Embarcadero Enters EAI Fray

Server-side integration launched.

• By Chris McConnell
• 03/07/2002

Believing there is an opportunity in the mid-market for enterprise integration tools, Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. launched its first server-side integration product last week.

Embarcadero's DT/Studio is an Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) product that enables enterprises to pull data out of one source and reformat it for another database or application. While many ETL products are designed primarily for data warehousing, Embarcadero pitches DT/Studio as a means to share data between applications.

According to Steven Akin, product manager at Embarcadero, a void existed in the ETL market. While vendors like Informatica Corp. serves extensive enterprise needs and Data Junction, Inc. offers an entry-level product, there was no mid-market product with expansive functionality appropriate for departmental purchase. With this in mind, Embarcadero decided to diverge from its traditional database tools, and create a server ETL product.

"We want to open this up to the casual user," Akin says. Unlike high-end products that require a deep knowledge of ETL procedures, DT/Studio uses a graphical, wizard-based approach for creating rules. Users can click through the wizards to decide which data to share between what applications. If the model a wizard generates is off kilter, administrators can edit the code by hand. DT/Studio uses Javascript for creating ETL rules.

In addition, Embarcadero based DT/Studio on J2EE for support on as many operating systems and hardware platforms as possible. The product runs on an application server, places requests to the host database, transforms the data into XML files, then converts it into a format the target database can use.