October 1996 start-up Acta Technology Inc is going to market with software that extracts data from SAP R/3 applications, transforms it and loads it into a data warehouse or data mart. The software automatically generates ABAP code – SAP’s 4GL. It offers pre- packaged data marts in addition to point products, the first of which, Rapid-Mart for sales analysis ships this month; Rapid-Mart for Financial Analysis is due next quarter. Running on NT with Unix to follow; prices begin at $125,000 for one SAP R/3 3.0 or higher installation. The company has venture funding from Greylock and US Venture and counts former Sybase Replication Server architect and data warehouse expert Alex Gorelik as president and VP engineering. The impetus for its business, it says, is that customers’ need to get at and use the data being poured into to large and very costly SAP applications. ActaLink for SAP extracts ABAP/4 Data Dictionary metadata and generates ABAP/4 for extracting the data itself which is transformed by an ActaLink Server that pumps the resulting data into a warehouse managed by a central metadata repository. Acta says it can also extract data from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, ODBC databases and from flat files. It claims that extracting data through the application layer rather than directly from the database means that valuable information stored in the SAP application’s business logic isn’t lost, that even encoded data can be read and that transaction integrity information associated with records is retained. Cognos is reselling the Acta work in its new Accelerator for SAP tool.
