Stephanie Best

Having recently spent a week at TDWI Orlando and with the extended team just wrapping up TDWI Amsterdam last week, data warehousing is officially top of mind!  While speaking with the Syncsort Data Integration Acceleration Customer Advisory Board and with the TDWI delegates, I found the conversation often turning to the potential value of DI Acceleration to the warehousing world.  So, I thought I’d condense some of these conversations into a blog post for your feedback…

Successful data warehousing initiatives can hold the key to providing valuable insights into your business and offer the promise of true operational excellence.  The question… how can you actually deliver on this promise and achieve new levels of operational performance and analytic insight?  We think (and our customers agree), that the answer is Data Integration Acceleration.

Syncsort’s Data Integration Acceleration solution – DMExpress – is purpose-built to integrate seamlessly into existing data management environments to enable your organization to do more with more data, in less time, and with fewer system resources.  Specifically, for the warehousing world, DMExpress is optimized to complement your existing data warehousing environment, surgically eliminating many of the processing bottlenecks that can occur within various data warehousing processing tasks, including:

• Staging the data
• Loading and unloading the data
• Refreshing the data
• Creating new views of the data
• Database reorganization
• And various other processing tasks

Often the most significant value comes from being able to use data in ways that were previously unthinkable.  Financial services organizations are achieving sub-one hour latencies in their enterprise data warehouses, enabling them to make more accurate decisions throughout the day based on more current data, which decreases errors and uncertainty in their daily operations and decision making.  Health insurance companies are performing predictive analytics on a nightly basis to identify policyholders that are at risk for major health episodes, minimizing their costs and increasing customer loyalty.  Marketers are able to apply more sophisticated behavioral models to increase conversions and generate more revenue from their targeting efforts. 

Syncsort has just published a whitepaper highlighting how organizations can accelerate their data warehousing initiatives by making faster and more insightful business decisions, and delivering previously unattainable value to the bottom line. I encourage you to download it and be sure to post your feedback.

In related news, we were pleased that Teradata recently recognized Syncsort’s commitment to helping drive data warehousing excellence, and highlighted us in a press release that featured their partners that have been certified on Teradata 13.1.

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Today at the 360 IT event in London, Syncsort announced the availability of DMExpress 6.2.  DMX 6.2 has some great new enhancements that our customers will love because they were designed to help them maximize existing technology investments and significantly improve data integration performance. A few of the key enhancements in DMX 6.2 are:

  • Dynamic Workfile Compression enables you to improve operational efficiency and generate cost savings through dramatically shortened elapsed time and reduced disk space.
  • A new Automated Upgrade Utility that makes it extremely easy to benefit from new versions of DMExpress without having to resave each job and task individually. 

I encourage you to check out our press release for complete details on DMX 6.2 and to stay tuned for some more exciting data integration announcements from Syncsort in the near future!

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More than 70% of the world’s transactional production applications are running on mainframe platforms.  And while these mainframe-based production applications have become widespread and mission critical, organizations are increasingly migrating them toward open systems such as Windows and UNIX.

Why?  Driven by increasingly intensive business demands and rapidly shrinking budgets, today’s organizations are looking for ways to reduce hardware and software costs, expand skill sets, and leverage the scalability of emerging technologies.  Which means -  you guessed it – already stretched IT teams are now trying to get their arms around mainframe application modernization projects.

But it’s complicated right?
Efforts to modernize mainframe applications have historically been complex and include many phases, each of which has unique organizational and technical challenges.  Migrating the data between the platforms is one of the earliest phases and a critical prerequisite to all other phases.  Although it is seemingly the simplest phase, it is filled with hidden complexity and is frequently a point of failures with success rates estimated to be under 20%.

And that’s where Syncsort DMExpress Enters the Equation!
By including DMExpress in your mainframe application modernization initiative, your project will be completed more quickly, with fewer resource demands and fewer hardware purchases. Also, with DMExpress in the open system environment, you’ll be able to confidently reproduce the equivalent data transformation processes that were executed in the mainframe environment with speed and with scalability.

Don’t believe it?
Sprint used DMExpress to handle the complex data conversion, and processed all of the data in 21 hours, instead of 8 days, closing for business on Saturday night, and re-opening on Monday morning with their new system in place and fully operational.

– and-

CitiStreet uses Syncsort MFX and DMExpress throughout their environment.  During one modernization process, they converted 50 GB of EBCDIC and binary data to the corresponding ASCII and binary data in 15 minutes, while handling both the ASCII and binary data properly in the conversion.

Want to learn more?
Be sure to read more in the article I recently wrote for Global Security Magazine entitled “Data Translation and Transformation Challenges for Mainframe Application Modernization”.  Or you can check out the Mainframe Application Modernization section on the new and improved Syncsort website.

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Data is critical to every important decision an organization makes. However, even the best data integration environments can unravel under the pressure of exponentially growing data and shrinking decision-making windows. The impact that this can have on a business is something we like to call the “Perfect Storm.”

To help organizations better navigate around these challenges, we are announcing a new “Perfect Storm” seminar series that will kick off in September. The series will feature industry experts and customers discussing the steps they have taken to eliminate performance bottlenecks to significantly reduce elapsed processing times, more efficiently utilize resources and achieve rapid time to value.

The first set of seminars we are announcing today include:

Chicago – September 14
Dallas – September 15
Los Angeles – September 15
Orange County – September 16

We hope to see you at one of the upcoming events!

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