Organizations of all shapes and
sizes are currently looking for ways to cut costs, consolidate data, and
streamline business processes. "Especially with the economy going down, all of
the priorities have been 'Okay, let's see where we can reduce our internal
expenses, let's move away from our legacy systems, [and] try to get our data
systems in place,'" says Pradeep Tapadiya, founder and CEO of Software Labs.
Software Labs' xFusion Studio 4.0 can help you streamline your data migration
and integration tasks, simplify your business processes to improve business
decision making, and automate manual database tasks.
"So basically if I have to
summarize the top three changes, one was the move to SQL Server 2005 as our
intermediate data store, which gave us the capability of the performance that we
needed. The second was the ability to make cached data permanent … and third was
a better user interface for looking at your temporary data store and for
managing your temporary data store," says Tapadiya. With SQL Server 2005 as the
back end for xFusion Studio, you can now process a lot of data quickly. And the
ability to make cached data permanent means you change data only when you really
need to change it.
In addition, xFusion Studio
4.0 includes new data integration and validation rules, as well as a new email
notification feature that lets you know if the automated data migration process
was stopped because of an error. "The idea here is that any time you're moving
data from one place to another and you're automating this process, you may want
to stop this process in the middle if you're data is not the right data, you
know if there are problems with your data, phone numbers are missing, country
names are missing, you know whatever the problem is, even before we put even a
single record into your final database you may want stop the process," explains
Tapadiya. "So we added this mechanism where you can actually define those rules
so that your data gets validated. And if something fails, then we don't continue
with the rest of the process, we abort the process and we also send an email
saying this process has been aborted because your input data has these
problems."
Also new to this release are
business process "packs" that provide extensive data integration and management
capabilities. The xFusion Insight Packs supports business decision making by
offering reporting snapshots of mission-critical business data from SAP
applications. The xFusion Acceleration Packs speed up the data migration and
integration processes between SAP applications and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
And the xFusion Data Quality Packs include predefined queries and can be used to
find duplicate data. "We have a 100 or 200 functions that help folks transform
their data in the way they want to work with it," says Reed Campbell, the vice
president of sales and marketing for Software Labs. "So we have data quality
functions as a subset of those, and we've taken those and done some predefined
queries to address the improvement of data quality for folks that wanting to
address that."
xFusion supports three coding
languages—C#, Visual Basic, and JScript. Pricing for xFusion Studio 4.0 starts
at $5,000 for a two user license and includes the customer portal, a four-hour
training course, maintenance, and technical support. It's important to note that
Software Labs offers guidance as part of the tech support, meaning you can ask
specific questions about how to perform certain actions within the product
without being charged extra. This product has been certified for integration
with SAP applications, including SAP Business Suite, SAP Business All-in-One,
and SAP Business One. For more information about XFusion Studio 4.0, visit the
Software Labs website.