BI.com, the business intelligence company in the JSE-listed ERP.com group, has signed with Ardent Africa to join the DataStage Suite programme. As such, it joins local companies such as Abraxas and Sybase on the programme, which has been designed to promote the issue of data quality among database and business intelligence vendors.
BI.com was launched last year after the listing of ERP.com. It provides a logical layer of business intelligence on the enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions implemented by ERP.com. It has secured business intelligence contracts at companies such as Citadel, Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, Avroy Shlain, Hollard and Edgars, and is a business partner of Oracle, Microsoft, Cognos, and Business Objects through Usko Software, says BI.com director Frances Brazier.
"BI.com is complementary to and synergistic with the rest of the ERP.com group," says Brazier. "But there are many ERP solutions on the market, and as many business intelligence offerings. The issue of data quality is very important to us, but our customers can`t afford to tie up expensive resources in writing their own, complex data quality systems and routines."
DataStage simplifies, automates and standardises the process of data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), extracting from all systems, transforming and cleansing data, and loading it to all target business intelligence applications.
"We surveyed all data quality tools on the market before deciding to standardise on DataStage," says Brazier. "DataStage was the most cost-effective, comprehensive, intuitive and easy to learn product of its sort. Its open standards and interfaces permit it to extract from many legacy systems, including mainframes and AS/400-based systems. We have many prospective customers running the JD Edwards suite, which makes the AS/400 feature particularly important. In addition, DataStage was the least resource-intensive product we tested."
Brazier says BI.com has identified an initial five potential sites for the deployment of DataStage.
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