PeopleSoft Certifies Acta Technology's
Award-Winning ERP-to-Data Warehousing Solution
ACTION ITEMS
Acta Technology, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, announced that ActaWorks, Acta's award-winning ERP-to-data warehousing solution, has been certified by PeopleSoft, Inc. to load the PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse Solution. Acta is the market leader for SAP R/3 extraction, transformation, and loading solutions for data warehousing and, with ActaWorks 3.0, extends its leadership in data warehousing for other ERP systems, such as PeopleSoft.
"By partnering with Acta, a leader in extraction, transformation, and loading technology, PeopleSoft gives customers the tools to quickly and efficiently migrate data to populate the PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse", said Mark Nittler, Vice President of Applications for PeopleSoft. "This addresses the critical factors of data availability, quality, and integrity, to ensure our customers have the right information to make effective business decisions."
With ActaWorks, customers are able to easily populate the PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse with PeopleSoft ERP and HRMS data. Acta has developed a suite of pre-defined data movement jobs that map data from the PeopleSoft source systems to the target PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse. These jobs calculate aggregations, capture incremental changes of data, where possible, and handle the identification and re-processing of data errors. Customers can easily customize these jobs to integrate non-PeopleSoft data and to reflect any customizations required by their business. In addition, to speeding the implementation of Enterprise Warehouse, ActaWorks can also be used to quickly build custom data warehouses from PeopleSoft data.
Easily Building a PeopleSoft-Based Data Warehouse PeopleSoft customers building data warehouses face many challenges. First, the PeopleSoft ERP and HRMS data schemas are intricate with over 8,000 tables. Finding the data that is needed to answer critical business questions needs to be facilitated. PeopleSoft customers also must handle the additional challenge of extracting and transforming data contained in PeopleSoft unique data structures such as Trees and records containing Effective Dates.
ActaWorks makes these tasks much easier. Once users have identified the PeopleSoft application panels and fields containing the required business data, they can easily use ActaWorks to determine which PeopleSoft application tables store that information. ActaWorks also allows users to identify the location of information in the PeopleSoft data schema using keyword searches based on the business descriptions of application tables. ActaWorks also contains pre-packaged transforms that simplify and facilitate the extracting and transforming PeopleSoft Trees and records containing Effective Dates.
"There is a rapid convergence of data warehousing and ERP systems as companies look to mine the wealth of information contained in their ERP systems," said Wayne Eckerson, vice president of technology services, The Data Warehousing Institute, a leading authority on data warehousing. "ERP databases, such as Peoplesoft, use schemas that are highly normalized and may consist of thousands of tables with complex interrelationships. ERP-specific data extraction and transformation products such as ActaWorks mask many of these complexities from the user, allowing rapid development of decision support systems," Eckerson said.
Added Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin, "We are pleased to gain PeopleSoft's certification. It further reinforces our commitment to be the leader in tightly integrated ERP-to-data warehouse solutions for PeopleSoft, SAP R/3 and other leading ERP systems."
ActaWorks 3.0 for PeopleSoft
ActaWorks, which is explicitly designed and developed to be tightly integrated with PeopleSoft and other ERP applications, is the first extraction, transformation and loading tool designed specifically to address the challenges of building data warehouses from PeopleSoft applications. Using an intuitive graphical user interface, ActaWorks extracts data from PeopleSoft and non-PeopleSoft sources, transforms and cleanses the data, and loads it into a data warehouse or data mart for strategic business analysis. Unlike other extraction tools, ActaWorks is tightly integrated with the PeopleTools architecture.
Data mappings, transformations, and control logic to manage a complex, multi-step data warehouse process are specified using a graphical user interface and are stored in a metadata repository. Joining of PeopleSoft and non-PeopleSoft data and other data transformations are performed in-memory in a high performance engine.
Pricing and Availability
ActaWorks 3.0 for PeopleSoft, which runs on Microsoft Windows NT and Unix, is currently in beta test and will be commercially available in March.
About Acta Technology
Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first vendor focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client/server applications. Initially focused on SAP and PeopleSoft, Acta's solutions include pre-packaged data marts built around the industry's only extraction, transformation and loading tool, ActaWorks, architected from inception to be very tightly integrated with ERP systems. Acta is an independent software vendor (ISV) participating in the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP) and PeopleSoft's Global Alliance Program. Acta also has signed a strategic OEM relationship with Cognos.
Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. Acta customers include Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; Maxtor, Monsanto, S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; and Shell Chemical Company. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com.