Oracle Buy Sunopsis

Mark Rittman

• 2 min read

Of course whilst I've been gallivanting around Europe doing my BI seminars, the news came out from Redwood Shores earlier this week that Oracle had bought Sunopsis, an ETL tool vendor that probably most people wouldn't have heard of until this announcement was made. Sunopsis, as Peter Scott points out, sell two products that operate within the data integration space; "Data Conductor", an ETL tool, and "Active Integration Platform", middleware that bridges disparate datasources in either data driven, event driven or service-orientated mode. Interestingly, like Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis take an "Extract, Load and Transform" approach to data movement where they extract data out of the source system, load it on to the target database and then transform it, using native SQL commands on the target system.

And this of course is where Oracle's interest surely lies with these products. Like Warehouse Builder, which uses the Oracle database to perform the ETL tasks, Sunopsis's products also leverage the target platform, but extend this approach to not just Oracle databases, but also platforms such as Teradata, DB2, Netezza, SQL Server and so on. Sunopsis's products are also built on Java, which again fits in with Oracle's strategic technology direction, and ticks all the right boxes in terms of Master Data Management, Service Orientated Architecture and so on. If Oracle can integrate Sunopsis's technology into Warehouse Builder and Fusion Middleware, then they can extend the same functionality currently provided for Oracle targets and sources to all platforms that customers have to deal with - immediately negating any currently perceived limitations with Warehouse Builder and simultaneously reinforcing the position as target databases - i.e. the Oracle RBDMS - as the natural place to perform ETL functions. Which should make life interesting for the pure-play ETL vendors such as Informatica.

Looking through the FAQ on the Oracle website, it seems that Oracle's plans are to firstly continue supporting the current Sunopsis product lineup, then start integrating Sunopsis technology into Warehouse Builder, use this to provide enhanced ETL functionality to BI Suite Enterprise Edition (which, in it's Siebel Analytics guise, previously used an OEM'd version of Informatica Powercenter to provide similar functionality), and eventually incorporate Sunopsis functionality into the broad family of products known as Fusion Middleware. Reading through the product documentation, it also looks like Sunopsis comes with a slew of real-time data integration features - Enterprise Information Integration, Business Activity Monitoring - that are conspicuously absent from Warehouse Builder, having been removed at the last moment from the "Paris" release before it was released earlier this year.

Overall then, this looks like a shrewd move by Oracle. It allows them to take their current philosophy - extract, load and then transform on the target platform - from just Oracle targets to most every other database platform, keeps to their Java technology direction and brings on board a development team with direct experience in the "next generation" ETL market. No doubt life's going to be busy in the OWB team over at Redwood Shores, but it should make for an interesting next set of product releases.

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