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Database World - Planning Sciences Changes Name To Gentia
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Date: Friday, May 23, 1997
Source: Newsbytes
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A., Newsbytes via Individual Inc. : In a
customer and press event at DCI's Database andClient-Server World in
Boston, officials of Planning Sciences [NASDAQ:PLNSY] announced a decision
to rename the company in honor of Gentia, the name of its flagship software
product for business intelligence.
During the event, attended by Newsbytes at Boston's Hard Rock Cafe, Paul
Rolph, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), said that Planning
Sciences will now be known as Gentia Software, a stock to be traded on
NASDAQ under the GNTIY ticker starting July 1.
Rolph told the audience that the name change is part of a broader move to
boost marketing activities for the Wakefield, Massachusetts-based company,
producer of a software environment for business intelligence that combines
an OLAP (online analytical processing) database, visual development tools,
distributed networking infrastructure, and intelligent agents for letting
end users issue event-driven queries from outside applications.
The CEO added that market confusion over the name "Planning Sciences" --
and over the relationship between Planning Sciences and Gentia -- also
contributed to the decision for the name change. People often garbled the
company's former name, coming up with "Planning Systems," for instance,
according to Rolph.
During a meeting with Newsbytes at the event, Scott G. Silk, VP of
worldwide marketing, outlined some of the future marketing plans for the
new Gentia Software entity.
As an initial step, Gentia is moving its corporate headquarters from the UK
to the US, where most of the company's customers are located, said Silk.
These customers include the likes of Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Oracle,
Texas Instruments, and Medtronics, he noted.
Gentia Software's marketing strategy also calls for "simplifying" the
complex technology behind the Gentia product into four readily
comprehensible concepts: agility, speed, knowledge, and growth.
The VP added that Gentia will support this strategy with new seminars,
direct mail campaigns, and public relations services from "blue-chip" PR
agency Miller/Shandwick Technologies.
"Gentia plays in some of the hottest markets in the industry: the Internet,
the intranet, and data warehousing. The technology is huge," Silk
contended.
As previously reported in Newsbytes, Gentia 3, a product announced in
December, is billed by the company as the first MDDS (multidimensional data
system) to comply with the OLAP Council's MD-API (multidimensional
application programming interface).
Earlier this month, the company announced integration between Gentia and
SpaceOLAP, a Java-based intranet data access tool from InfoSpace.
In an earlier interview with Newsbytes, VP of US Marketing Jack Connors
maintained that Planning Sciences, first launched 13 years ago as a
producer of DSS tools for DOS, was virtually re-created four years ago with
the first release of Gentia, a product that now runs on 20 different
platforms.
"What we didn't do was to simply port our DOS product to other
environments," Connors told Newsbytes. Instead, Gentia is "message-driven,
object-oriented, and standards-based," he asserted.
More information about Gentia Software is available on the World Wide Web
at http://www.gentia.com .
(19970522/Press Contact: Craig Librett or Doug Black, Miller/Shandwick
Technologies for Gentia Software, 617-536-0470; Reported by Newsbytes News
Network: http://www.newsbytes.com )
<<Newsbytes -- 05-22-97>>
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