Acta Technology Introduces Major Upgrade of its Award-Winning Data Warehousing Solution for Use With SAP R/3.PALO ALTO Palo Alto, city, California Palo Alto (păl`ō ăl`tō), city (1990 pop. 55,900), Santa Clara co., W Calif.; inc. 1894. Although primarily residential, Palo Alto has aerospace, electronics, and advanced research industries. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 1998-- ActaWorks 2.0 supports SAP R/3 4.0, SAP R/3 IDOCs and Informix databases Acta Technology, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing See data warehouse. data warehousing - data warehouse solutions for packaged applications, announced today a significant upgrade of its award-winning data warehouse solution explicitly designed and developed to be tightly integrated with SAP(tm) R/3(tm) and other ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) An integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. applications. The new release of ActaWorks, formerly marketed by Acta as ActaLink, supports SAP R/3 4.0, SAP's Intermediate Document (IDOC) architecture -- which facilitates the incremental extraction of SAP data, and Informix databases. Monsanto Contributes to ActaWorks 2.0 Feature Set Monsanto Company, the $7.5 billion life sciences company, and a large SAP customer, has purchased ActaWorks and is using it to extract sales and finance data from SAP R/3 to build an Oracle-based enterprise data warehouse -- called the Decision Support Repository -- from which Monsanto's IT divisions will build data warehouses and data marts to meet the needs of their individual business units. Monsanto, headquartered in St. Louis, Mo., contributed significantly to the new features contained in ActaWorks 2.0. "Acta has built a significant number of production-class features into this new release, including greatly improved facilities to migrate ActaWorks jobs from development to test to production," said Lenny Alper, technical architect in Monsanto's core SAP R/3 decision support group. "We consider our relationship with Acta to be a very strong and mutually beneficial Adj. 1. mutually beneficial - mutually dependent interdependent, mutualist dependent - relying on or requiring a person or thing for support, supply, or what is needed; "dependent children"; "dependent on moisture" partnership, as they have been highly responsive to our needs, while Acta has benefited from our extensive SAP expertise." Support for IDOC-based Changed-Data Capture ActaWorks now supports incremental data extraction Data extraction is the act or process of retrieving (binary) data out of (usually unstructured or badly structured) data sources for further data processing or data storage (data migration). for all SAP data. Utilizing a variety of methods, including SAP's Intermediate Document (IDOC) architecture -- the method by which SAP modules communicate with each other and the outside world -- ActaWorks 2.0 can incrementally extract only the data changed since the last extract. This is an effective means for capturing changed data when the underlying tables do not contain date and time stamps. In addition, ActaWorks extends the capabilities of IDOCs by generating ABAP ABAP Advanced Business Application Programming ABAP Anheuser-Busch Adventure Parks ABAP As Baller As Possible ABAP Abbreviated Ssi Application Process that can extract additional data related to each IDOC that is often required by a data warehouse. In addition to previously announced support for native interfaces to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server A relational DBMS from Microsoft that is a major component of the Windows Server System. It is Microsoft's high-end client/server database and is closely integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio and the Microsoft Office System. databases, ActaWorks 2.0 now supports native Informix databases as sources, targets and repositories. ActaWorks users can also perform bulk loading of data into Informix targets. Other significant new features in ActaWorks 2.0 include: -- ActaWorks now supports remote administration and monitoring, including the remote launching and scheduling of jobs, as well as remote log access. -- ActaWorks now makes it much easier to develop data warehousing extraction, transformation and load jobs using teams of multiple developers. -- ActaWorks debugging facilities are now significantly enhanced. "This new release of ActaWorks affirms our commitment to provide our customers with a robust, enterprise-class solution for building data warehouses and marts from SAP and non-SAP data," said Acta President and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. Carol Mills Baldwin. "ActaWorks can now tout even tighter integration with SAP R/3, along with improved performance, manageability and ease of use, enabling our customers to quickly gain the advantages of a data warehouse for their SAP R/3 data." ActaWorks 2.0 ActaWorks is the first extraction, transformation and loading See ETL. tool designed specifically to address the challenges of building data warehouses from packaged applications. Using an intuitive graphical user interface graphical user interface (GUI) Computer display format that allows the user to select commands, call up files, start programs, and do other routine tasks by using a mouse to point to pictorial symbols (icons) or lists of menu choices on the screen as opposed to having to , ActaWorks extracts data from SAP R/3 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. ActaWorks extracts the requested data from SAP R/3 by generating optimized ABAP/4 code and from non-SAP relational sources by generating SQL SQL in full Structured Query Language. Computer programming language used for retrieving records or parts of records in databases and performing various calculations before displaying the results. . Joining of SAP and non-SAP data and other data transformations are performed in-memory in a high performance engine. ActaWorks is the foundation on which Acta's RapidMarts, which were introduced today, are based (see companion release). Availability ActaWorks 2.0, which runs on Microsoft Windows NT, has completed beta testing (programming) beta testing - Testing a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the and is now commercially available. About Acta Technology Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first and only vendor focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client-server applications. Initially focused on SAP, Acta's solutions include pre-packaged data marts built around the industry's only extraction, transformation and loading tool, ActaWorks, architected from inception to be very tightly integrated with SAP R/3 and other ERP software's application layer. Acta is an Independent Software vendor (ISV (Independent Software Vendor) A person or company that develops software. It implies an organization that specializes in software only and is not part of a computer systems or hardware manufacturer. ) participating in the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP (1) (Certified Systems Professional) An earlier award for successful completion of an ICCP examination in systems development. See ICCP. (2) (Commerce Service P ) and has signed a strategic OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and relationship with Cognos. Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The company was founded by Sachin Chawla and Alex Gorelik, the architect and manager of Sybase, Inc.'s highly successful data movement software, Sybase Replication Server. Acta customers include Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; S-B S-B Stoer-Bulirsch (sampling algorithm) Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; Janssen-Ortho, and Monsanto. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com. Acta, ActaWorks and RapidMart are trademarks of Acta Technology, Inc. SAP, R/3 and all SAP product and service names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. |
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