Informatica Corp today unveiled the latest versions of its datawarehouse and datamart product lines which it claims automates many of the processes currently being carried out by hand. PowerCenter 1.5 is aimed at the high-end enterprise environment and is designed for building, deploying and managing datamarts and datawarehouses. New features of the product include integration with SAP’s Business Information Warehouse (BW). BW is SAP’s datawarehouse product, but it only allows data to be input from SAP R/2 or R/3 sources. Informatica’s software, however, enables users to integrate other forms of non-SAP data, such as Oracle or Peoplesoft, into BW. It also includes multiple engines, to move and process data more quickly, and better integration with proprietary mainframe data types. PowerMart 4.5 is designed for the departmental environment and is a single subject area datawarehouse, which means it will only handle data about one particular area, for example marketing or sales. PowerCenter, on the other hand, can work with multiple forms of data and synchronize between them. The company will also announce its next generation metadata exchange MX2 architecture tomorrow. MX2 is COM and UML-based and synchronizes metadata across analysis tools from multiple vendors. It also supports multidimensional metadata for business-focussed OLAP applications. Paul Albright, senior VP marketing said the key thing about the two new product lines is that they automate all the processes traditionally done by hand: 75% of people still work on their datawarehouses and datamarts by hand. That’s an extraordinarily ineffective way of doing things.
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