Ascential Knits Together Integration Tools
Ascential Software
On Tuesday the company will make available an Enterprise Integration Suite that melds the company's MetaRecon 6.0 data profiling tool, Integrity 6.0 quality management tool, and DataStage 6.0 data transformation tool, said Bill Hobbib, director of product marketing.
The software makes use of the company's parallel processing expertise to quickly cleanse and transform reams of data, he said.
While all corporations have reams of data, a lot of it resides in isolated bunkers inaccessible to many who need it. Users are "all stuck with stovepipe silos of individual tools and applications ... they want one tool to incorporate all of that," Hobbib said.
"If they don't have the right data at the right place at the right quality level, they're just moving dumb data from point to point," he continued. "It may be old, it may be of poor quality, they may have five copies of the same customer's [data. What's missing is the right integration infrastructure to make that dumb data more intelligent information. That's where the ROI is," he noted.
"We can go in to sell ETL [extraction transformation and loading and also sell the quality of data. It's no good if a company gets five views of the same person or customer," he said.
Hobbib said the suite, which costs in the range of $150,000 to $190,000 for individual tools or $400,000 for the entire suite, can save corporations money in their quest to make even existing CRM and ERP applications more productive.
"If a mutual fund company can't distinguish between its most profitable customers, it's in trouble. If it can keep the top 2 percent more loyal, that may be worth $20 million or more a year to the company. ... And we don't soak up $2 to $5 million in consulting costs," Hobbib said.
The suite wraps together the fruits of a string of Ascential acquisitions. It bought Vality Technology and its data quality management technology and MetaRecon from Metagenix last April. In November 2001, it bought Torrent Systems, an information asset management specialist.
Ascential was formerly known as Informix Software until spring 2001 when IBM bought the Informix database business for $1 billion, leaving the newly named Ascential with the DataStage data integration and Media360 content management products.