Rationale Behind Sybase's Move To Add ETL In IQ 12.7

Back in late April this year, when database specialist Sybase announced that it is adding new embedded extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities in its Sybase IQ 12.7 analytics server, it didn’t come as a shock to many. In fact, for a lot of people it was in the offing for a long time.

Sybase said that the addition of ETL functionality to IQ is aimed mainly at improving its data integration credentials and positioning it better against competing offerings from other vendors.

For a long time, users of IQ longed for ETL functionality, so when the company announced the embedded ETL capabilities for IQ 12.7, their wishes were fulfilled. But in the midst of all this, one can’t help but feel that Sybase might just be a tad too late in this regard, especially when pretty much every database vendor offers some sort of an ETL tool for moving information into a data warehouse.

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However, Haridas Nair, director, Emerging Technologies, Information Technology Solutions Group at Sybase feels otherwise. He believes they are not late and the rationale for bundling the ETL capabilities is fairly logical and one that has several practical implications.

“We’re just delivering on our promise to offer a comprehensive data integration solution suite and by adding ETL tools we’re only extending the capabilities of our offering for the customers so that they don’t have to buy different point solution for performing data integration tasks such as ETL,” said Nair.

Speaking further he said, “We know databases, it’s our core competency. As we were building our data integration suite, we realised that we needed to incorporate ETL functionality in it. That was one of the incentives for us in the Solonde acquisition. One can always argue that it’s late, but we believe that we’re on the right track.”

Nair argued that in order to fully understand the move, one has to look at it from a customer perspective and in a sales scenario.

“For instance, if we go to a customer who wants to build a data mart, first he has to move the data in before anything. In such a scenario the customer has got two options, either he can buy the manual script or go buy an expensive ETL tool from elsewhere. This is the case even if one wants to do a proof of concept (PoC). This tends to affect our time for closing a sale. However, by bundling a fast, graphical ETL right at the edge, customers do not have to face these issues and by using the embedded ETL capabilities they can develop a data mart quickly without too many problems. We’ve just tried to simplify the process. The move is nothing but an attempt at reducing the inertia from our perspective and going to the customer with a better, well rounded product,” explained Nair.

But what about the theories that Sybase is only aping its competitors, in particular Oracle which not too long ago did the same thing with its Sunopsis purchase?

“It’s not a question of copying someone. It’s just that we didn’t have the capabilities earlier and without the ETL tool our data integration suite lacked in comparison with others. In case of IQ, we embedded the ETL capabilities because we felt that we needed to increase its value proposition. If you want to play in today’s competitive marketplace, you have to offer fully featured products at cost effective price points,” said Nair.

Also, one needs to look at the move from a closer range in order to better understand it. Sybase IQ is a relational database focused primarily at analytics and business intelligence (BI) applications and ETL is by far the most popular data integration production tool for any sort of BI implementation. So if one does the math, then Sybase’s move doesn’t look so bad, does it?

Besides, Sybase is offering the ETL tool as a standalone offering also.