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Path: digifix!not-for-mail From: Conrad_Geiger@NeXT.COM (Conrad Geiger) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce Subject: PRESS RELEASE: WhiteLight Announces Business Modeling Software for NEXTSTEP Date: 11 Aug 1993 03:18:14 -0400 Organization: Next Announcements Lines: 167 Sender: sanguish@digifix.com Approved: sanguish@digifix.com Message-ID: <24a6fm$9d@digifix.digifix.com> Reply-To: norman@whitelight.com For more information, contact: Norman Goldfarb Whitelight Palo Alto, CA Email: norman@whitelight.com WhiteLight Systems Announces WhiteLight/Engineer 1.1 "Object-oriented business modeling software for financial planning, analysis and control" PALO ALTO, CA, July 30, 1993 --- WhiteLight Systems, Inc. today announced the release of WhiteLight/Engineer 1.1. Major new functionality includes object linking, scripting, and savable workspaces, as well as 71 other enhancements. Release 1.1 runs on NeXT, Inc.'s NEXTSTEP operating environment for Intel and Motorola processors. WhiteLight/Engineer addresses a fundamental problem shared by every large company: The complexity and dynamics of the business have outgrown the ability of current technology to deliver instantly the information that management needs to run the business. WhiteLight/Engineer is the first software product that enables a company's management and staff to build a shared model of the business from a common library of business objects and their computational relationships. The resulting business model is clear and unambiguous. Because it is as complex and dynamic as the business requires, the model is ready to partition and deploy as the company's financial planning, analysis and control applications. No matter how complex these applications become, they maintain the flexibility and continuity of the shared business model. This integration of business model with applications is unique to WhiteLight/Engineer. As a result, WhiteLight/Engineer customers achieve dramatic management and application development efficiencies. By reusing business objects, these applications enable users to instantly access and manipulate the unique information they require, in the format they require, while assuring information accuracy, consistency and integrity throughout the organization. Customers use WhiteLight/Engineer to build and operate applications such as financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting, sales forecasting, business planning, strategic planning, transfer pricing and portfolio analysis. Fortune 500 customers are in the telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, financial services, and public accounting industries. According to Ronald Weissman, director of corporate marketing for NeXT, Inc., "WhiteLight/Engineer is a superb implementation of object-oriented technology. It is the first tool that allows managers to actually model and manage their business using objects -- all without programming. Using objects to model your business is what the object-oriented revolution is ultimately all about, and WhiteLight offers a truly unique and compelling approach." According to Chip Goodman, WhiteLight president, "Companies are overwhelmed with data. But what they don't have is accurate, specific and conclusive information at their fingertips. With WhiteLight/Engineer, they get the information they need to run the business when they want it, often in seconds." "WhiteLight/Engineer is a fast and flexible reporting tool, but what really excites me is being able to perform sophisticated decision support analysis right in the application. End-users never before have been able to answer `what if' and goal-seeking questions with such a complete model of the business. A 7-dimensional business model might incorporate multiple allocations, eliminations, currency translation adjustments, non-linear functions and simultaneous equations," continued Mr. Goodman. WhiteLight supplies seven libraries of 1200 "intelligent business objects" that are common to many businesses, in categories such as finance, organization, region, time, and currency. These objects are intelligent in that they "know" how they computationally relate to other objects. For example, "1993" knows that it is the sum of "January" through "December". "Shareholders' Equity" knows that it is "Assets" minus "Liabilities". Customers easily customize these libraries and add other libraries specific to their business, such as product and customer lists. Users create applications by mixing and matching objects from their libraries. They use a "point and click" methodology; there is no procedural code (e.g., macros) in WhiteLight/Engineer. Further, because objects know how they computationally relate to other objects, applications mostly build themselves. Creating reports is similarly straightforward, since the "Income Statement" object knows which financial objects to present. Small end-user/developer teams design and deploy fully-operational applications, tailored to business requirements, within weeks of licensing the software. By reusing common business objects, end-users handle many of their own maintenance updates and generate their own reports, in minutes. End-users can also build small applications in days. WhiteLight/Engineer builds on NEXTSTEP's object-oriented environment. Business users realize the power of object-oriented programming without becoming programmers. The software hides powerful but arcane object-oriented concepts such as encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism under a graphical interface that speaks the language of the business user. Combined with WhiteLight's libraries of business objects, the result is a development and user environment that is exceptionally productive. WhiteLight/Engineer applications are not like other applications. First, they are extremely flexible because users can add, modify and delete business objects at will. Second, they handle complexity with ease, because the complexity problem is delegated to the business objects. Third, they provide clear and unambiguous information because the values, sources and uses of every business object are always available in the users' own terminology. "The benefits accelerate when you start adapting and reusing entire applications across the business. Simply by swapping a few business objects, you can re-engineer an application for a new use or a new set of users. For example, by swapping "budget" for "actual", you can begin to turn a financial reporting application into a budgeting application. By swapping months for years, you can also turn it into a strategic planning application," said Mr. Goodman. "We can build a prototype application from a company's data in one day. We just need their data, samples of their reports, and two hours of their time. The prototype will include their numbers, their account names, and their business structures. It will include up to 50,000 values, of which 80% may be calculated," said Mr. Goodman. "One customer built a complete budget system for their international business sector in six weeks. They tell us that, for the first time, they can understand the multi-dimensional impact of their decisions. A consolidation and reporting process that took six people eight weeks last year, one person did in four days this year," Mr. Goodman continued. "Customers often use WhiteLight/Engineer to replace large-scale spreadsheet applications. Spreadsheets are versatile personal productivity tools, but impractical at scale. Large-scale spreadsheet applications are inefficient, illogical, prone to error, expensive to maintain, dangerous to build on, and prone to collapse under stress," said Mr. Goodman. "Customers also replace budgeting, consolidation and other packaged applications that do not have WhiteLight/Engineer's ability to keep up with the customer's always changing requirements for immediate, accurate and specific information." According to the Patricia Seybold Group, "It is clear that using objects to model your business is a concept whose time has come... Of fundamental importance is business process redesign, collaboration and the need for a shared vocabulary about the business... Companies are increasingly taking advantage of the ability of object-oriented development approaches to make complex relationships available to all applications... They ask the very basic questions that... make their own business practices and assumptions explicit so they can reexamine those assumptions." WhiteLight Systems, Inc. is a privately-held software company headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.