Deal set to aid BW customers

By ADAM GIFFORD

The number of live mySAP.com sites is set to surge as the result of a deal between German business software giant SAP and Ascential Software, the solutions company spun off by Informix.

The deal, announced yesterday, allows SAP to sell the DataStage data extraction tool to buyers of the SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) module.

The Ascential enterprise applications marketing director, Mark Talbot, who was took part in the negotiations at SAP's Walldorf headquarters, said BW was an essential part of mySAP.com, the "e-commerce-enabled" version of SAP's software suite.

He said that 18 months ago SAP approached Ascential, or Ardent as it was then, to discuss a partnership aimed at resolving a problem with BW, which was sold as a data warehousing product optimised for the core SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system used by 13,000 firms worldwide.

Negotiations slowed when Ardent was bought by Informix, but picked up again when it was spun back out, stripped of its database business but bolstered by some of Informix's solution products.

"The business issue was the tools provided by SAP to get non-R/3 data into BW are fairly rudimentary," Mr Talbot said.

"The early adopters had got the R/3 to BW connection working. They now wanted to get other data in - and when they started using the tools in BW, they realised they couldn't do it."

DataStage Load Pack allows users to populate the BW database with data from legacy mainframe systems, customer relationship management applications, electronic commerce systems and other non-SAP applications.

It also solves the problem users had that when they tried to change the "cubes" within BW to better reflect their specific business needs, the extract tools would break.

Cubes, also known as star schema, are multidimensional databases that hold data more like a 3-D spreadsheet rather than a relational database. The cubes allow different views of the data to be quickly displayed.

With DataStage, they can extract data from any source, transform it and load to the data warehouse or analytical application.

Under yesterday's deal, SAP will sell a version of DataStage to BW customers which can go into any data source a customer may have, extract the data, and load it only into BW.

Included into the bundle will be connectivity kits to major packaged applications such as Siebel, Peoplesoft, Commerce One and Ariba, as well as a tool allowing conversion of non-XML data into XML.

Mr Talbot said giving SAP exclusive rights to sell the bundle to BW customers was good for Ascential.

"Our sales people understand data warehousing. What they don't necessarily understand is what BW does for a customer and everything else which is tacked onto the front of BW."

Once those customers become familiar with the product, Ascential expects to be sell more copies of DataStage, which costs about $US140,000 ($344,000), to deal with other business problems.

The stakes are huge. Mr Talbot said one DataStage customer, US cereals manufacturer General Mills, had $US60 million invested in a BW project.

He said there were just under 2000 BW customers so far. About a third had the software sitting on a shelf, 1200 had it in the development or testing phase, and only 123 had it live in production, "doing the heavy lifting."

The market will be expanded further next year, when SAP releases BW 3.0, designed as a data warehousing solution for all systems.