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Informatica Broadens Data Integration Platform

Data warehousing vendor Informatica Corp. (www.informatica.com) extended its PowerCenter data-integration software to draw information from Web logs and a company's business partners.

Like many data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool vendors, Informatica has been working to re-engineer and reposition its tools as data integration and e-business enablers.

A major competitor conducting a similar campaign, Ardent Software (www.ardentsoftware.com), is being acquired by database giant Informix Corp. (www.informix.com) in a deal announced last week.

Informatica' latest play is PowerCenter.e, which was announced today and will be available in the first quarter of 2000. The release will build on PowerCenter, which Informatica describes as a hub for enterprise data.

To help companies exchange data with business partners, Informatica has rolled in support for the increasingly popular eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The company's approach is to convert XML data into relational form in its PowerCenter hub and convert the XML metadata into data warehouse metadata.

To analyze the volumes of data generated by Web visitors, Informatica added tools to import and consolidate Web logs. PowerCenter.e supports sourcing and parsing of proprietary Web logs from Microsoft IIS, Netscape and Apache Web servers.

Other new features include demographic profiling of customers, and support for Perl. New licenses of PowerCenter.e will cost $100,000. -- Isaac Slepner

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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