Johannesburg, 13 Oct 2004
Gartner's Magic Quadrant Report for extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) 2004 has found that market demand is taking ETL tools into new application areas.
This is a sentiment echoed in the local market. The BI Practice at Sybase South Africa, a partner of local Ascential distributor Centerfield Software, and a reseller of Ascential's DataStage ETL product suite, says it has seen a major increase in the demand for ETL tools. Sybase's BI Practice resells DataStage as part of its complete business intelligence (BI) solution.
"There has been an enormous upswing in ETL activity in the local market, accompanied by greater uptake of data quality management and metadata tools; where previously there was much talk about data quality management, many companies are now implementing," says Estelle de Beer, Business Intelligence Practice manager at Sybase SA. "What we have also seen is that while there has been growth in traditional ETL demand, deployments are becoming more generic and are not focused solely on business intelligence. It's more about data management, data movement, and data migration."
Gartner found that during the first half of 2004, more than 40% of its clients inquiring about ETL said they planned to use ETL tools in non-BI scenarios, including data consistency between operational applications, master data management, and system migrations. The report says that 2004 represents the start of a significant trend toward the use of ETL tools for applications other than data warehousing.
"The reason for this is that companies have a diverse range of technologies across their organisations, and there is a huge focus on creating a single view of their environment - whether it's about the customer, the product or the supplier, companies want to bring all their systems together. The most basic way of doing that is at the data level, starting with data consolidation," De Beer says.
The Gartner report positioned Ascential Software in its Leader quadrant, making it one of only two ETL market leaders. Leaders are defined as vendors that are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction, and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.
As a result of the increasing use of ETL tools in non-BI scenarios, Gartner evaluated ETL vendors according to the following criteria:
* Bi-directional integration with packaged applications;
* Metadata interoperability with packaged applications, data quality tools, enterprise application suites and other infrastructure components;
* Broader runtime platform support, including the ability to distribute workload across platforms;
* Support for Web services to enable participation in a service-oriented architecture;
* Integration with messaging middleware and integration brokers;
* Flexible pricing options to make broad deployments cost-feasible; and
* Solid reference sites for non-BI deployments
Sybase chose to become an Ascential reseller over six years ago because of the product's demonstrated market leadership and maturity. The company now has a large referenceable customer base, placing it in a good position to take advantage of the ETL wave.
"It has been proved over and over that we made the right decision; the product has been a fundamental factor in the growth of Sybase's BI Practice," says De Beer. "The Ascential ETL toolset has the largest ETL customer base in South Africa as a whole, and The BI Practice at Sybase is a very active DataStage value added reseller in the country. We have invested heavily in people to support the product, which has also played a major role in making it attractive to the local market as customers know that there is an abundance of local skills."
Sybase's ETL customer base includes Investec, Telkom, Debswana, Harmony Gold, The Department of Health, FNB Corporate bank, FNB Analytics, Standard Bank and ITC.
Share