Data warehouse software specialist Kalido today unveiled a major refresh of its portfolio at the Gartner ITxpo in Florida, claiming a series of product enhancements would help improve data accuracy and make it easier for business users to extract the data they need to make corporate decisions.

Bill Hewitt, president and chief executive of Kalido, said the updates adhered to the company's new Active Information Management strategy to deliver streamlined information management functionality that allows business users to extract accurate corporate data without having to request that the IT department builds a solution specifically for them.

"The problem with the traditional design-build process [for information-based projects] is that by the time the solution goes live, the business requirements have changed," he said.
To tackle this problem Kalido has launched new Foundation Solutions, or templates, designed to make it easier for IT departments to quickly deploy its existing profitability management and performance management suites. Hewitt said that incorporating pre-built business models into these suites would make it easier for IT administrators to prepare and manage data so it can be more effectively analysed using profitability and performance management reporting tools.

Meanwhile, the company announced plans to launch a new Master Data Management solution early next year designed to help improve data accuracy. "The aim is to drive a consistent set of definitions across the enterprise, so that everyone knows what a product is, for example," said Hewitt. "Any inconsistencies are then flagged up so inaccurate data can be corrected."

Kalido also announced updates to its core data warehouse products, including greater scalability, an improved version of its networked data warehouse solution and enhanced best practice methodology designed to make it easier for firms to deploy small data warehouses for individual projects.

In separate news, Oracle bolstered its presence in the extract, transform and load (ETL) market yesterday with the acquisition of privately held data integration specialist Sunopsis.

Thomas Kurian, senior vice-president of Oracle Server Technologies, said the company would integrate Sunopsis' data and meta data integration platform into its Fusion Middleware suite and use it to underpin its next generation service-oriented architecture (SOA), business intelligence and master data management solutions.