An Interesting Mash-Up
Yesterday, Informatica and Salesforce.com announced an interesting deal that will allow the two tools to interact. After looking at a general overview of the technology, it looks like something that will be relatively useful for users of these products, and help to cement sales for both companies. I wouldn’t call this quite as appealing as the combination of Nike+iPod, but then again I am both a distance runner and an iPod owner.
I think that this is solid recognition that using data as a service in the enterprise is not only possible, but probable. Also, a nice move by Informatica to keep its products fresh and leaning towards the leading edge. At the same time, I wonder if we are trying to teach an old dog new tricks. After all, Cast Iron Systems sells EAI appliances that are also integrated with Salesforce.com. Probably not, as the really profitable customers of ETL tool vendors are probably not the same ones looking at appliances.
At least, not yet …
technorati tags:mashup, Informatica, ETL EAI,information architecture
July 23rd, 2006 at 4:19 pm
I’ve used Cast Iron Systems tool and I would hardly call it ETL worthy. It truly is EAI, and probably pretty good at that but we tried to use it for ETL and it does not fit the mold. The product was just too slow and not enough functionality for true ETL. Beware if the term “Real Time ETL” or “Real Time ETL-Lite”. Real Time Datawarehousing isn’t very practical and if any part of that process is batch then you have a batch process not a realtime process. I have seen tools advertising as real time ETL such as CastIron and thats a fancy way of saying we do EAI, not ETL.
July 24th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Thanks for your feedback about Cast Iron. I haven\’t used it myself, but I think that appliances could be the next step in the ETL market. Probably a good way for someone to attack the low end of the market, then move upstream.
Also, I appreciate your distinction on real-time vs. near-real-time. However, I would disagree with your assessment about the value of faster processing in the data warehouse. I am currently working in a near-real-time data warehouse, where our data takes less than 15 minutes to go from data collection to reporting. While I am not sure of the economic benefit of processing any faster, I can say that we are able to give our organization a distinct and tangible competitive advantage with our turnaround time.
August 21st, 2006 at 5:40 pm
[…] Dion Hinchcliffe has been writing some interesting stuff about web 2.0 in the enterprise. His latest post is a bit of a rant against Wikipedia, but push on and it is worth the read. Lately I have been pondering the impact of things like SOA and mashups in the enterprise context, blending in the web dialtone discussion that is happening on the O’Reilly Radar. […]