Seeking to give more of a multi-vendor spin to its Fusion Middleware collection of products, Oracle Corp. yesterday said it has acquired Sunopsis SA, a maker of data integration tools. The purchase price and deal terms were not disclosed.
In a statement, Oracle Senior Vice President for Server Technologies Thomas Kurian said the company will incorporate Sunopsis's products into Oracle's Fusion Middleware suite, which includes application servers, data warehousing platforms, master data management tools, and other products that help enterprises integrate and secure disparate applications and data sources. Specifically, Oracle said, the Sunopsis products will become part of Oracle's Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Intelligence, and Master Data Management product lines.
Sunopsis, an eight-year-old, privately owned company based in Limonest, France, with a U.S. office in Burlington, MA, claims 500 customers, many in manufacturing. Those include Fiat, American Eurocopter, and Trelleborg Wheel Systems, a Swedish maker of industrial wheels that uses Sunopsis's technology to integrate plant data from multiple IBM AS/400 systems into a SQL Server database system which displays the information in the form of performance dashboards.
Sunopsis has two principal products. The first, Data Conductor, is a so-called extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool. The product allows users, in near-real time, to extract operational data from a database or system such as an ERP application, transform it, and load it into a second system -- normally a data warehouse -- for execution or analysis.
The Data Conductor product, analysts have said, is distinguished by a couple of factors. First, unlike other ETL tools, it runs on either the source or target database system, not a dedicated ETL server. This can make Data Conductor less expensive to deploy.
Also, Data Conductor supports a wide range of source and target data sources, including databases and enterprise applications. Besides Oracle, they include IBM DB2, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and Netezza, a data warehouse appliance for enterprise applications. Oracle said it will continue to optimize the Sunopsis products to support those environments.
Oracle's existing ETL product, Oracle Warehouse Builder, is designed for customers moving data from heterogeneous sources into an Oracle Data Warehouse.
"Oracle plans to integrate the heterogeneous data integration technology acquired from Sunopsis and Oracle Warehouse Builder to provide a unified data integration technology suite that supports both Oracle and non-Oracle environments," according to a statement released by Oracle. (Oracle did not make executives available to discuss the Sunopsis acquisition.)
Sunopsis' second product, Active Integration Platform, combines Data Conductor with a database and integration hub and supports a variety of data integration types, including event-driven integration. Both Data Conductor and Active Integration Platform also support data cleansing through integration with products from Trillium Software.
The Sunopsis acquisition calls into question a couple of ETL partnerships that were in place before the deal. Oracle, via its acquisition earlier this year of Siebel Systems, has a partnership with ETL provider Informatica, under which Informatica's PowerCenter ETL product is deployed in connection with Siebel Analytic Applications (since renamed Oracle Business Intelligence Applications).
In a statement, Oracle said it will continue to support customers using the Informatica tools packaged with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. Oracle also said it plans to continue to enhance those applications. The statement, however, did not indicate whether the Informatica partnership will continue or whether Oracle will continue to sell the Informatica ETL tools to Oracle Business Intelligence Applications customers.
Prior to the acquisition, Sunopsis had a partnership with data warehouse software provider Teradata. Oracle, in a statement, said it plans to "ensure the continued success of Sunopsis customers, and continue to support Teradata Warehouse as an optimal target server." The Oracle statement did not indicate whether the Sunopsis tools will be sold to new Teradata customers under the partnership.
Oracle's decision to acquire an ETL tool to support Fusion Middleware is in contrast to the strategy of arch-rival SAP, whose NetWeaver products compete with Fusion Middleware. To date, SAP has provided ETL functionality through partnerships. The company makes available an open interface, the Business API, which is used by several ETL vendors to integrate with SAP's NetWeaver and Business Intelligence products.