Embarcadero Adds ETL Tools

Embarcadero Technologies Inc. is expanding beyond its roots as a database administration tools vendor with new data extraction, transformation, and loading software. Embarcadero is targeting sales of the ETL software, DT/Studio, toward small and midsize companies for whom other ETL products are too complex and expensive.

ETL software is used for data integration, application integration, and data-warehousing applications. Gartner estimates that annual sales of packaged ETL tools is just over $400 million, with sales expected to grow between 5% and 7% this year and reaching just under $600 million in 2005. DT/Studio will compete against ETL products from Ascential Software, Informatica, and other vendors, although Gartner estimates that 80% of all ETL software in use is custom-developed.

Cerqa, a supply-chain management-services company in Austin, Texas, installed DT/Studio in late December to transform data sent by the company's clients into a standard format. "We get a lot of data coming in from our customers in any number of formats," IT director Mike Tiller says. In the past, such transformations required lots of development work. "It was taking a lot of IT resources to do that," Tiller says. He says DT/Studio was installed in one day, quicker than far more complex ETL tools, and the graphical user interface makes the software easy to use.

DT/Studio uses a Java-based engine and includes Embarcadero's ER/Studio data-modeling tool for mapping data sources. The product also includes pre-built data transformation templates. With DT/Studio, developers can build Java and XML functions for a range of databases, including IBM DB2 Universal Database, Microsoft SQL server 2000, Oracle, Sybase, and nonrelational "flat file" databases. DT/Studio is shipping with a starting price of $35,000.