Data Mart, Warehouse Integration Drive Ardent Software XML Strategy
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While many companies are using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to extend the reach of stand-alone products and to enable their integration with other companies' products, Ardent Software is taking the opposite tack.

Fresh off the acquisition trail, Ardent is using XML as a means of unifying all of its own recently acquired technologies.

During the next quarter, Ardent, which acquired data warehousing company Prism Solutions in November 1998, will outline a plan showing how its recently announced MetaBroker software will be used to integrate Ardent data marts on Windows NT systems with Prism data warehouses on mainframe architectures.

The middleware software Ardent is using for the arrangement comes from its June 1998 acquisition of Dovetail Software. Underneath that middleware technology will be new support for XML file formats, which will be stored in Ardent's O2 object database server, technology that Ardent acquired from UniData in February 1998.

Scheduled to ship this month, Ardent's MetaBrokers are designed to share meta data information between a variety of vendors' data warehouse tools, officials said.

Pete Fiore, executive vice president and general manager at Ardent, said the Web is consolidating disparate technologies, and that one of the key enabling technologies for developing enterprise information portals will be XML.

"The Web creates a snowball effect in terms of demands for data access," Fiore said. "One of the key technologies in this area will be XML for managing, storing and distributing information."

MetaBroker pricing starts at $5,000 per broker.

Ardent Software Inc., in Westboro, Mass., is at http://www.ardentsoftware.com.