Oracle adds Data Integration Suite to middleware family |
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By Mark Brunelli, News Editor
05 Feb 2008 | SearchOracle.com |
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The latest addition to the Oracle Fusion Middleware family is designed to give users interested in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) a one-stop-shop for data integration needs, according to one industry expert.
Released yesterday, the new Oracle Data Integration Suite starts at $60,000 per CPU and offers users an "end-to-end" data integration platform that connects heterogeneous data sources and applications like the Oracle Database, IBM DB2, MySQL's open source database management system, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and Oracle and third-party enterprise resource planning applications, according to Oracle.
The idea, Oracle says, is to help customers with their SOA initiatives by coupling SOA technologies with data management capabilities like extract, load and transform (E-LT), data quality and data profiling functions.
The suite also combines Oracle's SOA-based Business Process Management and change management capabilities with Oracle-Hyperion's Master Data Management (MDM) capabilities. Oracle acquired Hyperion last March as part of an ongoing, high-profile acquisition spree.
"What Oracle is trying to say is that in order for SOA to be successful, you need to have MDM in place," said Ray Wang, a business applications analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. "You also need to have the business processes and you also need to have some of the semantic rules built into all of that."
On the MDM front, Oracle says the new suite offers a wide range of data movement and delivery services, broad data connectivity, data integration core services and metadata services.
Potential Data Integration Suite buyers also have the option to incorporate Oracle's in-memory data grid technology. Analysts say that storing data in-memory reduces performance overhead and speeds up the process of retrieving data that exists on the virtual or middleware layer.
The new suite, which comes with the Oracle Data Integrator E-LT technology, also incorporates two relatively new products -- Oracle Data Profiling and Oracle Data Quality for Oracle Data Integrator -- which were developed in conjunction with Harte-Hanks Trillium Software.
Oracle says the two products extend the data quality features of Data Integrator to provide added data governance capabilities.
Oracle Data Profiling is a quality monitoring tool that allows users to assess the quality of their data through metrics, to discover or infer rules based on this data, and to monitor the evolution of data quality over time, according to Oracle.
Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator employs a rules-based engine to help users ensure data quality and conduct name and address cleansing as data integration efforts move forward.
With the new Data Integration Suite, Oracle is sending the message that "no matter what solution you have, no matter where you go, you don't have to worry about where your data is," Wang said. "You can keep a single source of truth with Oracle."
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