Ardent SA, the enterprise information infrastructure (EII) company, has announced a broadening of its channels to market to include companies active in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) markets.
Ardent`s products, such as DataStage, help customers resolve data quality issues and simplify the potentially complex process of mapping data sources - often multiple and disparate - to business intelligence applications such as data warehousing. This is done through the process known as data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). Now, says Ardent SA GM Simon Jeggo, the same ETL process is being used to bridge applications such as ERP and CRM, which are inherently complex; in addition quality management techniques are being used to ensure correctness and integrity of the data.
"Thousands of companies have invested in ERP systems to ensure they are Year 2000-compliant and to integrate and standardise business processes," says Jeggo. "At the same time, these companies have come to recognise that they need to get closer to their customers, which has led to the great interest in CRM applications. However, ERP data does not easily lend itself to CRM; ERP extensions tend to be proprietary to the particular ERP application; and they are not easily integrated with other enterprise or third-party data.
DataStage addresses this corporate requirement with direct extraction from many popular ERP systems, transformation into a data staging environment and loading into the new application.
"In effect," adds Jeggo, "our definition of potential customer stretches far further than just those in the ERP and CRM space. It is any customer with a requirement to move large amounts of data around."
In line with this identified market opportunity, Ardent SA is working with ERP vendors, resellers implementers and CRM pioneers, and will soon announce its first channel partners.
"We have committed to a channel-only model of going to market," says Ardent SA channel manager Gary Segal. "This policy has worked out very well for us, helping us secure more than 20 top corporate data warehousing sites."
Ardent SA`s current business intelligence VARs include Global Technology BI, DCS, PQBI, Sybase and Informix. "We have sought two types of VAR," adds Segal. "These are decision influencers, and solution implementers, with the commonality being their ability to add value and apply skills."
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