Hawk redesigns most of Ascential’s core products, blending them into a new bundle that is integrated to a common metadata back end and a common front end. The result is that users, including developers, data architects, and business analysts, will be able to work off common information on how data is being moved, transformed, and integrated.
It also enables database and application personnel to work on data transformations, cleansing, and profiling without having to switch to different tools. And Hawk adds various point capabilities, such as the ability of all of the Hawk tools to read or write data in XML, receive or pass messages using SOAP or JMS, and expose data transformation services as WSDL or Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs).
Hawk will enter open, or final beta in late June and is tentatively scheduled for Q4 release. For the most part, the product names will simply add WebSphere in front of the Ascential product name. For instance, DataStage becomes IBM WebSphere DataStage.
The components of Hawk will include new versions of the DataStage data migration and transformation product; the ProfileStage data profiling product; the QualityStage data cleansing product; the AuditStage product, which creates data transformation audit trails; and the MetaStage product, the former standalone repository.
The AuditStage Hawk offering, which adds new reporting capabilities, has been code named Sorcerer and will likely be renamed WebSphere Information Analyzer.
Additionally, several new products will be available as extensions to the Hawk metadata engine. They will include WebSphere MetaBroker Architect, which provides integration with third party products such as CA’s ErWIN data modeler, IBM’s new Rational Data Architect (the new version of Rational ROSE Data Modeler), and Universe, the repository used by Business Objects business intelligence products.
Other add-ons will be IBM WebSphere Business Glossary, which will provide a higher level, browser-based business analyst’s tool for reading and writing into the repository; and an as yet unnamed Impact Analysis product, that will provide some change management capabilities.
Ascential’s current (pre-Hawk) products are the result of a series of acquisitions that the company made after selling Informix to IBM in 2001 for $1bn. After giving roughly half of it back to shareholders, Ascential invested much of the bulk in acquisitions such as Torrent Systems, which provided the high-volume, high-speed ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tool that is now DataStage data migration engine.
It also acquired data quality and profiling tools, and Mercator, which provided capabilities for mapping EDI transactions to enterprise databases. As a result, the company had a large spread of capabilities, represented by standalone tools supported by a standalone meta data repository.
Although Microsoft and Oracle also offer ETL tools that funnel data into their own databases, until now, Ascential’s primary rival has been Informatica. Founded roughly a decade ago, Informatica’s claim to fame was that they were the first vendor to design an ETL tool that was driven, not off raw code, but from a common metadata engine and visual, declarative environment where you mapped data transformations graphically.
Informatica’s common engine was designed to funnel data to and from relational databases, although in later years they also added some legacy ETL capabilities that in some cases licensed third party technology not part of their core engine. Informatica has also trended to partner for capabilities such as data quality, where it has a relationship with Trillium.
By contrast, Ascential has had broader capabilities, including legacy and relational transformation, plus data profiling and data cleansing, but it lacked the single engine that Informatica boasted.
That meant that you had to switch between different tools to perform the different tasks, and had to update the repository (if your company acquired MetaStage) using a separate operation. (There were some exceptions; for instance, AuditStage was sold as the reporting component of ProfileStage).
As a result, unless everybody involved updated the repository consistently, there was no guarantee that the person performing the ETL function had the latest information on the status of the data itself, or whether the ETL process had been changed.
With Hawk, Ascential bridges the gap and ups the ante, using the core engine to also support profiling, cleansing, and audit trail analysis.
However, Hawk does not include all of Ascential’s offerings, yet. For instance, DataStage TX, the former Mercator product, will not be included in the initial release. Development of Hawk tooling as an Eclipse plug-in is also set for a future release. And, as if the plate isn’t full enough, with IBM’s acquisition, future work is scheduled to bring the Hawk capabilities closer to other IBM products such as WebSphere Business Integration (WEBI).
Although Ascential’s products will be branded under the WebSphere banner, they fall under IBM’s Information Management group, which handles DB2.
