It was developed in the early 1980s in the UK by Mars Group Services, primarily as a tool to support the activities of the National Market Research Agency (NMRA), which was also part of the Mars group at that time. It shares its origins with Stratagem, originally developed by Integrated Planning Inc of Cambridge, MA.

Although similar in many ways to Express, the first product of this type, Acumen has a number of novel features. For example, allowing a single cube to store elements of data of different types, and not requiring dimension definitions to be consistent between cubes or databases.

Acumen soon acquired a small but enthusiastic user base in Europe, and was launched in North America under the Acumate brand name.

In 1990, Acumen/Acumate was sold to Kenan Systems, who continued to develop and enhance the product, merging it back with Stratagem, which they acquired from Computer Associates. They rebranded the product as Acumate/ES.

In 1998, Kenan was acquired by Lucent Technologies, and in March 2002 the business was passed on to CSG. There is no longer any information on Acumate on their website.

If you have worked with Acumen or Acumate, either as a user of the product, or as a member of one of the development, support or consultancy teams, please register with the Acumen Community - a way of keeping in touch with former colleagues and friends.

To learn more about OLAP, and the latest Business Intelligence products, try The OLAP Report by Nigel Pendse and Richard Crieth. They have a good section on the history of OLAP, which gives ACUMATE a mention.