Ardent Software Inc will release in the last quarter of the year the first fruits of its acquisition of the meta data transformation company, Dovetail Software Inc. Ardent, which acquired privately-held Dovetail back in June (CI No 3,432) will start selling Dovetail’s Interplay software as MetaStage, as an addition to its own DataStage data extraction and cleansing tool for data warehousing. Interplay provides a feature that was missing from Ardent’s data extraction software – an interface that understands what different relational databases and software from companies such as Cognos and Business Objects mean by metadata. To perform its role of translator between different sources of data, the Interplay software has a super-repository for breaking down meta data and making it available to third party data warehousing tools and applications. Ardent, born this year from a long-drawn out merger between Vmark Software Inc, Unidata Inc and French object database vendor, O2, currently splits research and development between its three divisions, relational databases and tools, object databases and tools, and data warehousing. But Ardent, which currently makes over 80% of its revenue from relational databases and related tools, sees the most rapid growth in revenues coming from its data warehousing division, which account for 12% of the company’s revenues, and in the much longer term its object database and tools products. Although the company will keep the relational database products alive, it will not work on adding new features, instead it will merely add capabilities to meet customer demands.
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