Acta Technology Announces Major Upgrade of its
Data Warehousing Solution for Use with SAP R/3
and PeopleSoft
ACTION ITEMS
Acta Technology, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for ERP applications, has announced a major upgrade of its award-winning ERP-to-data warehouse extraction, transformation and loading tool explicitly designed and developed to be tightly integrated with SAP R/3, PeopleSoft and other ERP applications. Acta also announced the support and immediate availability of ActaWorks 3.0 for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard Company's business-critical proven UNIX operating system, as well as significant enhancements in data movement performance and powerful new metadata capabilities.
In addition, Acta announced that ActaWorks for PeopleSoft, which has been certified by PeopleSoft to load the PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse Solution, is now generally available, as is ActaWorks' capability to load SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), the new-generation decision processing solution that combines advanced data warehousing technology with the business expertise of SAP.
Acta customers running ActaWorks, which was previously available only on Windows NT, can benefit from the HP-UX 10.20 operating environment for supporting more demanding workloads-with better throughput and performance, as well as increased scalability for developing and deploying SAP R/3 and other ERP-based data warehouses. ActaWorks will be available on HP-UX 11 and additional UNIX platforms later this year.
"We are pleased that Acta has selected the industry-leading HP-UX operating environment on the powerful HP 9000 Enterprise Servers as the first UNIX platform for which ActaWorks will be optimized," said Janice Chaffin, general manager for HP's Business Critical Computing Business Unit. "This is another example of the momentum behind HP-UX in the data warehousing marketplace."
"HP-UX is the top UNIX platform for SAP R/3 and other ERP installations," said Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin. "This new release of ActaWorks reaffirms our commitment to provide our customers with a robust, enterprise-class solution for building data warehouses and marts from SAP R/3 and other data sources."
Improved Performance
In addition to UNIX support, ActaWorks 3.0 provides major performance enhancements for loading Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Informix databases. ActaWorks 3.0 provides pipelined bulk loader support for Oracle databases, which significantly reduces loading times by splitting the output file for the bulk loader into several segments. This segmentation enables Oracle SQL*Loader to begin loading a segment while the following segment is being updated by ActaWorks. In addition, this feature enables ActaWorks to be used with the parallel option for SQL*Loader, providing even greater loading performance. ActaWorks 3.0 also introduces support for parallel loading of Microsoft SQL Server, and Informix databases via SQL Insert, Update and Delete statements.
Other ActaWorks 3.0 performance enhancements include:
Tighter Integration with SAP R/3
ActaWorks 3.0 extends Acta's market leadership in SAP R/3 integration by its:
ActaWorks for PeopleSoft
ActaWorks for PeopleSoft, which is also now generally available, has been designed to meet the needs of PeopleSoft customers looking to build an enterprise data warehouse with their PeopleSoft and other corporate data. ActaWorks for PeopleSoft uniquely provides the capability to extract and transform data contained in PeopleSoft unique data structures such as Trees and records containing effective dates.
Enhanced Metadata for the Data Warehouse Developer
ActaWorks 3.0 provides additional technical metadata for data warehouse developers. ActaWorks 3.0 enables users to quickly and easily perform "where used" and impact analysis on extraction, transformation and loading jobs, including automatically identifying job modifications required due to changes at the table or column level in source or target schema definitions. In addition, ActaWorks delivers advanced capabilities for operational metadata capture, including such commonly used statistics as counts of rows inserted, updated, or deleted for each target table, as well as performance statistics for each data movement job.
"ERP databases, such as SAP and PeopleSoft are highly complex, in that they use schemas that are highly normalized and may contain thousands of tables that are interrelated," said Wayne Eckerson, senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group, a strategic e-business and technology consultancy in Boston, Mass. "ERP-specific data extraction, transformation and loading solutions like Acta's ActaWorks mask many of these complexities from the user. Acta has demonstrated considerable success in selling its solution into companies with a need to rapidly deploy SAP-based data warehouses and marts."
ActaWorks is the first extraction, transformation and loading tool designed specifically to address the challenges of building data warehouses from ERP applications. Using an intuitive graphical user interface, ActaWorks extracts data from ERP systems and other sources, transforms and cleanses the data, and loads it into a data warehouse or data mart for strategic business analysis. Unlike other extraction tools, which attempt to extract data directly from the application's underlying database, ActaWorks extracts data and essential business information via the ERP software application layer, the only way to ensure access to all data and business logic. Data mappings, transformations, and control logic to manage a complex, multi-step data warehouse process are specified using a graphical user interface without writing any code, and are stored in a metadata repository.
Availability
ActaWorks 3.0 is available for HP-UX 10.20 and Windows NT platforms.
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 AG and PeopleSoft, Acta's solutions, which have been purchased by over 60 companies in eight countries, include pre-packaged data marts, called RapidMarts, 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.
Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. Acta customers include Chevron, Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; FX Meiller, Guinness Maxtor, Monsanto, Sanofi Winthrop, S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; and Shell Chemical and Company. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com.