June 11, 2002 Informatica PowerCenterRT FAQPowerCenterRT — a new special edition of PowerCenter from Informatica — brings ETL into real-time to enable real-time alerts in metrics-driven analytic applicationsWhat is PowerCenterRT?Informatica Corp. announced on June 10, 2002 that it will offer a special edition of PowerCenter called PowerCenterRT. (RT stands for real time.) The special edition is basically PowerCenter plus a new real-time component called ZL Engine. (ZL stands for zero latency.) It provides bi-directional message detection and delivery for SAP R/3, Tibco Rendezvous, WebMethods, and environments supporting Java messaging services (JMS). How does the ZL Engine compare to traditional ETL engines?Most tools for extract, transform, and load (ETL) — like Informatica PowerCenter — manage a batch queue by "waking up" when it's time to execute a job. When execution concludes, the tool goes back to sleep. ZL Engine, on the other hand, is always awake, always listening for a message, and always ready to publish data as a message. If the ZL Engine is transaction-aware, can I assume transactional integrity?PowerCenterRT supports constraint-based targeting, user-defined commits, and user-defined flushes. This is the first release, so subsequent ones will, no doubt, offer more functions to ensure that a message gets delivered as intended. Does this means that Informatica is moving into the EAI arena?Informatica is supporting real-time data movement for data warehousing purposes where real-time decisions are required. That's very different from supporting a managed message queue for enterprise application integration (EAI). Isn't Informatica blurring the line between ETL and EAI?Informatica's actions are fully consistent with market trends. Already EAI and ETL products have come closer to each other's spaces over the last couple of years. For more details about the confluence of ETL and EAI (and other trends in the world of integration), see my article "Beneath the Waterline." What's the availability and pricing for PowerCenterRT?Pricing for PowerCenterRT begins at US $200,000, and it will be generally available in the third quarter of 2002. Assessment — What's Informatica really up to with PowerCenterRT?Despite the previous discussion, which probably led you to think PowerCenterRT is about a confluence between ETL and EAI, the real reason Informatica is expanding ETL into real-time concerns analytic applications. In a nutshell, the ZL Engine in this special edition of PowerCenter is an enhancement to Informatica's infrastructure, an enhancement expressly intended to satisfy the requirement for real-time alerts delivered through the Informatica Analytics Server into Informatica Applications. After all, real-time ETL "for its own sake" has no appealing business case. However, enabling real-time alerts in metrics-driven analytic applications makes real-time ETL appealing and practical to managers and executives who run their companies "by the numbers" and who need to act with agility and immediacy to keep corporate performance on plan. Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.philiprussom.com] is a Research Director at Giga Information Group where he provides advice to user organizations about data warehousing, business intelligence, and database management. RESOURCESRelated Articles by Philip Russom on IntelligentEnterprise.com: Enterprise-Scope Suites of Analytic Applications. New packaged analytic applications — integrated into suites that cover multiple domains across the enterprise — present both challenges and benefits. (April 30, 2002) The Best-Laid Business Plans. Enterprise software for business performance management (BPM) is all the rage lately. But the software is pointless unless you first have a business plan against which you can gauge performance. (April 16, 2002) From Back to Front. Informatica expands from ETL back end to dashboard front end. (March 8, 2002) |
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
