11/10/2003

DataMirror, the provider of live data integration and protection solutions, unveiled “an innovative new software solution that saves companies time and resources typically spent extracting data from mainframe environments. DataMirror iFederate broadens the scope of DataMirror's comprehensive suite of LiveIntegration solutions spanning mainframes, midrange servers, desktop computers and mobile devices.”

“With pressures on IT departments to maximize legacy systems with limited resources, DataMirror iFederate offers a compelling solution to organizations that place a premium on timely information delivery and analytics,” the vendor asserts. “iFederate enables customers to access timely reports from a variety of mainframe data stores to drive strategic business initiatives such as customer relationship management, business intelligence, e-Business and Web services enablement.”

"Data exists in every department and every system in a company, but there needs to be a corporate data strategy or else all of that data just continues to exist in silos and cannot be used to make business decisions," said Colleen Niven, Vice President, Research in an AMR Research Report published in August 2003. "Advances in technology have helped to proliferate this problem, because now there are more automated systems and more back-end sources of data."

Organizations face significant challenges accessing islands of data residing in disparate data stores on the mainframe. “Most IT departments must employ development resources specifically to write complex data extraction programs-often to support simple reporting requests,” DataMirror explains. “iFederate reduces companies' reliance on such specialized skills by allowing customers to define queries against a virtual database that consolidates common data storage formats including DB2, VSAM, ISAM, IMS and SAM. By providing quick and economical unified access to mainframe data stores, iFederate delivers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Powerful, flexible and extremely easy-to-use, iFederate enables companies to maximize their mainframe investments and reallocate valuable mainframe development cycles to production-related tasks and key business initiatives.”

"DataMirror iFederate is unique in its ability to perform complex joins across any supported mainframe data store," said Herman Wallenburg, Chief Scientist, DataMirror. "With iFederate, an individual with minimal technical knowledge of the underlying data structures can quickly and easily perform a join between, for example, VSAM and IMS or between DB2 and SAM-a key differentiation in the ETL market."

DataMirror iFederate may be used as a stand-alone solution or in conjunction with DataMirror DB/XML Transform “to provide enterprise-wide access to mainframe data types. Organizations have the flexibility to extract data directly into a flat file or consolidated report, or capture, transform and flow the data into XML or popular databases including DB2 UDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase.”

DataMirror iFederate is generally available today.