ARDENT SOFTWARE AND PANEL OF EXPERTS DEFINE THE PROMISE AND POTENTIAL OF DATA WAREHOUSING

Imagine a future where every employee within an organization has the information to make crucial business decisions; produce comprehensive reports using transactional data, text documents, magazine articles, and even e-mail; or trace the history of every document ever created for their organization - all with just a mouse click. Next-generation data warehousing technology is the road to that future, and it is paved with the Internet, navigated by enterprise portals, and managed by meta data.

This is the vision described by a panel of industry experts to a standing-room-only crowd at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) Best Practices Conference in San Diego led by Pete Fiore, Vice President of Marketing Operations and Business Development for Ardent Software, Inc. Participants included Richard Rist of TDWI, Gene Phifer of GartnerGroup, Katherine Bull of InfoWorld, Claudia Imhoff of Intelligent Solutions, Inc., and Jack Garzella of MatchLogic Inc., a subsidiary of Excite@Home.

The Ardent-led group examined the current state and future direction of the data warehousing, business intelligence, and analytical applications marketplace. The result was a look into twenty-first century information management - where the data warehouse becomes the foundation of an infrastructure that is linked to the Internet, provides access to structured and unstructured data, and serves as the platform for e-business and analytical applications within the enterprise and beyond.

"The Internet is the flashpoint for advancing data warehouses from narrow islands of data used by relatively small groups of people to a true enterprise information resource," says Gene Phifer, Research Director, GartnerGroup, Inc. Internet Strategies. "The prevalence and ease-of-use of web browsers - coupled with the emergence of enterprise portals - ensures that more people will have access to more information than ever before."

The next step in the evolution of data warehousing is providing the foundation of intelligence and analytical application infrastructure. The experts concurred that meta data management, integration, sharing, and data quality assurance capabilities are critical characteristics of effective data warehouse solutions because they provide more reliable, clearer information to end users for real-time decision processing.

"Data warehousing has gained recognition from executive management as a significantly contributing factor to an organization's ability to compete successfully. Collecting, accessing, analyzing, and acting on information in real-time is paramount in our increasingly fast-paced, wired economy," said Fiore.

Ardent Software's Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII) initiative, announced at the DWI Conference, is designed to deliver products that will enable organizations to deploy a single infrastructure to support a wide variety of strategic solutions, including e-business, analytical applications, and enterprise information portals. DataStage Suite, which shipped earlier this month, is the first EII product set. DataStage Suite includes three components - DataStage XE 1.0, DataStage Enterprise 1.0 and DataStage 3.6 - to suit a variety of corporate business intelligence infrastructure needs.

For more information, visit Ardent's web site at http://www.ardentsoftware.com/.