Informatica Upgrades Data Mart Tools
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Informatica Corp. recently released the latest versions of its data mart deployment tools and its data integration hub, with new features designed to make both more appealing to large corporate enterprises.

PowerMart 4.5 is the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's tool suite for designing and deploying data marts. Once one or several data marts are up and running, the PowerCenter 1.5 data integration hub helps tie them together and transform legacy, relational and enterprise resource planning data so that it can be analyzed for decision support.

Together, the two tools will include increased mainframe support, enterprise analytic applications support, meta-data enhancements, new parallel engine capabilities and new aggregation-handling capabilities for managing larger data stores.

Stanford University in Palo Alto uses PowerMart to consolidate all of its corporate financial, student and production data from 15 legacy systems. The university has been testing the latest edition. "We particularly like the new lock-down security features that let several groups work on the same repository without overwriting someone else's work," said Patrick Nolan, an MIS engineering manager at Stanford. "We have been able to standardize the way we do [data] processing throughout the system, and our productivity has gone way up."

Sapient Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based software company, has built its decision-support data mart on PowerMart. Ivor Fergus, the architect of Sapient's mart, said the new scalability capabilities were "critical" to his company as it expands its small data mart into a more encompassing storehouse of financial data.

Fergus said that he still would like to see more attention paid to how to best perform data consolidation in a distributed environment. "This still seems to missing in these latest versions," he said.

Pricing starts at $85,000 for PowerMart 4.5 and at $225,000 for PowerCenter 1.5.