Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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Chats with BI vendors

From the vendors that I talked with at the last Data Warehousing Institute conference, it is obvious that there is no end to the innovation coming from the Business Intelligence technologies. I met with many different vendors in most areas of BI implementation. I wish I had had more time to meet with all the vendors but there are only so many hours in the day…

Here are just a few highlights from my meetings.

One of my first overviews was with a new contender – Silver Creek Systems. I met with Martin Boyd, their VP of Marketing. The best way to describe Silver Creek’s offering is to say that it is like capturing a subject matter expert (SME) in a can or in their case, an application. We all know that the most difficult step in ETL processing these days is the arduous manual process of interpreting or translating the various pieces of data from our operational systems into the one “single version of the truth”. This involves the manual creation of “look up” or translation tables by knowledgeable programmers or willing SMEs. Unfortunately ETL tools don’t help us much in this area. Well, now there is help in the form of Silver Creek Systems. Take a look at their offering at their website for more information on this critical process.

Then there was a familiar player – Informatica and Don Tirsell, Director of Product Marketing. I got an overview of their roadmap for the next couple of years and their current work on mainframe connectivity. They have finally filled the void in their ETL offering by announcing that PowerCenter is now able to natively connect to mainframe environments. It is interesting to note that many corporations today still rely on their mainframes not just as sources of data but also as homes for their data warehouses. Informatica will be able to help those companies that wish to implement their warehouses on their mainframe environments. Another new addition is the data profiling capability that Informatica built and embedded in PowerCenter. On another note, Don said that Informatica has pretty much abandoned their analytical applications and are focusing almost exclusively on the broader data integration market (beyond ETL for BI). They are offering the data models behind their applications but are not expending effort to sell or enhance these offerings. Quite a change from where they were two years ago, huh?

Metapa is another interesting, relatively new company. I spoke with Scott Yara, their CEO, about what Metapa does. He considers his company to be the “pioneer in data warehouse supercomputing” – a tall claim that Scott feels they can really deliver upon. Their product is a software-only solution – that is, it is a database only, not hardware, which makes it different from the data warehouse appliance idea (see below). The technology is based on POSTgres which is an MPP database system that runs on commodity hardware. An interesting snippet – keep your eye out for a name change for Metapa…

Datallegro is an innovative, new technology company for the BI space. Stuart Frost, their CEO, and Kim Stanick, their VP of Marketing, used this conference to announce their new offering and to introduce themselves to the BI world in general. Datallegro is the newest member in the data warehouse appliance arena. The definition of a data warehouse appliance according to their website is a server designed to provide outstanding performance at an affordable price. Basically it a very different technological paradigm from the traditional solutions we have today. It is a black box that combines hardware and software seamlessly to create a screamingly fast environment that can hold massive amounts of data for data analysis. Given their price points and performance promises, Datallegro is poised to give Teradata and Netezza a run for their money in terms of both performance and price point. Good luck to this newest member of the BI space.

And while I can’t talk about what they are doing just yet, keep an eye on Unisys. They are developing some very interesting technology to be announced later this year. As they say – “Imagine it!”

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