INDUSTRY

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) and Meta Integration Technology, Inc. (MITI), the industry leader in metadata integration, today announced a partnership that will enable Oracle(R) Warehouse Builder customers to more efficiently manage metadata integration with modeling, extraction and reporting tools commonly used in business intelligence (BI) architectures. The incorporation of MITI's Meta Integration(R) Model Bridge (MIMB) technology with Oracle Warehouse Builder provides users with greater control of their business data integration processes. MIMB enables the movement of metadata across numerous environments such as databases and data warehouses as well as BI, design, and extract, transfer and load (ETL) tools. Metadata is defined as data about data and protects data investment by setting the stage for the data re-use. This partnership enables: -- Synchronization of data models across different data repositories and BI tools -- Elimination of manual re-coding of data models throughout organizations -- Simplification of the maintenance of metadata and data models "Oracle and MITI will assist Oracle customers to effortlessly exchange metadata with a large number of third-party tools and environments -- overcoming one of the most important barriers towards the construction of an integrated BI solution," said Ray Roccaforte, vice president, Server Development, Business Intelligence, Oracle Corporation. "Our customers undertaking data integration and BI initiatives stand to benefit from our support of MITI's powerful metadata movement technology." "We are delighted to provide a powerful metadata integration solution for Oracle Warehouse Builder within the enterprise toolset," said Christian Bremeau, president and CEO, Meta Integration Technology, Inc. "A reliable metadata flow is critical to support the perpetual change management in today's complex data and software development life cycle. Oracle Warehouse Builder facilitates the seamless integration of our metadata movement components." This partnership will help customers to utilize their existing investments in modeling, reporting and ETL tools. Oracle Warehouse Builder can utilize MIMB for metadata integration with popular BI products including: -- Data modeling tools such as CA AllFusion ERwin, Sybase PowerDesigner(R) -- ETL tools such as Informatica PowerCenter -- BI query and reporting tools from Business Objects and Cognos -- Standard metadata repository formats such as OMG CWM(TM) "Every modeling, ETL, OLAP, BI and reporting tool provides its own repository that produces and consumes metadata," said Dan Vesset, research manager, Analytics and Data Warehousing, IDC. "As a result, it is critical for any new tool to integrate well in the enterprise metadata flow. Oracle's partnership with MITI enables Oracle Warehouse Builder to integrate with a wide range of tools, providing users greater control over metadata integration." Pricing and Availability Companies can purchase and download MITI's bridges from the company's Web site at http://www.metaintegration.net/ . Pricing, installation instructions and support information are also available from the site. Upon installing the bridge, its features will become accessible to Oracle Warehouse Builder users from the metadata exchange menus.