Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) has concluded a system integrator partnership agreement with U.S.-headquartered Apatar to distribute its open source data integration suite in South Africa. KID will use, consult, train, and offer support services for the Apatar integration package that offers a single interface into all integration projects across Mac OS, Windows, and Linux using an open source architecture and modular applications that deliver flexible deployment options.

The growing need for data integration across corporate South Africa
“South Africa is a quickly developing region and it is very important for us to fill the open source data integration niche,” says Sergei Lobanov, Alliance Enabler at Apatar. “With its presence in the South African market, KID, with the help of Apatar, will be able to satisfy customer requirements to integrate legacy and modern systems, applications, and databases through a proven track record of data quality services.”

Apatar already has in excess of 100 users in South Africa and expects KID to expand its penetration of the local market. KID is Apatar’s first South African partner, opening new opportunities and advantages for both parties. The companies reveal their main target is small and mid-sized companies in South Africa that have a need for a free, easy-to-use extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool.

“The growing need for data integration across corporate South Africa, from the smallest to the largest companies, necessitates an open source tool that operates in a number of environments and offers customers the greatest flexibility,” said Julian Field, Business Development Director at KID. “Apatar is at the forefront of the open source wave with an impressive international track record and a number of successful and highly recommended implementations.”

Benefits to South African business users
Two of the major benefits of Apatar are its visual job designer and visual transformation mapper, which are 100% Java-based. They obviate the need for coding of any kind. That capability greatly reduces the need for technical skills and makes it appropriate for businesses without a depth of technical skill.

“Apatar reduces the time and cost usually associated with data integration projects through wide connectivity—including connectivity to various data quality services—provided through the tool’s intuitive interface,” said Mr. Field. “It allows data transformation jobs to be built without writing a single line of code.”

The suite allows: data integration across businesses; users to populate databases and data marts; cross systems such as source systems, flat files, FTP logic, queue-to-queue, and application-to-application. It can also: cross time zones and currency barriers; overcome brittle mainframe or legacy code uplinks that, sometimes unreliably, transfer data; and schedule and maintain no-code or little-code in connections to many different systems.

Apatar enables connectivity with Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, GoldMine, DB2, Sybase, PostgreSQL, dBase, EnterpriseDB, vTiger, InnoDB, Openbravo ERP, Compiere ERP, .CSV, XML, RSS, ATOM, HTTP queries, POP3, LDAP, FTP, WebDav, Autodesk Buzzsaw, any JDBC data sources, Amazon S3, Flickr, StrikeIron and CDYNE Web services, and more.

“Apatar also runs in a multi-threaded fashion to optimize performance levels,” said Mr. Lobanov. “It generates XML metadata files that store information captured by the Apatar designer and mapping graphical interfaces. The engine manages, executes, and controls the project execution plan described in XML metadata files and, in addition, for every executed job, it generates detailed reporting or logs.”

According to Mr. Lobanov, the metadata-centric approach means that it’s easy to adapt to changes in the external environment and promotes reuse at every level. Reusing connectivity settings, transformation, and mapping delivers projects more quickly and cost-effectively.

For more information on Apatar contact Alexander Pipko, alex.p@apatar.com at Apatar.