Ascential Software leads EDI market into 2005

In its December 2004 enterprise extract, transform, load (ETL) report, "How to evaluate Enterprise ETL", Forrester Research has cited Ascential Software as leader in the enterprise data integration (EDI) market.

The enterprise data integration leader was among 14 companies that participated in the independent market researcher`s study to discover which company is the best in the enterprise ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tools market.

"Ascential received the highest scores for overall strategy and vision for product content, partnerships and commitment in the market," says Julian Field, MD of local Ascential distributor Centerfield Software.

Strategy, current offering and market presence are key indicators in the Forrester Wave methodology that was used to assess the ETL products. The Forrester Wave is a research graphic built on open methodology and an algorithm that exposes vendor scores, key attributes and weightings in an interactive spreadsheet.

According to Forrester, Ascential has differentiated itself from other players in the market by delivering data integration capabilities and products for related ETL functions such as data profiling, data quality, application integration and mainframe data access. Ascential is the only vendor in the study to provide all of this functionality natively and on a single platform.

"A successful vendor in the enterprise ETL market should focus and differentiate, and demonstrate the ability to maintain value-added relationships with systems integrators, technology leaders and complementary application vendors," says Philip Russom, principal analyst at Forrester. "Ascential understands this and performs well accordingly."

In the report, Ascential is recognised for its extreme ETL scalability and advanced connectivity; a price/performance ratio more favourable than that offered by the other vendors assessed; its lengthy list of data sources that Ascential DataStage supports, mostly through native gateways to all relational databases; and its complete collaborative capabilities.

Forrester also noted Ascential`s extract methods that range from open database connectivity (ODBC) to object linking and embedding databases (OLEDB), and call interfaces. Connectivity areas that differentiate Ascential DataStage from other high-end tools include multiple types of services; support for a long list of products and standards for message-oriented middleware; and mainframe data access.

"During the study, Forrester received a report from a user processing five billion rows into 12 dimensions per fact daily, using the multiple server instances in Ascential DataStage together with Ascential`s Parallel Extender," Field says. "Other users report high scalability out-of-the box, resulting from the product`s support of parallel processing for all components, its linear scalability as hardware is added, and dynamic load balancing in multi-node configurations."

Ascential`s Enterprise Integration Suite is a data integration solution that profiles, cleanses, and transforms data from applications and systems regardless of data volume or latency. The company`s integrated offering is designed to help organisations streamline operations, improve customer support, expedite business transactions, and make better tactical and strategic decisions on the basis of the best available information. The suite provides unlimited scalability through parallel processing, complete meta data management, and any-to-any data source and application connectivity. It also delivers on-demand data integration seamlessly in service-oriented architectures.