Ascential Integrates The Fruits Of Its BuyoutsAscential Integrates The Fruits Of Its Buyouts

As companies collect and analyze ever-greater volumes of data, it's only getting harder to integrate and process it all in a time-effective manner. Ascential Software Corp. is tackling that problem with the release Tuesday of DataStage 6, its data-integration software. It incorporates profiling, quality management, and parallel-processing technology from Ascential's serial acquisitions.

DataStage is a set of tools for extracting data from operational sources and loading it into a warehouse for analysis. The new release includes data-quality software Ascential acquired when it bought Vality Technology in March and data-profiling software, used to analyze the content and quality of data before moving it, which it bought from Metagenix Inc. in April. There have been links between those products and DataStage, but now they're all integrated.

Also new is DataStage's parallel-processing capability, courtesy of technology Ascential acquired when it bought Torrent Systems late last year. That, the vendor says, gives DataStage the ability to process and integrate 357 Gbytes of data per hour, compared with 117 Gbytes per hour for DataStage 5. In some applications, the new release can even perform on a real-time basis, according to Ascential. The DataStage Integration Suite is available now; pricing starts at around $400,000.

All this is good news for companies such as database-marketing firm Acxiom Corp., which wrestles with exponentially growing data. Acxiom manages 850 terabytes of consumer data for its clients. It accessed consumer-spending records 45 billion times in August alone. "Customers are always asking us to do things the hardware and software can't handle," CIO Keith Henkel says. In fact, Henkel says, Acxiom had to pass on a customer request to process 300 million consumer records per day using 50 variables such as age and income. Acxiom's IT system couldn't handle the workload.

Acxiom uses DataStage as a platform on which it builds marketing apps. It's already building apps for two financial-services customers on DataStage 6, Henkel says. "This is going to lead to some pretty substantial productivity gains for us."