Synchrony

Synchrony is analytic software designed for business analysts and decision-makers to examine in-depth relationships across multiple aspects of their businesses. Based on the foundation of relational OLAP, and extended to encompass the full capability of multidimensional analysis, Synchrony permits you to understand your true business drivers. By utilizing temporal concepts and methodology, Synchrony becomes the framework of a new class of analytic application.

Consider the Nature of a Query

The fundamental nature of query behavior is exploration that is iterative in nature.  Synchrony answers questions – from simple to extremely complex – by applying iterative conditions in order to understand the behavior of the business and its customers.  As is the nature of all analysis, as one question is answered, another question will emerge. Synchrony embraces this iterative process and uses the answer to one question as the basis for the next question.  The beauty of this methodology is that related questions can be constructed without requiring changes in the database.

Synchrony is also a framework for a new class of customized analytic applications. This framework permits enterprise applications to create analytic power from enterprise data by integrating if… technology.  This framework is easy for the developer, elegant for short development cycles and extensible for custom functionality.

 What Do You Know About Change?

Current data mart and business intelligence tools provide an "analysis of the obvious."  They can answer questions about the effects of change, but leave the users to conjecture about the causes of change. For example, these tools permit a business user to look at sales by product over time. By allowing comparisons of sales from one period to another, however, users can see when and where sales are increasing or decreasing, by how much, and how fast.  By utilizing temporal concepts and methodology, Synchrony permits more complex understanding of the context of your business in the answers it generates.

For instance, this query:

  • Claudia is in the Marketing Department of a large airline. She is looking to increase revenue by offering new products to a profitable segment of customers. In identifying a profitable segment of customers, she wants to understand how increases in household income affect increases in miles flown on her airline. She wants to identify customers that had an increase in household income of between 1% and 15% and those with an increase greater than 15%. She then wants to compare the number of miles each group flew in 1994 compared to the number of miles each group flew in 1995 and find the percentage difference in miles flown between the two years for each group.

 Slowly Changing Dimensions: Aperiodic Changes

In a data mart or warehouse, the characteristics of your information change over time, as data is accumulated.  Those changes are often not predictable: changes in marital status, currency valuations, stock prices, demographics, personnel assignments, region or product definitions, employee performance, supply chain variance – and all are likely to have profound effects on your business.

Other query and reporting software, which delivers canned or parameterized reports with pivots and drill-downs, requires IT intervention to go beyond simple queries.  Synchrony is designed to permit end users to perform analysis of behavioral changes in their customers, analysis of spending or purchasing patterns, analysis of related events over time – or exceptions to related events.   In other words, Synchrony’s power lies in bringing its temporal approach to bear on understanding your business.

 Make Synchrony’s Power Your Own

  • Use your own database: Synchrony works with major DBMS products.
  • Explore! Easy-to-use browser encourages iterative result exploration.
  • See your data source: natural, intuitive GUI displays star and snowflake dimensional database schemas.
  • Use drag and drop analysis construction: drag attributes, constraints, groups, measures and calculations into your report.
  • Utilize flexible tables: fact-less fact tables, snowflakes and slowly changing dimensions.
  • See your exceptions at a glance: exception reports are color highlighted.
  • Customize and share reusable queries, groups, reports and studies – shared, distributed or mailed.
  • Distill your results into new reports: groups and studies allow reuse of result sets.
  • Compare apples to oranges: understand why apples changed to oranges – and the effect on your business.
  • Create ad hoc reports in minutes: get the answers you need – fast.
  • Go beyond drill-down: query multiple dimensions across marts.
  • Cross-tab results with studies: dig deeper than ever with filters on filters – and no additional SQL.
  • Design your own: build custom applications through Synchrony’s analytical capabilities.

Specifications

System Requirements

  • A PC with 486-class or higher processor; Pentium recommended
  • CD-ROM Drive
  • 16 MB memory (32 MB recommended)
  • 50 MB free disk space (including sample databases)
  • Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 3 or higher) as client
  • ODBC drivers to connect to your DBMS

Supported Database Platforms

Synchrony is designed to run on multiple platforms, including:

  • IBM DB2 2.1
  • Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 (Service Pack 2) and 7.0
  • Informix 7
  • Oracle 7.3 and 8.0.4
  • Red Brick 5.1
  • Sybase SQL Server 11 and 11.5

Essentially, Synchrony runs on any 32-bit ODBC-compliant database platform.

 

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