PINE CONE SYSTEMS INTRODUCES THE INDUSTRY'S FIRST METADATA MANAGEMENT
SOFTWARE BASED ON A DISTRIBUTED METADATA ARCHITECHTURE
Pine Cone Systems, Inc. introduced its Meta Exchange software which for the first time allows corporate enterprises to exchange, synchronize, view and manage both technical and business metadata across heterogeneous technologies in distributed environments. Meta Exchange, based on the industry’s first distributed metadata architecture, enables all vendors' products throughout the enterprise to exchange metadata --regardless of technology differences--while maintaining the metadata’s complete integrity; all without the use of a centralized repository.
Meta Exchange is an extensible architecture for distributed metadata management. It provides an immediate benefit to organizations by allowing them to create metadata once, reuse and propagate many times. Any metadata source in an enterprise, specifically metadata sources created by warehouse tools, will be seamlessly managed by Meta Exchange. Pine Cone Systems is collaborating closely with the leading BI/OLAP and ETL vendors, including Brio Technology, Business Objects, Carleton, Information Advantage and Prism Solutions, who have announced support for Pine Cone’s distributed metadata architecture.
In addition, Pine Cone has completed an extensive training and certification program for leading data warehouse consulting organizations that qualify them to install and advise companies on strategies for implementation. Meta Exchange Certified organizations include Client Server Associates, DataFlow Concepts, DataInsight, Intelligent Solutions, NewTHINK, Result Data Consulting, Saama Technologies, Inc., StorageTek World Wide Customer Services and Xenon Consulting.
Pine Cone also recently announced that TDWI selected Meta Exchange as a finalist for the 1998 Pioneering Products Shoot Out. The Pioneering Products Shoot Out highlights version 1.0 or equivalent products that promise to revolutionize the practice of data warehousing and Meta Exchange was honored by being chosen as one of six finalists. Pine Cone Systems' Meta Exchange has potential to provide breakthrough capability in the data warehousing industry, said Wayne Eckerson, vice president of technology services at TDWI.
Support for Metadata Standards
Meta Exchange will leverage all appropriate metadata standards and will supplement these with APIs and custom development. Version 1.0 includes the MDIS (metadata interchange standard) interchange format. Version 1.1, scheduled for early in the first quarter, 1999, will include CDIF (common data interchange format) and an interface for OIM (open information model). Support for these standards will allow for the import of metadata from over 100 vendors’ products, including ETL tools, OLAP tools, repositories, and the like, into the Meta Exchange managed environment. Pine Cone also provides its own import and export APIs for Meta Exchange, allowing vendors or customers to develop customized metadata applications or to integrate other products and systems with Meta Exchange's distributed metadata architecture.
"Meta Exchange is the next step in the evolution of metadata management", said Pine Cone President and CEO Dennis McCann. "Before Meta Exchange, there was no crossover of metadata-each implementation was like a disconnected island. Incremental implementation was very difficult or impossible and full enterprise implementation was like boiling the ocean", McCann said. "Meta Exchange allows metadata to be leveraged throughout an organization incrementally, so you can grow as you go".
Patent Pending for Meta Exchange
Meta Exchange supports fully distributed, heterogeneous metadata with its patent pending technology. Pine Cone’s unique approach guarantees unambiguous ownership, guarantees integrity of metadata throughout the environment, and allows both locally autonomous and sharable metadata.
"For metadata to truly provide business value to an organization, you need both a global perspective on metadata as well as a local perspective," said Bill Inmon, Pine Cone Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). "If metadata from a particular node is available to all nodes of the warehouse, the potential powerful uses of metadata are greatly increased. At the same time though, local control of metadata must be preserved so that users can do their jobs productively."
Meta Exchange’s unified view of business and technical metadata allows companies to utilize business and subject area logic rather than technical jargon. This, coupled with users' "local view" of all metadata, is very powerful. Meta Exchange consists of two modules, Exchange Manager and Meta View. Exchange Manager is used for basic metadata management processes such as defining the management environment, business model and data model, along with mapping the data model to the business model and synchronizing metadata. Meta View is a web-based tool for viewing business and technical metadata. Meta Exchange provides powerful new features for the effective management of metadata, including:
Distributed metadata architecture allows companies to leverage the
existing DSS architecture
Heterogeneous interchange of metadata objects
Automatic synchronization and copy of metadata within the environment
"Grow-as-you-go" incremental implementation
System of record, ensuring ownership, autonomy and shareability of
metadata throughout the enterprise
Unified view of business and technical metadata
"One of the biggest issues facing our data warehousing clients is the enormous amount of unconsolidated metadata they are creating due to creating multiple warehouses with multiple tools," said Ken Rudin, CEO of Emergent Corp., a leading data warehouse consultancy. "Meta Exchange will help solve that problem, and will enable us to build better solutions at a lower cost by allowing us to focus on delivering the right data to the right place, not restricting or standardizing on tools where it is not appropriate. Meta Exchange is going to provide us tremendous flexibility in maximizing our data warehouse designs and implementations especially when attempting to integrate disparate data marts".
Pricing and Availability
Meta Exchange has completed beta testing and is generally available. Exchange Manager is priced at $49,900 for a two-user license and runs on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and DEC UNIX. Meta View is $5,000 and runs on Windows NT. The product is available now for Oracle, Informix and DB2/UDB, with support for Teradata and SQL Server 7.0 available in the next release.
About Pine Cone Systems
Pine Cone Systems, based in Colorado, is the leading provider of data warehouse/data mart management and control solutions. Founded in 1995 by Bill Inmon, the father of the data warehouse concept, Pine Cone’s mission is to bring increased value and return on investment to organizations' data warehouse/data mart environments by addressing the complex issues and unique challenges of managing the data warehouse environment. The company's partners include: Business Objects, Brio Technology, Digital Equipment Corporation, Evolutionary Technology, Fiserv, Hewlett Packard, Informix Software, KPMG Peat Marwick, Oracle, Price Waterhouse, Prism Solutions and Sybase. Products currently available from Pine Cone include: Content Tracker for ensuring high quality warehouse data; Usage Tracker to monitor and report on warehouse usage; Cost Tracker to accurately assign warehouse usage costs; Refreshment Tracker to track the loading of data into the data warehouse in an automated manner; and Activator for event detection and monitoring. Pine Cone's products are available on most hardware platforms and support Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2 PE and UDB, and NCR/Teradata databases. For more information, see http://www.pine-cone.com