Tech Solution: Data Integration Tools
Most companies have large volumes of detailed operational data, but because it's spread across many departments or is locked in sluggish legacy technology, business analysts and decision-makers can't get the answers they need. Data integration tools, commonly referred to as data warehouses, help companies consolidate data to present a single view of the business to users and to other front-end applications. Companies can make better decisions faster and less expensively, and get answers to questions that previously went unanswered.
Business Objects Data Integrator
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: Pricing for the core product starts at $25,000 per four CPUs.
Business Benefits: Data Integrator allows organizations to explore, extract, transform, and deliver data to applications and/or end users. Data Integrator helps ensure that data is accurate and up to date. It accelerates the process of moving large volumes of data and improves developer productivity.
Functionality: Data Integrator can correlate and integrate data from any source, and enables users to design customized data integration processes. Megadata Manager is a set of capabilities within Data Integrator that allows users to collect BI, ETL (extract, transform, load), and third-party data, then view and analyze it. The subsequent reports provide information on data quality, impact analysis, and report-to-source data lineage. Consequently, users can deliver data for compliance requirements, internal controls, or decision-making.
Contact: Business Objects at 866-681-3435; or visit www.businessobjects.com
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Data Integration
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: Role-based licensing fees start at $640, plus a $160 annual maintenance charge for upgrades.
Business Benefits: Data integration is a component of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, and is a single ETL solution designed for BI. It optimizes data merging, extraction, data transformation, and dimensional management to deliver data warehouses ready for business reporting and analysis.
Functionality: Data integration within Cognos 8 Business Intelligence uses a multiplatform server-based engine to process large volumes of data within short update windows. This has the added benefit of reducing hardware investments. A pipelined transformation engine reads data in single passes to deliver high throughput. Finally, the solution delivers data warehouses that consist of coordinated data marts to group commonly shared subject areas together, and then provide facts and analysis for those areas.
Contact: Cognos at 1-800-426-4667; or visit www.cognos.com
Teradata Warehouse 8.1
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: Entry-level pricing starts as low as $300,000 per terabyte of user.
Business Benefits: Teradata Warehouse 8.1 is a suite of data warehouse, hardware, and consulting services designed to run on a single platform that is updated in real time.
Functionality: Warehouse 8.1 uses parallel process, which breaks down the task of integrating data from multiple systems into smaller subtasks that can be managed concurrently by multiple work units
This allows ad-hoc queries to be performed as efficiently as possible, as opposed to single large queries, which can create a bottleneck. It also enables complex data tasks to be broken down into small tasks and distributed to multiple software processors within the database, saving time and improving efficiency. In addition, Warehouse 8.1 provides standardized interfaces to facilitate easy client/server application development and includes client and host-based utilities that allow users to interact directly with the Teradata database.
Contact: Teradata at 858-485-3029; or visit www.teradata.com
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