Speaking at an Ascential industry analyst gathering in Phoenix, Arizona last week, Chris Leone, PeopleSoft’s vice president of strategy for financial applications and EPM, said that significant progress has beed made on several fronts.
Leone told analysts that both companies have been working closely to develop connectivity maps that help customers to smoothly migrate their custom Informatica PowerMart developed ETL routines over to Ascential’s DataStage platform.
DataStage is now fully embedded…100% of the packaged maps for EPM were be at the end of January.
Leone also announced that the next release of EPM, codenamed Mozart, is on track for general release in early 2005and will broaden integration to include MetaStage, Ascential’s metadata management module.
According to Leone, a key part of the release will be to extend EPM’s data model to incorporate content from JD Edwards, which PeopleSoft acquired last year.
We’ll rationalize all our business content in a single data model.
Leone also hinted at greater enhancements in metadata management and new metadata management utilities.
Overall Leone acknowledged that while many EPM customers have embraced the transition to Ascential’s platform, some were not so happy.
[PeopleSoft and Ascential] have worked as hard as they can to make customers as satisfied as they can possibly be, he said.When asked by ComputerWire whether EPM users would from now on be exclusively to Ascential’s technology, Leone replied that it would still allow EPM customers to continue using Informatica or custom, home-grown ETL routines.
While the focus of the relationship today is focused on analytics (i.e. EPM), Leone did not discount a broader use of Ascential’s operational and transactional data integration competencies across the rest of the PeopleSoft business applications suite.
There are other things we’re working on at a strategic level that we can’t talk about right now.
Ascential pulled off a major coup by replacing PeopleSoft’s long-standing ETL partner, Informatica. Informatica had OEM’s its PowerMart ETL platform as part of EPM for several years prior to the switch.
Leone said the decision was not made lightly. It was the result of a long evaluation cycle and due diligence. We asked what the focus of [Ascential] was and data integration was where PeopleSoft wanted to see its partner headed, he said.
Rival Informatica Corp however paints a completely different picture asserting that the decision was made on an inability to resolve sticky licensing issues rather than core technical competencies.
DataStage was arguably an industrial upgrade from PowerMart, which was focused on data marts and less functional that Informatica’s PowerCenter tool; making it unclear why the former was chosen. It is also unclear whether Informatica would have been willing to throw its metadata management suite into the OEM mix.
Regardless of the actual reason(s), Ascential is now firmly established as PeopleSoft’s partner of choice.
But allegiances can change. Informatica recently unveiled a new strategy called Universal Data Services (UDS) that forwards a much broader vision of data integration than the company has focused on in the past. For analytic environments its already has a mature ETL platform (PowerCenter) that is more than a match against Ascential’s DataStage and a strong metadata management product (SuperGlue). Informatica also acquired string mainframe access capabities when it acquired Striva Corp last year.
What’s currently lacking in Informatica’s portfolio however is native support for data quality. Informatica relies heavily on partnerships with the likes of FirstLogic Inc to provide this capability.
Chances are that Informatica will start to address broader types of integration – i.e. across the operational, transactional, enterprise information integration (EII) divide – as it continues to flesh out its UDS vision this year.
