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Barney Finucane

Welcome to my BeyeNETWORK blog. My main goal here is to address hype issues that come up in the Internet, not to provide any overview of the BI market itself. I look forward to any questions or comments you may have.

About the author >

Barney Finucane has extensive experience in the BI industry. As a consultant, he has supported companies in the chemical, energy and manufacturing sector with the introduction of BI software. As product manager for the company MIS, he was responsible for the front-end products Plain and onVision, and kept a keen eye on projects and tools from other vendors. His areas of speciality include tool selection, quality assurance for BI, data warehouse strategies and their architectures.

Interesting story behind Jedox hiring the remaining Alea developers from Prague. As far as I know there are three left, but once there were thirty. The MIS hotheadedly fired most of them after the disastrous Alea 4.0 project back in 2001 (or maybe 2002, I have forgotten).

Alea was a clone of TM1 developed by MIS GmbH from scratch in Prague back in the mid 90s. After squandering its IPO money, MIS ended up as part of Infor. Comshare was there too, and the two product lines started to compete internally and merge. In my opinion MIS had better technology than Comshare, but I am not a neutral observer.

One upshot of all this is Alea was renamed Infor OLAP and development was moved to Ann Arbor. My guess is that this is one reason why Matthias Krí¤mer went to Jedox, though I haven't asked him. He won't need to take much time to get to know the products.

The MIS front-end tools are still being developed in Prague. The Web application development tool was originally created by Intellicube, which Christian Raue (founder of Jedox) sold to MIS. The development team was partly made up of redundant Alea developers. I was later product manager for that product, now known as Application Studio. Unsurprisingly, the Jedox front-end tools are very similar to Application Studio.

Posted December 8, 2009 8:52 AM
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