Daman Converts Information into Knowledge with IBM Visual Warehouse and ETI Solution

Tightly integrated solutions

In the data management industry, Daman Incorporated has earned a reputation for quick delivery of solutions based on IBM's business intelligence products such as IBM Visual Warehouse.

Gita Lal, CEO and President of Daman Incorporated, attributes much of this success not only to Daman's knowledge and ability to quickly and accurately perform data migration implementations but also to IBM's comprehensive package of business intelligence products and integration with complementary products such as ETI*EXTRACT, developed by Evolutionary Technologies International.

"IBM's support for products such as ETI*EXTRACT gives us a considerable advantage, because we don't have to go out and test the integration processes among the different tools," explains Lal. "They are already integrated into the solution."

IBM's package includes reporting tools, meta data tools, tools for propagating and migrating the data from the source application to the warehouse, and also replication technologies. Lal says, "Having an integrated suite of tools that supports all our reporting needs definitely increases our ability to deliver such solutions to our customers."

Rapid, low-cost implementations
For Daman's customers, quick implementation and conversion from legacy systems to their new data warehouses is a major concern. Using IBM's business intelligence products such as Visual Warehouse in conjunction with propagation tools like ETI*EXTRACT Daman can deliver interface and programmatic conversion solutions under tight deadlines. "Our in-house methodologies and extensive expertise allow us to take full advantage of the latest tools and technologies," says Lal. "The result is a solution delivered both quickly and cost-effectively."

One of Daman's most recent implementations was for a large property and casualty insurance provider, where the business objectives were to migrate a legacy policy management system to a newer system running on an IBM mainframe using DB2 for MVS. Daman also developed several programmatic interfaces from the new policy management system on DB2 to hundreds of disparate subsystems that support numerous decision-support functions. At another site, Daman designed a data mart on DB2 for OS/390 to maintain an insurance fraud decision-support system. ETI*EXTRACT was used for the data extraction and load process, and Visual Warehouse was used to design and build the data mart.

"The cost of implementation and deployment is significantly reduced by using the Visual Warehouse prepackaged solution, largely because implementation time is reduced, as is the level of skill required for implementation," says Lal. "The combination of Visual Warehouse, ETI*EXTRACT, and DB2 delivers a synergy that provides the basis for an advanced decision-support environment that is easy to learn, use, and maintain."