Most data warehouse and business intelligence vendors provide a collection of tools that support a specific function needed to construct a data warehouse such as data extraction, data transformation, and end-user data access tools. Often, tools provided by vendors, even from one vendor, do not support a common development environment or user interface. This situation makes it difficult for organizations to build dedicated teams for specific tasks of a data warehouse construction process.
Though the number of vendors providing data warehousing solutions and tools is increasing, the following section compares only a few tools available at the time of this writing that interface with SAP R/3 and SAP BW.
ActaWorks for SAP from Acta Technology is a data extraction, transformation, and data-loading product. Though ActaWorks provides some initial SAP R/3 data extraction schemes and generates ABAP code to populate data marts, you must develop change identification and delta change capture techniques for transaction data in SAP R/3. ActaWorks is a good product, but from an overall global information delivery perspective, it is not an information delivery environment. To fill this gap, Acta is partnering with Cognos and other vendors to provide a frontend environment to complete its data warehouse solution.
inSight from arcplan is among the first few ODBO-certified products for SAP BW. inSight is a very mature product. You can access EIS data from SAP R/3 and SAP BW queries. arcplan has gone one step further when it comes to delivering SAP R/3 and SAP BW data analysis and reporting environments to the Internet by providing ActiveX controls for pure Web clients. arcplan has introduced another product, DynaSite, for pure Java-based clients.Evolutionary Technology Inc. (ETI) is best known for its data extraction technologies. Its products are powerful and can extract data from just about any data source, including SAP R/3. Its products are also certified to load data in SAP BW using Staging BAPI. In comparison to SAP BW, ETI covers only data functionality in BW.
Information Builders, Inc. (IBI) is one of the pioneers in enterprise reporting and data warehousing. IBI provides several tools that cover similar functionality as SAP BW. However, such tools still use old technologies and are not integrated. They do, however, provide a robust Enterprise Data Access (EDA) server that supports distributed queries across homogeneous and heterogeneous data sources and platforms.
Informatica has been a leading data mart construction tool provider for more than a decade. Informatica products can extract data from flat files and relational databases to process and load data in target data marts. Informatica was late to enter the ERP data extraction race. Recently, Informatica has filled the ERP data extraction gap by adding new data extraction components for SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft. Informatica's PowerCenter was among the first wave of products certified for Staging BAPI to load data in SAP BW.
Oracle is in direct competition with SAP BW in the data warehouse market. Oracle provides many tools to build data warehouses and deliver information. Oracle has a good potential to provide a unified data warehouse environment but still lacks product integration when compared with SAP BW. Oracle also provides Oracle Tool Kit for SAP R/3.
Seagate is a midrange data warehouse construction and information delivery tool provider. Seagate is acquiring technologies from several vendors and offers an integrated data warehouse solution. Seagate Holos OLAP is the OLAP engine. The Reporting tools come from Crystal that can access data from most relational databases. Seagate also announced that it will build data extraction tools for SAP R/3.
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