Hello,

I have seen little (no) mention of the acquistion of Ascential by IBM.
Perhaps the theme is not appropriate for this newsgroup, but it is an
interesting event for someone like myself trying to see where the
DWH/ETL market is going. I would appreciate it if some esteemed
members of this newsgroup could give us their informed comment.

(As I see it:
IBM recognizes that their own product Warehouse Manager is woefully
inadequate, especially in comparison to Oracle's OWB;
that their DWH strategy has been somewhat erratic the past decade;
that (DWH) RDBMS on UNIX is a growth market:
that they have to come up with a competitive ETL product to OWB.
Is this more directed to ETL rather than information integration?
Can IBM come up with an offer as competitive in price as OWB?
Can IBM successfully integrate Ascential products with UDB?)

TIA, Ch. Keller

Dear Christopher -

christopher> I would appreciate it if some esteemed members of
christopher> this newsgroup could give us their informed comment.

I (although pretty egotistical) wouldn't presume to refer to myself as
"esteemed" but, I feel compelled to note that the recent adoption of
DataStage as the ETL component of PeopleSoft's EPM (their data
warehouse product) and, PeopleSoft's subsequent purchase by Oracle
provides an interesting market dynamic.

Historically (i.e. 4 years) PeopleSoft bundled Informatica's PowerMart
with EPM. About a year ago they switched over to Ascential and, about
six months later PeopleSoft was purchased by Oracle. Needless to say,
Oracle isn't inclined to rely on IBM products.

PeopleSoft customers are significant users of UDB and, EPM has been
taking off lately (go figure).

Just thought it was worth noting.

- Billy

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Cell 617-510-7244 Office 781-736-4657
AIM goedsole
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'information integration' category than ETL. Maybe this is because
information integration is taking off right now, IBM's very much into
it, and ETL is just one of many integration methods?

Anyhow, the only analyst concern that I read was that IBM might bungle
the integration of products. But that seems highly unlikely: IBM works
quite a bit with Ascential already, and it shouldn't be difficult to
manage. Just hope they don't bungle the integration of organizations -
they've had more challenges there.

As far as where ETL is headed - it looks to me like industry
consolidation, a consolidation with EAI, and a migration towards
real-time & SOA architectures. Perhaps the challenge of reengineering
these solutions to support SOA is part of the reason for the
consolidation? What I really miss is an engineering solution to data
integration rather than a marketing one - published patterns for ETL
along with the availability of small & cheap ETL components. That's 180
degrees different direction than where we've been heading since 1995,
but it's as needed today as it was then.

ken