Sagent placed among BI leaders by Meta Group’s Spex Research

Susan Andre2001

Sagent Technology, a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, announced that Sagent Data Load Server received excellent marks in ETL Tools 2001, an evaluation of extract, transform and load (ETL) tools in a review conducted by Spex Research, the leading Internet authority for enterprise and Web-based software technology evaluations.

Spex is a division of Meta Group, a leading research and consulting firm, focusing on information technology and business transformation strategies.

Sagent Data Load Server earned exceptional marks in the areas of functionality, usability and technology. According to the Spex Evaluation, Sagent's Data Load Server is "a solid product with particularly strong development and administrative features". Additionally, it states that Sagent's "history in business intelligence and current focus on analytical applications make the Data Load Server a suitable solution for customers looking for ETL strategies in these areas".

The Spex research focuses on such vital decision points as integration and architecture; platform support; data extraction, cleansing and transformation; and metadata management. "Sagent Data Load Server's excellent marks in Meta's research study is evidence of the Sagent leadership and continuing efforts to evolve the power of data integration solutions," said Susan Andre, Managing Director, Sagent South Africa.

"Furthermore, this evaluation confirms that Sagent's focus on providing an end-to-end, solution forming the foundation of its architected platform for analytical applications, make for a strong showing in the competitive market of business intelligence solutions."

The study singled out Sagent Data Load Server for its scalability, as a result of included load balancing and fail over features, as well as its parallel and pipelined loading architecture, and built-in load monitoring and debugging capabilities.

Additionally, the study identified Sagent's partnership with SAS Institute, the market leader in e-intelligence and data warehousing, as a strong point because it enables Sagent users to license SAS statistical libraries for advanced calculations and data transformations. The study also documented that the Sagent Data Load Server comes with more than 60 standard transforms out of the box, two of which are general purpose with the flexibility to create sophisticated analytic processing procedures, thereby offering more transformations.

Another recognised strength is Sagent's Address Cleanser and Coder that provides built-in address-cleansing features and automatically standardizes addresses to defined standards.

Sagent Data Load Server

Data Load Server is a high-performance application server for data extraction, transformation and loading. Featuring a multi-threaded, agent-based architecture, Data Load Server rapidly integrates information from multiple complex sources, including relational databases, flat file systems and multidimensional data warehouses and data marts.

A centralized repository, powerful administration tools and support for all leading database platforms ensure that Data Load Server integrates seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure.