Westmont, Illinois - May 17, 1999 - Silvon Software, Inc. today announced that it has finalized a distribution agreement with Hall-Mark Integrated Solutions, a division of Hall-Mark Global Solutions and part of Avnet, Inc. Under the agreement, Silvon's business intelligence solutions will be jointly marketed and distributed by Silvon and Hall-Mark Integrated Solutions, to organizations in the Small-To-Medium Business (SMB) market segment.
"Our alliance with Hall-Mark Integrated Solutions will bring packaged business intelligence solutions to a broader segment of businesses that may not have the wherewithal to invest in traditional, higher-priced tools-oriented custom solutions," said John Hughes, Silvon's senior vice president of sales and marketing. "This partnership will extend the reach of Silvon's DecisionMart solutions by melding our world-class business intelligence application expertise with Hall-Mark's hugely successful, value-added distribution channel."
According to Hughes, select Hall-Mark value-added resellers will work hand-in-hand with Silvon's corporate sales center to sell and deliver the DecisionMart industry-specific solutions. The solutions include Silvon's business intelligence software specifically packaged with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 RDBMS, Compaq Proliant or IBM Netfinity servers (depending on the DecisionMart solution licensed), as well as installation and educational services. The total cost to an end user customer for a DecisionMart turnkey solution is $36,000.
"Hall-Mark Integrated Solutions views this alliance with Silvon as a strategic partnership with great potential," said Richard Lawson, senior vice president of Hall-Mark Integrated Solutions. "It certainly offers our value-added resellers a viable solution that will benefit their customers who require low-cost, powerful business intelligence solutions. Silvon is an acknowledged leader in this market segment."
"The small-to-medium business segment ($20M to $125M in revenue) represents a huge opportunity for solutions like DecisionMart," said Andrew Hoover, group industry marketing manager of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing at Microsoft. "The Silvon/Hall-Mark partnership speeds deployment and simplifies management of data mart solutions and also leverages SQL Server 7.0 and the many benefits that it brings to organizations in terms of database flexibility, scalability and power."
The Silvon DecisionMart product line is designed to accelerate the process and lower the cost of delivering packaged Business Intelligence Solutions to a broad market segment. Silvon's DecisionMarts can easily extract data and automatically create a real-time management tool built around an industry-specific data model with a rich set of predetermined business rules and ad-hoc reports for analysis. Silvon DecisionMarts provide value to sales, marketing and financial analysts and managers. The solutions are tailored to provide business performance answers to such questions as: detailed sales performance by geography, individual representative and product; market segmentation; product line profitability; exclusion reporting; trend analysis; returns analysis; pricing analysis; and more user defined rules. Silvon DecisionMart applications are built around an architecture that provides critical flexibility and scalability. This architecture is Silvon's Application Foundation that allows clients to start small and grow to meet future needs without costly software and hardware changes. Clients can add applications, create new business rules and expand the capabilities of their Silvon Application Data Mart system.
Since 1987, Silvon Software has focused on software-based business optimization solutions for manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail organizations. Silvon solutions are predicated on the fact that better business understanding will empower the move toward an optimized Supply Chain organization. Silvon clients benefit from improving business practices and profitability by leveraging analytic information on customer, supplier, and operational profitability measurement. The company's products are driven by the Silvon DataTracker application foundation, which stores and maintains large volumes of data in an efficient, highly scalable format for enterprise-wide access, navigation and OLAP analysis by business users and decision makers. Silvon DataTracker is currently installed in more than 1,000 sites worldwide and supported by a network of OEMs, value-added resellers and independent distributors. For more information about Silvon and its DecisionMart solutions, visit www.silvon.com/sst.
Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT) is a Fortune 200 company with annual sales exceeding $6 billion and more than 10,000 employees worldwide. Beneath the Avnet umbrella is a series of companies in electronics and computer products distribution. A group of these companies carry the Hall-Mark name and are in the business of value-added distribution. One such company is Hall-Mark Integrated Solutions, headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, and created to focus entirely and solely on the NT VAR marketplace. For more information please visit www.hmis.avnet.com.