Ascential Software, the unquestioned leader in the enterprise data integration market, has brought a unified suite of products to the channel with the announcement of its Enterprise Integration Suite.
"This new suite solves the two biggest problems our channel partners are experiencing in helping their clients gain a 360-degree view of their businesses: too many disparate integration tools and too little power to handle the vast and varied amount of data," says Julian Field, MD of CenterField Software, sole distributor for Ascential in SA.
In an industry first, Ascential`s new Enterprise Integration Suite fuses three best-in-class data integration products into a single offering powered by a parallel processing architecture that scales linearly to handle unlimited data loads.
Early users of the suite are achieving a single, accurate view of customers, products, suppliers and business operations in support of their strategic business imperatives.
The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite combines the company`s three data integration products for data profiling, data quality and data transformation on a shared platform of software services for infinite linear scalability through parallel processing, management of metadata and connectivity.
The products in the Enterprise Integration Suite are MetaRecon 6.0, Integrity 6.0 and DataStage 6.0.
"Our channel partners have told us repeatedly in the last 12 months that they are looking for more power and functionality, but less complexity, because that is what their clients are demanding," adds Field. "The new suite`s unlimited scalability is critical to high-volume and real-time data integration "It allows customers to tap an unlimited number of processors through parallel processing-based data integration."
This, adds Field, means today`s most competitive companies can achieve the performance needed to transform their large, complex and constantly growing data flows into intelligent information by feeding that information into such strategic applications as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), business intelligence/analytics, data warehouses, and other enterprise applications. "This, in turn, will allow customers to achieve the return on investment they originally expected from those applications," notes Field.
Ascential created its Enterprise Integration Suite in response to the growing demand for a complete offering from a single vendor, rather than multiple "point product" tools that must be stitched together, and that lack the flexibility and scalability required to meet the challenges faced by today`s enterprises.
The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite combines enterprise users` data into an all-encompassing "single view" of each customer to enable better customer service, more cross-selling opportunities and increased profitability.
"With this Enterprise Integration Suite, Ascential is giving us the ability to plug in various data integration services where we need them, all in a consistent framework of parallel processing, providing architectural, application, and operational leverage in timely support of our business opportunities," says Doug Williams, VP of systems development at ClubCorp, an Ascential DataStage user and the world`s largest owner and operator of golf courses, country clubs, private business clubs, and resorts.
"Historically, enterprises have had to cobble together data integration components from four or more different vendors, then pray that they could get them to work together. Emergent comprehensive data integration platforms can reduce implementation time frames and costs while they improve stability and performance," says Doug Laney, Meta Group VP, Application Delivery Strategies.
$600b dirty data dilemma
The Ascential Suite is the only enterprise data integration offering with integrated functionality for data cleansing and quality, solving the "dirty data" problem that cost US businesses $600 billion in 2001, according to a recent study by The Data Warehouse Institute. Competing point products lack the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite`s built-in data profiling, quality, and transformation scope and scalability.
New data integration product releases
The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite products include:
* MetaRecon 6.0 for data profiling, which automatically discovers related data scattered across multiple systems and applications, eliminating laborious and time-consuming manual efforts;
* Integrity 6.0 for data quality management, which cleanses and standardises data to eliminate costly and inefficient data redundancies and inconsistencies, ensuring that the information companies rely upon is accurate and coherent; and
* DataStage 6.0 for data transformation, which integrates, enriches, transforms and delivers data in the proper format for its intended use by strategic enterprise applications.
Shared software services
The new, infinitely scalable platform within the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite provides a set of core services, including:
* Unlimited linear scalability across all products in the suite. By shielding developers from the complexity of parallel processing, the platform automatically partitions and repartitions data on the fly to maximise and coordinate the resources of all underlying hardware, from multiprocessor SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems to the world`s largest MPP (massive parallel processing) and clustered environments.
* Comprehensive metadata management and coordination that enables organisations to respond faster to changes, increase business users` confidence, eliminate custom integrations and reduce project complexity.
* Any-to-any connectivity between data sources and targets that allows enterprises to leverage their investments in strategic enterprise applications by extracting incoming data from a broad range of sources and loading it as high-quality, transformed data to feed those applications.
The Enterprise Integration Suite is available immediately. It can be licensed in its entirety or as individual Release 6.0 integration products.
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