CA Technologies has announced a major new release of the ERwin data modeling solution. This new release which is the second in less than a year provides a collaborative data modeling environment to manage enterprise data using an intuitive, graphical interface. It helps improve data re-use, optimize system quality, accelerate time-to-benefit and enable appropriate information governance—key objectives for IT organizations serving companies in today’s highly competitive and closely regulated markets.
The traditional ERwin customer base has been data architects, modeler, DBAs, and the product has been very data-focused, Donna Burbank, vice president, Product Marketing, Data Management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The use case has traditionally been, and still is, how to manage disparate databases – such as DB2, Teradata, and Sybase – and get a central view of the data structures and the definitions, and rationalize the data in order to increase quality and efficiency, she explains. While improvements have been made in this area in ERwin r9, Burbank notes, the new release is also intended to address a growing need to accommodate a broader cross-section of users who are involved in areas such as data governance and business analysis. “There are not only new tools that we need to integrate with but also new users,” she notes.
As a result of this need, CA ERwin r9 includes significantly improved collaboration features—on the “back end” with a re-architected model repository, that provides improved performance to accommodate more data, as well as better categorization of the data, says Burbank. In addition, on the “front end” there are enhancements to the web portal—that enable non-technical users to make updates to business-centric metadata because business users want to not only see the data, but also to contribute, says Burbank. With the understanding that the data will be accessed by a broader range of users, the new release also includes support for corporate security policies and industry-standard protocols, such as LDAP. These new capabilities enable disparate teams of business and IT users to more easily work together to enforce standards, assess the impact of change, and manage data assets more effectively.
More information is available about ERwin at http://erwin.com/products/
For more information about the CA ERwin community which totals more than 70,000 users worldwide, go to http://erwin.com/community.