and as a springboard.

, President and CEO of privately held ProClarity, and its founder ten years ago, assuredly says his company has a very deep relationship with Microsoft. Along with Siebel Systems, Quest, Citrix and Outlooksoft, it is one of five worldwide ISV partners reckoned in 2005.

SQL Server, a database management system (DBMS), made its first foray into BI with its previous iteration in 1999, as mentioned above. Lokken admits ruefully that his company went out of business prior to this, but "kind of re-launched" to coincide with SQL`s launch at the time, which he rightly saw as a phenomenally exciting market event.

Zero to hero

"SQL Server 7 went from zero to 24% of the [DBMS] market in three years," he recounts. Riding on this juggernaut gives ProClarity all the market it can handle. Lokken looks forward to BI improvements in Yukon, which include rewritten cubes, and, generally, upgraded BI components, such as the ETL layer (extraction, transformation and loading tools).

So how does ProClarity manage not to be squeezed out of its own market by this feared adversary?

For one thing, they`re on the same side. The enemies are, in fact, Oracle and , with their database offerings.

Though Lokken seems reluctant to part with market stats, he lets slip that more than two-thirds of their customers were or are Oracle or IBM shops. Microsoft`s beaten their total cost of ownership to a pulp with its SQL offering, which has let ProClarity in the door.

Lokken also prefers Microsoft`s MDX - "which is to multi-dimensional databases what SQL is to relational databases", he says. He rates IBM`s and Oracle`s chances to bring multi-dimensional intelligence into their DBMSs, but says they`re not there yet.

African tour

In his exclusive briefing of iWeek and ITWeb`s online news service, Lokken made reference to big-name, usual-suspect customers in South Africa, where he says ProClarity`s share of Microsoft-based BI outstrips its worldwide market share (around 30%).

How big is the company in all these accounts? "We`re not that big in the JSE, but it`s got high potential," he says.

Jones continues: "We have 3 000 users in South Africa, among others also SAB, , Edcon and Shoprite, all of them in varying degrees of implementation scale. We compete, as we do elsewhere, with Cognos." (Which, by the way, performs its BI functions through use of metadata management systems in the BI platform itself, whereas ProClarirty is quite happy to leave that up to increasingly intelligent DBMS partner systems.)

Shoprite is a large installation with 500 users, all store managers. Who would have thought a store manager could do BI? It`s complex stuff, traditionally the domain of IT managers, and not business leaders.

"You get three generations of BI users - the business user that dumps the report in a spreadsheet and manipulates it to their requirements, the analyst that uses the analytical model, and the third-generation user, who uses it directly through part of a widespread deployment," says Lokken.

Shoprite`s deployment was through a dumbed-down interface, which made it unnecessary for users to use spreadsheets in their retrievals.

Tags: Swimming  with  sharks