To Provide Quick Access to Enrollee and Claims Information, Enabling Better
                  Healthcare Program Planning and Management

    LOS GATOS, Calif., Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Red Brick(TM) Systems, Inc.
(Nasdaq: REDB), The Data Warehouse Company(TM), today announced that Blue
Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), a health insurance provider for the
Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), has chosen Red Brick
Warehouse for its Federal Employee Program (FEP) data warehouse.  Red Brick
Warehouse is a high-performance client/server relational database management
system (RDBMS) designed specifically for data warehouse and data mart
applications.
    BCBSA said it chose Red Brick Warehouse as part of its new integrated IT
(information technology) architecture.  The new architecture is designed to
address a growing need for information and knowledge management to stay
competitive, reduce costs and improve program administration.
    BCBSA said it determined that Red Brick Warehouse could provide the
flexibility for a powerful, very fast data warehouse, giving users the ability
to manage and query detail data quickly and efficiently.  BCBSA also said it
recognized that it would be able to reduce its DBA- and programmer-supported
paper reports inventory by more than 80 percent, and estimated that it would
see an eighteen-month payback on its Red Brick investment.
    The Red Brick-based data warehouse will provide information management and
analysis on approximately 1.8 million contracts representing more than three
million insured lives.  Forty-two percent of federal employees and retirees
who participate in the FEHBP are enrolled in BCBSA's Service Benefit Plan,
usually referred to as the FEP.  At $6 billion, it represents the largest
private health insurance contract in the nation.  Each year, FEP analysts
process and examine approximately one terabyte of historical data.
    "We developed a new strategy and architecture that would essentially
remove everyone between the user and the data," said Ray Pyle, managing
director of Information Systems and CIO at BCBSA FEP.  "The previous system
was labor intensive and resided in IS, which prevented business analysts
and actuaries from being able to be go against the data in an ad hoc,
customized fashion in order to build their information resources, queries and
reports.
    "I had already seen Red Brick's performance and had an opportunity to
compare it with other systems in a previous position.  At BCBSA, we decided to
do a complete market and product analysis to view the most recent database
benchmark information.  We found Red Brick superior in speed of loading, a
critical requirement for us, and in processing complex queries across large
volumes of data.  Red Brick's support of star schema, bit-mapped indexing and
parallel queries produces a combination that makes it scream when dealing with
the large volumes of data we analyze.
    "We process, store and analyze approximately 80 million claims and two
million enrollment contracts a year.  There is a tremendous amount of data
involved here," said Pyle.  "We're very concerned with focusing our energies
on service to our subscribers in order to be able to design benefits that will
be attractive in the FEHBP and meet the needs of subscribers.  We need to
efficiently analyze this huge volume of data to understand enrollment dates,
understand subscriber needs and understand how they use insurance."
    BCBSA said its prior decision support system, based on an IBM DB2
mainframe system, was labor intensive, hard to access and put data users
behind the reports queue in IS.  The new Red Brick-based system will reside on
a 4-processor SunSPARC Ultra Server.  The initial data set, at approximately
200 gigabytes, is expected to quickly grow to nearly a terabyte to accommodate
the total size of the historical and analytical data, according to Pyle.
    BCBSA has designed a pilot project on Red Brick that incorporates 30 users
and uses BrioQuery as its front-end tool.  The total number of users of the
data warehouse could reach more than 500, as BCBSA expects to make the data
warehouse accessible to its own analysts and actuaries, as well as to all 62
Blue Cross Blue Shield plans nationwide through BluesNet, its TCP/IP network.
    BCBSA has completed and implemented the data warehouse star model for
enrollment data.  Next it plans to develop the claims schema and an EIS front
end that will enable executive users to go against a set of data to obtain
high-level graphical information, with drill-down capabilities that will
facilitate the ability to manage by exception.
    The FEHBP is a nationwide program that provides and administers a variety
of health plan products and benefits for federal employees.  Established in
1960, and administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, FEHBP rates
the FEP as the most popular choice of health plans by federal employees
and retirees.

    About The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's FEP
    Nearly 1.8 million federal employees and retirees are now enrolled in the
Blue Cross and Blue Shield Service Benefit Plan, representing coverage of
about 3.5 million individuals.
    For more information about BCBSA and its member Plans, including current
news releases, visit http://www.bluecares.com.

    About Red Brick Systems, Inc.
    Red Brick Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of data warehouse products
and service.  The company, based in Los Gatos, Calif., specializes in software
products used for fast, accurate and confident business decisions on large
client/server databases.
    Information about Red Brick is available on the World Wide Web at
http://www.redbrick.com.  News releases and corporate background information
may also be retrieved by fax. For an index of available materials, please call
800-758-5804, and enter PIN #105756.
    Red Brick and logo is a registered trademark, and Red Brick and The Data
Warehouse Company are trademarks of Red Brick Systems, Inc. All other
trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective
holders.

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