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Oracle Acquires Data Integration Company

by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 4:00:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

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.

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