Spending on middleware tools for enabling the extract, transformation and loading (ETL) of data will expand by between 10% and 20% annually over the next three to five years, says research company Meta Group.
Meta analysts position Ascential and SAS as leaders of ETL market, a market being driven by the increased requirement to rationalise data drawn from multiple data sources before feeding it to data warehouses, query and reporting tools and other applications for processing and analysis.
In the challenger category, Business Objects is noted as offering the “strongest vertical expertise of all vendors”, while Meta also praised the built-in intelligence features of Oracle, DataMirror and Sunopsis.
Analysts also noted that, in spite of its current “follower” rating, Microsoft was the vendor to watch. The software giant’s existing user base and aggressive pricing “should cause the entire market to stand up and take notice by 2005-6”, Meta says. Price pressure from database software vendors will also continue to have an impact.
