Prism Solutions Inc, Boston, Massachusetts developer of data warehouse development tools, has landed $3m in its second round of financing, bringing the total raised so far to $6m. Norwest Venture Capital joined Prism’s original investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund and JMI Equity Partners, in the new round. Prism says it has found tremendous demand for data warehouse automation tools, and will use the new capital to expand its sales force and customer support group, and to continue its development efforts. Prism claims to be the only company with a total system for automatically developing and maintaining an enterprise-wide data warehouse. The system integrates data from a spread of large computer systems for precise analysis of business trends, and makes historical operating information available in a form designed to be readily accessible and meaningful in effecting business and market decisions. It has installed the system with 12 companies and pilot programs are scheduled with 10 others. Warehouse Manager automatically produces the programs and control statements, including the Cobol programs, job control language and data definition language needed to move data into the warehouse from a wide variety of operational systems – currently IMS, QSAM and VSAM files from IBM MVS systems, and sequential files from Hewlett-Packard Co systems, with DB2, Sybase and Oracle on Unix systems on the way. It builds a data warehouse in a mainframe or client-server environment on a target database management system such as DB2, Sybase, Oracle or Red Brick on IBM mainframes; Hewlett-Packard, IBM RS/6000, Digital Equipment Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Data General Unix file servers; and OS/2 and VMS kit.
