SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- The XML for Analysis (XMLA) Council today announced the success of the first public XMLA Interoperability Event, which took place at The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) conference in San Francisco, May 11 - 14. The goal of this event was to provide more detail into the efforts and progress of the XMLA specification, and to further demonstrate the importance of XMLA as a leading open, industry standard in the Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management marketplaces. The event, sponsored by the XMLA Council, showcased early release versions of XMLA-compliant products from 18 Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management solution providers, including Applied OLAP, Arcplan, Aspirity, Brio, Comshare, Crystal Decisions, Hyperion, Intellimerce, Microsoft, Microstrategy, MIS, Panorama, ProClarity, SAP, SAS, Simba Technology, SPSS, and Temtec. The event followed the XMLA Council's second successful Interoperate Workshop, hosted by Simba Technologies, in early April 2003. "The council's ability to show interoperability in a public forum signals that they have reached an important milestone in the evolution of the standard," said Andrew Braunberg, senior analyst of Current Analysis. "It also highlights growing momentum and market acceptance of the open, scalable, standards-based specification among business intelligence and business performance management vendors." XMLA Support and Council Membership Continues to Grow In addition to the Interoperability Event(s), momentum for and support of XMLA continues to grow. The XMLA Council has received applications from over 60 companies from around the world to become members of the XMLA Council. Since the first XMLA Council Interoperate Workshop, held last November, the XMLA Council has added three new members, including Bandwiz, Informatica and Intellimerce. "We are excited to see the level of industry support and overall momentum that the XMLA specification has gathered, and welcome the new members," said Rich Clayton, vice president of Business Performance Management product strategy at Hyperion. "XMLA has the potential to dramatically impact both the Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management categories and drive the development and implementation of new applications deployed through Web Service architectures." "The tremendous support for and momentum of the XMLA Council signals the industry's desire for a single standard that allows multidimensional databases to be accessed as a Web service," said Stan Sorensen, director of SQL Server product management at Microsoft. "With the growing number of participants, the XMLA Council will provide an industry standard that incorporates the experience and best practices of leading business intelligence companies." "We at SAS are excited to see interest in XMLA accelerating throughout the business intelligence community. Businesses appreciate the Council's work in building an open, cross-platform standard," said Jim Metcalf, director of foundation technology strategy at SAS. "XMLA is allowing vendors and customers alike to quickly solve business problems rather than being sidetracked by interoperability roadblocks. These early results are driving the growth of the XMLA Council, resulting in a stronger standard for all involved." The new council members join a growing group of industry leaders who have previously announced their support for XMLA. The importance of the growing list of companies supporting XMLA underscores the need for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to adopt XMLA as an open, industry standard, as well as the importance of customers to evaluating the purchases they are making in order to ensure that their investments will be able to interoperate with the leading products in the industry. The primary drivers of the XMLA specification include the founders Hyperion, Microsoft and SAS. XMLA Council members also include Alphablox, ANGOSS Software Corp., Applied OLAP, Applix, Inc., Aspirity Inc., ArcPlan, Inc., Brio, Business Objects, Cognos, Comshare Inc., Crystal Decisions, DSS Lab, Inc., INEA, Lawson Software, MicroStrategy, MIS AG, MJM Consultant Corp., Panorama Software Systems, ProClarity, Inc., SAP AG, Silvon Software, Inc., Simba Technologies, SPSS Inc., Temtec and Vigilance, Inc. Interoperability of XMLA on Display As part of the recent Interoperability Event(s) the XMLA Council has not only demonstrated the interoperability among the various ISVs that make up the Council, but also the interoperability between XMLA and J2EE architected solutions and other cross-platform technologies. Given that XMLA is built on standard Web services technologies and is fundamentally a standard Web services query and reporting interface for Business Intelligence platforms, it is proving itself to be an open and cross-platform industry standard that works well in either .NET or J2EE environments. As an example of the cross-platform interoperability that is enabled via XMLA, one of the Council members, MIS AG, demonstrated both Java and DHTML based Consumers that use XMLA to seamlessly connect to XMLA Providers at the recent Interoperability Event(s). Next Version of XMLA Specification on the Horizon In parallel with the recent Interoperability Event(s), the XMLA Council is actively working on enhancements to the current XMLA specification. Such enhancements include, support for mdXML, the standard linguistic interface being defined as part of XMLA, and support for Data Mining Providers.