Before the acquisition, the French developer of business intelligence (BI) software, which maintains dual headquarters in Paris, France and San Jose, California, had traditionally focused on developing front-end BI tools, leaving back-end data integration functions to a select band of technology partners. Business Objects says that it worked closely with Acta for the better part of 2002 to develop Data Integrator 6.0; even before the official merger in August last year. The latest version of the product, which is technically an extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tool, now links to BI tools (query, OLAP analysis and reporting) to deliver more of an ‘end-to-end’ solution.
Denise Sawicki, senior product marketing manager for Business Objects told ComputerWire that Data Integrator 6.0 represents the fusion of ETL and BI. Sawicki, who came on board from Acta, outlined three main thrusts in the new release – metadata management, real-time, and enterprise deployment.
We’ve worked closely with Business Objects to jointly develop a universe metadata bridge that enables easier metadata management across the data integration and BI environments said Sawicki. The bridge allows BusinessObjects [the company’s namesake BI software] metadata to be imported into the Data Integrator environment to automatically create universes which provide a semantic representation of underlying database structures in a graphical business form. Our bridge not only insulates BI end users from the complexities of the underlying data, but is also designed to automatically handle updates in source data without necessitating constant rewrites of reports, added Sawicki.
Data Integrator 6.0 also puts a greater emphasis on providing a real-time architecture. Our real-time capabilities are really third-generation, stressed Sawicki. We’ve baked real-time functions into our engine since 2002.
She differentiated the approach from other real-time data integration products from Informatica Corp and Ascential Software Corp. Informatica draws on third-party middleware products, such as MQ Series and Tibco, for its real-time capabilities. We can leverage these tools, but can also function in real-time without them, said Sawicki. We can pick up events from any system that speaks in real-time, including enterprise application integration (EAI) products and transactional business applications from SAP AG and PeopleSoft Corp, and pick up on real time events as mundane as a database trigger or file change. The integration with SAP is especially tight We can go two way [bi-directional integration] with SAP Sawicki said.
The new real-time architecture feeds up-to-date data to Business Objects’ dashboards and analytic applications. More proactive BI capabilities are also supported in the new release. For example, transactional activity in the database automatically triggers an XML message (XML schema support is provided) to the Business Objects Application Foundation to alert end users. The real-time alert capabilities can be tied to workflows for complicated data processing tasks.
Data connectivity is facilitated by two-way support for Web services, including support for related standards such as SOAP and WSDL. We have taken this [Web services] down to the ETL layer said Sawicki, adding, Many of our customers wanted to be able to kick off a Data Integrator job from a browser based application, to support on-demand data refreshes.
Data Integrator 6 also packs in a host of features that enable enterprise-wide deployments, including SNMP support for integration with network management products, performance enhancements such as parallel capabilities and in-memory data stores, fault tolerance, Web-based administration, and automatic workload distribution capabilities. Data Integrator is now intelligent enough to determine optimal processing configurations. If the database can do something faster than our engine, then we will push the processing to the database said Sawicki.
Business Objects is not alone in addressing real-time data integration with transactional ERP systems. Analytics vendor Informatica is working closely with WebMethods Inc, an enterprise application integration (EAI) provider, to build connectivity between its data integration platform (PowerCenter) and WebMethods’ integration platform. Ascential Software Corp is pumping more and more real-time data transformation and capabilities into its flagship DataStage ETL platform. Sagent Technology Inc has also recently announced a real-time integration product that can be called from within reporting tools and spreadsheets.
Source: Computerwire
