Oracle’s spending spree continues with the purchase of Sunopsis, a leading vendor in the data integration space. Sunopsis has two main products Data Conductor, an ETL tool, and Active Integration Platform, a piece of middleware that can bridge disparate data sources found within an organisation; interestingly this product can work in three modes, event driven, service orientated or data driven.

Superficially, you could ask what does Sunopsis bring to the party that Oracle did not already have with Warehouse Builder – both OWB and Sunopsis Data Conductor have a similar approach in that the transform & load are pushed to the target database i.e. not using a dedicated ETL hub to effect the load and transform process. But one area where Sunopsis scores highly is that is seen to interwork with a wide range of enterprise database targets, native connectors exist for IBM DB2, Teradata, Netezza, Sybase IQ, MS SQL Server, and others. True, OWB 10.2 has come on a lot in terms of interoperation but it is a new release and common perception has it that it only works with Oracle targets.

In these days of merger and acquisition and even the refresh of legacy solutions it very common to find businesses with a mixed IT architecture, gluing this mixture together, either through common masterdata, or via on-the-fly application to application mappings is a vital tool in most enterprises