ASC SEQEL & Competitors

My company is looking into EIS / Business Intelligence tools -- basically,
the goal is to give end users a fairly user-friendly way of displaying
various data (e.g. sales history) on their PCs, as either charts or
graphs, and being able to analyze the data (sales by customer, sales by
product line) and drill down, etc. They'd also like to be able to do
comparisons and "what if?"s. Most of the data will originate on our
AS/400, but some is in PC-based databases (MS Access), so the ability to
mix data from both sources would be a plus (but maybe not a show-stopper,
since the IS dept has been trying for years to move everything to the
AS/400).

Right now, we're looking at a product called QlikView, by QlikTech; ASC's
SEQUEL and FYI; and COGNOS. Does anyone have any experiences with any of
these products that you'd like to share? I found a thread on SEQUEL a
while back in the archives, and a few references to COGNOS, but they're
two or three years old. I'm interested in the basic things - speed, ease
of use, ease of setup, flexibility, end-user satisfaction, etc. Anything
anyone would like to share with me would be great, and if you'd prefer to
reply privately that's fine.

Thanks very much!

Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA  01376
413-863-4357 x444
mnaughton@juddwire.com