PINE CONE CUTS COST OF MANAGING METADATA.

Pine Cone Systems Inc, the Orlando, Florida based supplier of data warehousing management solutions, this week introduced what it says is a revolutionary system that does away with the need to build proprietary and expensive repositories to store and manage metadata. The company says its Meta Exchange software is designed to manage metadata in a distributed environment at a fraction of the cost of implementing the standard technology used today. A spokesperson for the company said the current methodology, which relies on centralized repositories for storing the data, was inflexible and proprietary. He said repositories typically cost around $500,000 to buy and can often take up to a year to implement. And even then, they tend to be proprietary in that they only hold metadata from a specific data warehouse built on a specific database. "They don't cater for today's IS departments which are typically distributed and heterogeneous," the spokesperson said, "Most companies use a mixture of technologies from Oracle, Sybase, IBM and so on." The spokesperson said Pine Cone's solution works by holding metadata from any database or node and can be set up in a couple of days at a fraction of the cost, around $50,000. The software works by enabling departments to put restrictions on their metadata so that some of it is kept private, while the rest is made available to the company where it can be refreshed and updated. "No other company does it this way," the spokesperson added, "it's completely unique in the market." The announcement was made during The Data Warehouse Institute's (TDWI) Fourth Annual Leadership conference, taking place this week in Florida. Pine Cone said it was closely collaborating with the leading OLAP (on-line analytical processing) and ETL (extraction, transformation and load) vendors, including Brio Technology, Business Objects, Carleton, and Information Advantage, all of whom have announced support for the architecture. Meta Exchange will leverage all appropriate metadata standards and will supplement these with its own import and export APIs for Meta Exchange, allowing vendors or customers to develop customized metadata applications or to integrate other products and systems with Meta Exchange's distributed architecture. Support for these standards will allow for the import of metadata from over 100 vendors' products, including ETL tools, OLAP tools, repositories, and so on. Meta Exchange consists of two modules, Exchange Manager and Meta View. Exchange Manager is used for basic metadata management processes such as defining the management environment, business model and data model, along with mapping the data model to the business model and synchronizing metadata. It is priced at $49,900 for a two- user license and runs on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and DEC UNIX. Meta View is a web-based tool for viewing the metadata (users access the server via standard desktop browsers). It costs $5,000 and runs on Windows NT. The software is available now for Oracle, Informix and DB2/UDB, with support for Teradata and SQL Server 7.0 available in the next release. The company plans to extend database compatibility over time.