That deal called into question the relationship that Informatica currently enjoys with Oracle, as Oracle ships Informatica’s ETL product, PowerCenter, with its Siebel Analytic Applications.
However Informatica’s director of technology EMEA, Bert Oosterhof, told Computer Business Review that not only is that deal set to continue despite Oracle’s acquisition of Sunopsis, but that he considers the deal as a positive because as he sees it, We have one less competitor to compete with in the ETL space.
ETL involves taking large volumes of data from one or more data sources, transforming it into a suitable format and loading it into a data warehouse for subsequent analysis.
Sunopsis’ claim to fame was that rather than handling the transformation using a separate transformation engine on a staging server, it handled the transformation at the database layer, hence calling its technology ELT instead of ETL.
Oracle already had an ETL tool of its own prior to the Sunopsis acquisition, called Oracle Warehouse Builder, and though this also handles the data transformation at the database layer, it can only handle loading data into an Oracle Data Warehouse. The Sunopsis product can load data into other third party data warehouses too.
Informatica’s Oosterhof noted that since a December release, Informatica too has been able to do the transformation at the database layer rather than at an independent transformation engine. Sometimes doing the transformation at the database can be more efficient — Sunopsis made a good point there, said Oosterhof.
But we can do it either at the database or separately, he continued. That’s more flexible, because you may not be targeting a database, for example if you are transforming into flat files. If you are not targeting a database then you need an independent transformation engine of course. With Sunopsis, or Oracle Warehouse Builder, you don’t have that choice.
Oracle though argued that by making Sunopsis’ technology part of its Fusion Middleware line, it will bolster what it calls its hot-pluggable suite with support for both Oracle and non-Oracle data sources and targets. It said it would make Sunopsis an integrated part of its service-oriented architecture (SOA), business intelligence, and master data management (MDM) offerings.
As we reported on Monday, Oracle’s Fusion Middleware vice president, Rik Schultz, confirmed that the Sunopsis deal will not kill off the Informatica relationship: We have an ongoing relationship with Informatica which is quite strong, and in fact we recently renewed it. This move [acquiring Sunopsis] is about a broader solution set for SOA, BI and MDM, whereas our relationship with Informatica is more around the analytic applications for BI only – the Siebel Analytic Applications.
Aside from Siebel Analytic Applications, Oracle will naturally be recommending the Sunopsis product ahead of Informatica for customers who need to load more than just Oracle Data Warehouses. If they are only targeting Oracle Data Warehouses, they could use the Oracle Warehouse Builder product.
