Information Builders and iWay Software Release DataMigrator 7.1 and Service Manager 5.5, Offering Most Complete Data Integration Platform for BI.

New Products Support Overall Data Integration Road Map for Customers

NEW YORK -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, and its subsidiary iWay Software, an innovator of enterprise integration solutions, today announced the release of DataMigrator 7.1 and Service Manager 5.5 as part of a joint organizational road map for customer-facing, BI-related data integration issues.

"You can't approach data integration with a one-size-fits-all mentality," commented John Senor, president of iWay Software. "Both new products will blend capabilities of traditional BI based on static data - with other data integration mechanisms allowing support of a unified data architecture and overall data integration road map that will support our customers' constantly changing businesses."

As part of this vision, Information Builders and iWay Software have outlined six data integration strategies for business intelligence and have aligned the development of future product releases - including the new versions of DataMigrator and Service Manager (SM) - to support this road map.

iWay DataMigrator 7.1

DataMigrator - iWay Software's extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, which supports both traditional batch ETL, and trickle-feed ETL for real-time data updates - provides improvements around ease of use, auditing and management, and integration with other iWay tools. Key features include:

* Improved support for data definition, custom process definitions, and metadata management from the Web console, which helps administrators easily service-enable data regardless of location, format, or DBMS - even legacy data

* Easier graphical join definitions, defined within the source system, which simplifies the way that ETL designers select data to use and ensures that all operations (including, but not limited to, DataMigrator processes) can use the data consistently

* Easier project management through the use of application directories and filtering, which helps users and administrators organize large projects efficiently

* Additional support for disparate data sources and non-table sources (e.g., Oracle stored procedures)

These capabilities enable users to perform ETL, enterprise information integration (EII), and related forms of data integration, especially in the following three of six integration strategies.

Traditional data warehousing - Data is extracted from multiple systems and physically moved to a single database that has a consistent data model. Before loading, the data must be transformed to reconcile the source data models into the data warehouse's model. The major advantages to this technique are query performance and the single view of the data. Disadvantages are that it usually involves long development cycles, requires different business units to agree on the definitions of key terms such as "customer" or "sale," and the data inside the warehouse is only refreshed periodically. This method is well-suited to BI implementations that require strategic planning and other long-term work.

Operational data access and EII - Data is retrieved in real time from an operational system. The advantage is real-time information; disadvantages include the fact that most operational systems were designed for transaction processing instead of reporting and business intelligence. If users need to query information from multiple sources at the same time, this is EII, and they must pay careful attention to performance issues. Whether one source or many, this strategy is well-suited to operations management, short-term planning and analysis, and departmental-level business intelligence.

Drill-through data warehousing - This strategy combines other methods listed to create a data warehouse (real-time or traditional) for most analytical and reporting work, while allowing users to use information from the data warehouse to trigger reports from operational systems. Because it combines the advantages of the other strategies, it is suitable for a very wide range of applications, allowing data architects and business users to work together to use the best means possible to solve any given business problem.

iWay Service Manager 5.5

The iWay SM 5.5 release provides significant improvements to the usability of the tool for service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects. It also improves utility for data integration and business intelligence. New features include:

* A fully redesigned Web console that walks users through a graphical definition of a service- and event-handling interface, the selection of reusable process flows that define service implementations, and other requirements particular to the interfaces

* Business intelligence object that allows users to call Information Builders' WebFOCUS reports from within a process flow, enabling reports to provide input into business processes and for Web services to initiate information delivery to end users

* ETL object that enables services to automatically initiate iWay DataMigrator jobs

* Enhanced ease-of-use features such as deferred design mode, improved debug capabilities, and more

These capabilities, enhanced in iWay SM 5.5, support the other three of the six types of data integration.

Real-time data warehousing - This approach provides the benefits of data warehousing - a single version of the truth and good performance characteristics - but ensures that business users get what they need in real time. It retrieves transactions as users enter them, cleanses them, reconciles them to the data model in the data warehouse, and loads them directly into the warehouse immediately, without waiting for a nighttime bulk load. This strategy is well-suited for complex environments in which users need real-time information derived from multiple information streams, such as contact centers, anti-terrorism activities, and some types of marketing activities.

Process-driven business intelligence - This approach may use any of the other data integration mechanisms, but adds two important capabilities: the ability to monitor business processes and detect relevant events in them, and the ability to participate in business processes and contribute information to them. In the former case, the process-driven alerts must detect significant events and send them to the relevant users. Only significant events should be passed to users so that they won't be overwhelmed with data, and the events must contain rich enough information for the users to be able to make relevant business decisions based on it. In the latter case, the business intelligence system must be able to inject information (e.g., "break-even price for product #1234") into a business process so that the process can adapt to changing circumstances. This strategy is needed for process automation and process improvement.

Web services - This approach to data integration provides ways to retrieve and manage data using industry standards that have the potential to do more than SQL, ODBC, JDBC, and other data-oriented standards. Since many application-integration and SOA tools use Web services, this is an effective way of blurring the line between application and data integration. Implementations that include Web services can be more interoperable and flexible than those that do not.

BI Requires Integration Savvy

ArvinMeritor, a global supplier of components for the automotive industry and current Information Builders and iWay Software customer, implemented WebFOCUS in conjunction with iWay Software products, resulting in faster, intuitive access to information that increases sales, streamlines operations, and improves customer service. The company's data integration challenges involved creating a unified cross-platform enterprise business intelligence environment for a variety of e-initiatives and legacy data migration into a Web-based reporting environment.

"Companies need to consider all their data integration options when they implement enterprise business intelligence solutions," said Gerald Cohen, CEO, Information Builders. "Businesses are moving toward real time and taking advantage of all different types of information, including Web services and non-structured data. That makes the requirement for solid data integration architecture greater than ever before."

About iWay Software

iWay Software, an Information Builders company and the world's leading adapter vendor, accelerates business integration by providing tools that make service-oriented architectures easy to implement. Clients achieve short-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly, while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. The biggest names in software, including BEA, Microsoft, and SAP, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERP and CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, and more. Additional message transformation and data integration make iWay a natural integration choice - standalone or with other middleware.

About Information Builders

An industry innovator for more than 31 years, Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product - the industry's most secure and flexible - is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS' empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all - from legacy to data warehouse - is unmatched.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 31 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,600 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information visit www.informationbuilders.com.