Acta Technology, represented locally by Global Technology Business Intelligence (GBI), has announced the availability of release 5.1 of ActaWorks, its ERP-to-data warehouse extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) solution.
The release enables large corporates to design, deploy and deliver data warehousing and integration projects from any enterprise data source - including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel Systems, Oracle Applications, mainframe and OS/400 sources - faster and at lower cost. Applications include business intelligence, customer relationship management, supply chain management and e-commerce.
Version 5 of ActaWorks also provides a wide selection of pre-packaged adapters and native interfaces, eliminating the need to code, even in complex data integration projects.
"The latest release of ActaWorks includes architecture changes that have resulted in doubling the ETL performance of ActaWorks 5.0," says GBI CEO, Johan Cloete.
He adds that in testing verified by independent performance auditor, Gradient Systems, ActaWorks performed 2.5 times faster than Informatica`s PowerCenter in data ETL, moving 2.1MB of data per second per CPU in a typical data warehousing environment.
During the benchmark tests, ActaWorks 5.1 extracted from two tables with a join, performed three transformations and loaded the data into a target fact (or transaction) table.
"The tests verified that ActaWorks 5.1 has the fastest data movement for any ETL tool," says Cloete. "ETL performance has a direct impact on business efficiencies, and Acta is backing up its results by having them independently audited."
Research group Gartner predicts that by 2004 most enterprises will need to manage 30 times the volume of data they managed in 1999. As companies increasingly require integration of supply, demand, customer and market data to ensure timely and accurate delivery of products and services, they are integrating higher volumes of complex data. As a result, ETL vendors will need to improve upon their tools` throughput and ability to deal with complex integration scenarios.
"Because ActaWorks 5.1 is now the fastest data integration tool on the market, companies deploying the solution will not only save time and money by being able to rapidly design and implement data integration projects across the enterprise, they will also handle the growing amounts of data that need to be moved during fixed time windows."
ActaWorks 5.1 doubles the batch performance of ActaWorks 5.0 with Acta Performance Optimizer, which provides:
. Automatic workload distribution, a rules-based engine that puts the ETL work where it is most efficient - at the source, target, or in the ActaWorks engine.
. Intelligent threading, which automatically assigns more CPU resource to the more complex data flows.
. Support for parallel processing and database partitioning that takes advantage of all available computing resources.
ActaWorks is a quickly deployed ETL product with a code-free, graphical designer interface for all tasks involved in designing, debugging, testing, modifying, and maintaining data integration projects, for both batch and real-time.
Its new data scan feature lets a developer preview what is happening to the data at each step of the transformation, allowing faster development and debugging.
Cloete says ongoing integration projects will be easier to maintain and less costly with the new release. A Web-based administration interface allows IT staff to monitor all ActaWorks servers and jobs from a central location. An extensive library of metadata reports (impact analysis, where-used, etc) makes maintenance and enhancement tasks easier.
ActaWorks also provides out-of-the-box capabilities to browse metadata for enterprise applications including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards WorldSoftware and OneWorld, SAP R/3, and Siebel. The new release adds pre-packaged adapters to J2EE, JCA, JMS, XMI, and HTTP, eliminating the need for creating these interfaces in complex data integration projects.
Acta is the first ETL vendor to support the new XMI 1.1 (XML metadata interchange) standard that provides metadata exchange with over 16 data modelling tools, 10 object modelling tools, and metadata standards and environments from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAS and others.
In addition, ActaWorks` metadata architecture now supports the Object Management Group (OMG) common warehouse metamodel (CWM) for interchange with CWM business intelligence tools.
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