Event Summary
"HAMBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- systemfabrik, the leading European vendor
of Information Integration products, has announced the immediate availability
of Warehouse Workbench 4.0 (WWB). The new set of features prepares the ground
for an enterprise wide platform for information transformation, thus bridging
the gap from Data Marts to Enterprise Application Integration and e-commerce.
WWB
4.0 provides a unique platform for rapid development of mission critical Information
Integration Infrastructure including graphical data flow analysis, content driven
reverse engineering, and data flow simulation for diverse sources such as SAP
R/3, Internet content, and relational data bases. The enhanced feature set further
shortens implementation cycles of data migration processes and moves beyond
ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) capabilities. Warehouse Workbench 4.0 introduces
an open, enterprise wide Information Infrastructure Architecture based on the
Universal Transformation Language (UTL).
Reverse
Engineering and graphical online simulation of all transformations, accelerate
the integration of inter enterprise data."
"Increasingly,
data marts and data warehouses are no longer isolated features within the company"
says Gerrit Kolb, CEO of systemfabrik. "Their rapid integration into the overall
information infrastructure is critical to the survival of the Enterprise in
the hyper competitive Internet Age. The 4.0 release addresses this need with
a unique feature set that combines the ability to solve complex business problems
with rapid implementation speed."
Market
Impact
The vendor is apparently making an attempt to turn itself into an Enterprise
Application Integration vendor instead of an ETL vendor. However there is nothing
in systemfabrik's press release or documentation that indicates the new release
of WWB is anything more than the ETL tool it has been in the past. A complete
EAI solution requires a middleware component (i.e., hooks into IBM's MQSeries)
to allow different applications to communicate and exchange messages. We see
nothing in the product documentation to indicate that this has been provided.
User
Recommendations
Customers evaluating ETL tools should include systemfabrik on a long list of
vendors to be evaluated. Their product should be of particular interest if data
from SAP's ERP solution needs to be accessed. However, customers interested
in EAI should at most consider questioning systemfabrik on why its Warehouse
Workbench 4.0 qualifies as a true EAI offering.