Heterogeneous, diversified, and big - Cargill Inc's use of Evolutionary Technologies International's ETIExtract Tool Suite - Company Operations

Software Magazine, Nov, 1997 by Eden Osucha

Mergers, globalization, and industry deregulation at large companies have produced software systems that are as heterogeneous and as widely distributed as the businesses themselves. The world's largest private corporation, Cargill Inc., is a $21 billion dollar international enterprise with a sprawling IT infrastructure. The Minneapolis-based company processes, distributes, and markets a wide variety of agricultural, food, financial, and industrial products.

Cargill supports six data warehouses, the largest of which totals 50Gbs. One of the greatest challenges for the managers of these warehouses is migrating and integrating data from legacy systems and vendor applications.

To further complicate matters, many of Cargill's 30 decentralized divisions have their own IT staff and methodologies. Carla Melby, a Cargill IT technical consultant, says one the thorniest problems is determining business rules to cleanse and build consensus for integrated data such as customer information from different business units.

According to Melby, Cargill is helping to manage its data integration with the ETI*Extract Tool Suite developed by Evolutionary Technologies International (ETI). This open systems data conversion tool selectively retrieves, transforms, and moves data between databases and data warehouses. Melby says the ETI data conversion tool was chosen over such competing products as Trinzic's Infopump, Carlton's Passport, and Prism Solutions' tools because it allowed customization of the code being generated.

"What was also key with ETI were code-insertion points," says Melby. "You can indicate to the tool that you want to insert a custom block of code, and it will then be inserted into the program where you want it. That's very important to us because manually manipulating the generated code defeats maintenance benefits and waiting for vendor modifications when you're in the middle of a project is not a feasible solution." Melby says ETI*Extract allows her senior IT people to focus on architecting the data conversion process instead of code quality control. She points out that this strategy optimizes resources and ensures consistently high code quality. "In any typical data integration situation, you can always plan for what you do expect," says Melby. "It's how effectively you can recover from surprises that saves you."

Cargill also reaps the benefits of ETI*Extract on the business side. The tool suite is a key component in Cargill's Common Message Transfer Service (CMTS). Melby says the system provides a flexible infrastructure to move data between diverse supply-chain management applications and supplements API functionality in products or packages that may lack an interface.

"We are selling to pain." says Katherine Hammer, co-founder, president, and CEO of ETI, which currently ranks 17th in the Inc. 500 list of America's fastest-growing private companies. According to Hammer, ETI*Extract has helped her customers achieve up to a thirty-fold increase in data management productivity. Melby confirms that while an interface for a function with the CMTS can take 30 hours to build, setting up an additional application for that functionality may take as little as two hours.

Hammer says ETI*Extract is designed for markets in which comprehensive data management -- via straight migration or warehousing -- is an increasingly expensive proposition. "In large IT shops, 80 cents of every dollar is spent on systems maintenance, rather than on deploying systems," notes Hammer, adding that ETI*Extract offers a cost-effective means of coping with change, "not just throwing big machines at it."