Sterling Software Announces VISION:Pursuit, Which Allows Organizations To Create Data Warehouses
In Record Time

Sterling Software Inc.'s Information Management Division (IMD) recently announced the release of VISION:Pursuit, which allows organizations to be operational and begin building data warehouses in less than an hour.

This new Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tool enhances IMD's already extensive data warehousing product offering and provides its users with a complete set of tools to manage their information supply chains. VISION:Pursuit is debuting at the Best Practices & Implementation Conference sponsored by the Data Warehousing Institute, Sept. 21-22, at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina, Booth No. 16.

VISION:Pursuit allows direct access to Oracle, Informix, UDB, Sybase and most other RDBMSs, along with ODBC, HTTP and text files as data sources. VISION:Pursuit supports an equally impressive number of RDBMS data structures when building the data warehouse, including HTML.

The new tool, designed for Windows 95/98 and NT as well as most Unix workstations such as Sun Solaris, HP HP-UX and IBM AIX, automates connectivity to a wide variety of data sources. Using VISION:Pursuit with the optional Connector for SAP gives companies the power to examine information stored in SAP, integrate it with data from other sources and load it into a data warehouse.

"Business users need access to critical information from a variety of data sources and they need it fast," said Rick Jackson, president of Sterling Software's Information Management Division. "Sterling Software's full line of data warehousing products makes it possible for organizations to manage the information supply chain and the structure of business critical data resources."

VISION:Pursuit covers the complete range of data movement capabilities and can be used for ETL, ERP Reporting, Data Migration, and business-to-business data integration tasks. With the ability to add engines as data movement requirements increase, VISION:Pursuit provides a truly scalable solution for growing organizations.

Key Features And Benefits

VISION:Pursuit provides the fastest and easiest implementation of data warehousing projects with advanced technology and features including:

• Intelligent Scheduling: Allows multiple extracts, transformations and loads to be scheduled by multiple engines to maximize throughput.
• Procedural Transformation language: Includes a rich set of functions to provide virtually unlimited flexibility in filtering, cleansing and transforming data.
• Automated Setup Wizard: Automatically identifies the available databases and makes the connections. This eliminates the manual DBA efforts of identifying and connecting to each database.
• Modular Hub-and-Spoke architecture: Multiple components, which include a Designer, Runtime Scheduler and Engine, can be interconnected to support large environments.
• Multi-Platform Engines: Production extractions may be shared among multiple Engines, running on different processors to improve throughput. Scheduling and load balancing is done automatically by a common Runtime Scheduler.
• Graphical Simulator Interface: Allows users to display and test live data at each step of the process. This significantly speeds up the development process by allowing all transformation to be thoroughly tested without impacting the production environment.
• Multiple Change Data Capture Methodologies: Permits fast and efficient adoption of changes to source data systems.
• Automatic SQL and ABAP generation: Means users do not have to be fluent in SQL or ABAP (SAP's list processing language) to complete complex extraction processes.
• Metadata Repository and Automatic Documentation: Automatically provides a representation of all transformations, processes and executions. Documentation is produced automatically, saving valuable developer time.

Information Management Division

Sterling Software's Information Management Division, with headquarters in the Los Angeles area, is a provider of solutions that enable organizations to structure and manage data and application resources, maximizing their return on assets. IMD's products and services satisfy the desktop integration, data warehousing and applications portfolio needs of cross-industry users, regardless of business function. Further information about IMD's product offerings can be found on the division's Web site at http://www.sterling.com/vision.

About Sterling Software

Sterling Software is a leading provider of software and services for the application development, business intelligence, information management, storage management, network management, VM software and federal systems markets. The company is one of the 20 largest independent software companies in the world. With headquarters in Dallas, Sterling Software has a worldwide installed base of more than 20,000 customer sites and 3,700 employees in 90 offices worldwide. For more information on Sterling Software, visit the company's Web site at http://www.sterling.com.