Event Summary
"TORONTO, Jan. 13 /CNW-PRN/ - Hummingbird Communications Ltd. (NASDAQ: "HUMC"
and TSE: "HUM"), a world-leading enterprise software solutions company, today
announced the immediate availability of Genio Suite 4.0, representing a tremendous
leap forward in functionality for the market-leading data integration solution.
This release was designed with significant improvements to usability, performance
and openness to better support organizations as they implement large-scale enterprise
data warehousing and e-commerce solutions.
As
organizations move into the post Y2K era, IT leaders are looking to implement
the business-critical applications that have been postponed. Topping the list
of these projects are e-commerce and data warehousing initiatives which both
share the challenge of massive data volumes and the need for integration with
existing environments.
Genio
Suite version 4.0 extends Hummingbird's open metadata strategy, by including
wizards for importing and viewing Business Objects' Universes and Cognos' Catalogs,
in addition to Hummingbird BI/Suite. This significantly increases the usability
of leading business intelligence tools with Genio Suite, since all metadata
is shared in a common repository with cross-links between metadata objects.
Other key enhancements in this release include improved loading capabilities
of NCR Teradata and Oracle 8. With performance as a critical success factor
for e-commerce and analytical applications, the loaders are a welcome addition
to Genio Suite; they help enterprises significantly reduce the time required
to manage the large transaction volumes to improve the responsiveness of these
systems."
Market
Impact
The addition of a graphical interface for designing information flows, enhanced
support for Hyperion's Essbase 5 & 6, a SAP certified solution for loading SAP's
BW (Business Information Warehouse), wizards to provide a link to the metadata
in Cognos and Business Objects business intelligence solutions, and improved
loading capabilities to Oracle 8 and NCR, should provide Hummingbird Genio with
a stronger product. (For more information about the prior version of Genio see
"Hummingbird
Announces Extraction and Portal Strategy for ERP" October 27th, 1999.) It
should be noted that Hummingbird is relatively new to the ETL industry, and
their technology should be examined closely.
User
Recommendations
Customers examining Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) tools should include Genio
on a long list of candidates. One question that should be asked of the vendor
is which fast load technology is employed with Oracle and NCR Teradata (there
are a variety of options). In addition, it should be noted that its claimed
support for changed data capture (an important feature which avoids table scans
and requires a method to identify changed records), is only via Sybase's Replication
Server product. Another feature that may provide additional speed and should
be examined is the ability to compile transformation objects, which avoids the
typical interpretive nature of ETL tools. Genio states that "all metadata is
shared in a common repository with cross-links between metadata objects". (For
an alternative approach see "Informatica
Conforms to Metadata Standard" November 10th, 1999.) There are many
issues to be weighed when considering common versus distributed metadata repositories.