Can the Enterprise Data Warehouse also play a role in the application integration issue?
If the Data Warehouse is build in the classical way with and Operational Data Store (ODS) it can. The story goes that data warehousing has started in the 70ies when banks started to collect their enormous volumes of transaction data in a data base from which these data was delivered to all kind of subsequent systems. The providers of ETL solutions have also recognised this and the leaders like BusinessObjects, Informatica and Data Stage are today also delivering “real-time” components for application integration purposes. Some of those (like Business Objects Data Integrator (BODI)) even have interfaces with messaging tools like IBM Websphere and Tibco. NewFrontiers has been involved in the early development and piloting with BODI, at that time called Acta. Our project with HunterDouglas in 2000 was one of the first in Europe were SAP R/3 based Data warehousing and application integration have been succesfully married.
