Information Builders and iWay Software Release DataMigrator 7.1 and Service Manager 5.5, Offering Most Complete Data Integration Platform for BI

Business Wire, Nov 8, 2006

New Products Support Overall Data Integration Road Map for Customers

NEW YORK -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, and its subsidiary iWay Software, an innovator of enterprise integration solutions, today announced the release of DataMigrator 7.1 and Service Manager 5.5 as part of a joint organizational road map for customer-facing, BI-related data integration issues.

"You can't approach data integration with a one-size-fits-all mentality," commented John Senor, president of iWay Software. "Both new products will blend capabilities of traditional BI based on static data - with other data integration mechanisms allowing support of a unified data architecture and overall data integration road map that will support our customers' constantly changing businesses."

As part of this vision, Information Builders and iWay Software have outlined six data integration strategies for business intelligence and have aligned the development of future product releases - including the new versions of DataMigrator and Service Manager (SM) - to support this road map.

iWay DataMigrator 7.1

DataMigrator - iWay Software's extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, which supports both traditional batch ETL, and trickle-feed ETL for real-time data updates - provides improvements around ease of use, auditing and management, and integration with other iWay tools. Key features include:

* Improved support for data definition, custom process definitions, and metadata management from the Web console, which helps administrators easily service-enable data regardless of location, format, or DBMS - even legacy data

* Easier graphical join definitions, defined within the source system, which simplifies the way that ETL designers select data to use and ensures that all operations (including, but not limited to, DataMigrator processes) can use the data consistently

* Easier project management through the use of application directories and filtering, which helps users and administrators organize large projects efficiently

* Additional support for disparate data sources and non-table sources (e.g., Oracle stored procedures)

These capabilities enable users to perform ETL, enterprise information integration (EII), and related forms of data integration, especially in the following three of six integration strategies.

Traditional data warehousing - Data is extracted from multiple systems and physically moved to a single database that has a consistent data model. Before loading, the data must be transformed to reconcile the source data models into the data warehouse's model. The major advantages to this technique are query performance and the single view of the data. Disadvantages are that it usually involves long development cycles, requires different business units to agree on the definitions of key terms such as "customer" or "sale," and the data inside the warehouse is only refreshed periodically. This method is well-suited to BI implementations that require strategic planning and other long-term work.

Operational data access and EII - Data is retrieved in real time from an operational system. The advantage is real-time information; disadvantages include the fact that most operational systems were designed for transaction processing instead of reporting and business intelligence. If users need to query information from multiple sources at the same time, this is EII, and they must pay careful attention to performance issues. Whether one source or many, this strategy is well-suited to operations management, short-term planning and analysis, and departmental-level business intelligence.

Drill-through data warehousing - This strategy combines other methods listed to create a data warehouse (real-time or traditional) for most analytical and reporting work, while allowing users to use information from the data warehouse to trigger reports from operational systems. Because it combines the advantages of the other strategies, it is suitable for a very wide range of applications, allowing data architects and business users to work together to use the best means possible to solve any given business problem.

iWay Service Manager 5.5

The iWay SM 5.5 release provides significant improvements to the usability of the tool for service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects. It also improves utility for data integration and business intelligence. New features include:

* A fully redesigned Web console that walks users through a graphical definition of a service- and event-handling interface, the selection of reusable process flows that define service implementations, and other requirements particular to the interfaces

* Business intelligence object that allows users to call Information Builders' WebFOCUS reports from within a process flow, enabling reports to provide input into business processes and for Web services to initiate information delivery to end users

* ETL object that enables services to automatically initiate iWay DataMigrator jobs