Information asset management solutions provider Ascential Software is leveraging its recently signed partnership with Torrent Systems to create an enterprise-level, fully scalable data warehousing solution.
Julian Field, country manager for Ascential Software South Africa, says the development has been in direct response to customers` needs.
"The exponential growth of enterprise information, especially in industries with extremely large volumes of consumer transactions such as telecommunications, financial services and retail, has created unprecedented demand for high-transaction information management.
"Many of our customers need to load vast amounts of data, rapidly, from their transactional and e-business systems to their data warehouses and analytic applications. Until now, there has been no solution on the market that will achieve this level of information delivery in a short time."
Field points out that hardware and software limitations have rendered it difficult to manage increasingly large volumes of valuable information gathered daily via enterprise databases.
Consequently, he says, business users have not been able to analyse a consolidated set of information assets across regional boundaries, lines of business or between merged and acquired entities.
"As a result, companies have often missed cross-selling opportunities, failed to optimise pricing, miscalculated forecasts and lost valuable customers," Field says.
There is widespread consensus that the market for data warehouse tools is growing strongly and information access is leading the charge. Field refers to a recent IDC report, "Data Warehousing Tools: Market Forecast and Analysis, 2000-2004", which says: "Worldwide revenue in this industry will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26%, from $5 billion in 1999 to $17 billion in 2004."
The report, which analyses the data warehousing tools market, adds: "All segments of the data warehouse tool software market are contributing to the overall market`s healthy growth. However, information access is leading the charge. The gradual shift of revenue from warehouse generation and management to information access tools is a factor of the maturation of data warehousing.
"As buyers move from the initial stages of use to full deployment, spending priorities will shift from capturing and storing the data toward delivering the information to a wider range of users."
With worldwide revenues increasing at a 1999-2004 CAGR of 35% to $8.8 billion, the data warehouse information access market will overtake the data warehouse management segment, grabbing more than half of the overall data warehousing tools market in 2004. By comparison, its share in 1999 was 36%. Field says the new solution from Ascential and Torrent targets this growing market.
"It will allow companies to integrate, transform and share massive amounts of corporate data for business intelligence, customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce applications," he says.
The two companies have already integrated their flagship products, Ascential`s DataStage XE data integration solution and Torrent`s Orchestrate, a component-based framework for scalable applications. This joint component is available now.
"The partnership addresses the imbalance caused by databases being under-served. Organisations will have access to a solution that enables them quickly and easily to collect, process, and distribute massive amounts of data.
"The combination of Ascential`s and Torrent`s enterprise-class solutions is an important step to capturing the cost saving and revenue generation opportunities executives are seeking from the tremendous volumes of data they are juggling today," Field says.
He adds that in-house testing of the interface between DataStage XE and Orchestrate has shown that companies can cut volume constraints, time processing requirements and speed of throughput considerably.
"Our goal is to speed data warehouse extraction, transformation and loading by 200% to 400%, depending on customer configurations."
Business benefits, Field says, include improved customer service, targeted marketing and sales programmes, and substantial increases in productivity alongside decreased cost of programming and analysis time.
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