Who Needs MetaTrieve? Answer: Database Administrators, Programmers, Consultants, Business Analysts, Financial Analysts, Systems Integrators, Business Executives . . .

From companies with as few as perhaps two dozen employees to transnational
corporate behemoths, the challenge of locating data within often departmentally widely distributed Relational database environments, or environments comprised of multiple vendor systems, is pervasive. Given this, members of two broad categories of personnel may experience dramatic productivity benefits in using MetaTrieve!: IT department staff and general, company-wide, information seeking business end users.

While IT personnel have long had various database indexing or cataloguing tools available to them, as databases have exploded in size under the tidal waves of information coming from the Internet (and soon to be perhaps even more dramatically expanded by RFID-tag data inflows) these already barely adequate expedients are of increasingly marginal benefit. The sheer number of Tables and Columns within databases makes any imperative to visually filter through such lists numbing at best. At worst, overlooking and missing precisely the data being sought becomes an ever greater risk, with damaging consequences that ripple throughout the company as the result. Further, to the extent that specialized expertise or restricted access has constrained the use of even these, the many information-seeking business end-users throughout the company or organization have often essentially been made dependent; for any selection of data that no prior query has been structured for, they must submit a request to the IT department for later fulfillment and delivery, thus compounding the inefficiencies that the IT department itself must contend with. With MetaTrieve!, both of these constraints disappear, dramatically empowering both categories of user.

For the IT department, barely a single data administrative function is free of the common and fundamental requisite that must first be fulfilled before these functions can themselves be effectively executed: namely, locating the data upon which they are dependent, and which is generally scattered throughout a widely distributed database environment. Not only does this include a function as fundamental as querying itself, it also includes ETL, EAI, data-mapping, EII, data-base and data-warehouse construction, Business Intelligence system implementations, Metadata Management, B2B initiatives, and even programming, per se.

How significant is this? Let us illustrate by highlighting just one of these functions: EAI. Research reports have indicated that as much as 40% of all IT spending is lavished on Enterprise Application Integration. Clearly, then, making EAI more efficient has very significant financial implications for the enterprise. Why MetaTrieve! is so valuable in this context is well addressed by Russell Levine in his November, 2003, Business Integration magazine article, The Myth of the Disappearing Interfaces:

“Ultimately, it’s all about data anyway. The dirty little secret of integration is that no technology is ever going to resolve the semantic data mapping issue. Data mapping is like making sausage. Everybody likes a little sausage for breakfast, but nobody really wants to know how it’s made. Data mapping requires intimate knowledge of the data and how it’s used. This can be accomplished only with the network of knowledge and analytic processing power possessed by higher-order, carbon-based life forms. It takes time and effort. Once you’re done, you can take advantage of the productivity features of EAI tools to capture and reuse definitions and mappings. First, however, you must understand every data relationship. That hard work is unavoidable. Even if you have no configuration or customization effort for a given data object exchange, this significant data analysis task just won’t go away.”

The great value of MetaTrieve! lies in its ability to efficiently fulfill the data discovery and data-relationship discovery functions emphasized here as being a prior necessity to the hard work of analysis which only human personnel can fulfill. More generally, the crucial importance of these fundamental data-discovery and data-relationship functions to such a wide range of important IT department imperatives, explains why the productivity implications of MetaTrieve!, are so pronounced. As such, the following is a sampling of the IT department personnel with a need for MetaTrieve!, and why:

If you are a CTO/CIO responsible for promoting the productivity and proficiency of your IT department, or a CFO responsible for screening IT implementations for maximal productivity and ROI/payback benefit . . .

If you are a Database Administrator, programmer, Systems analyst, Software Design Engineer or other IT department personnel who needs to more efficiently find the data scattered amid a widely distributed relational database environment, and which you ultimately need efficient access to before you can structure a data warehouse, plan, design, and code programs, perform ETL functions, map data, or select elements needed for Enterprise Application Integration, Business process analysis, Business Intelligence-suite configuration or B2B implementation initiatives . . .

A sampling of general company end users who might dramatically benefit from use of MetaTrieve! would certainly include, but not be limited to the following:

If you are a company or organization employee and information-seeking end user – whether CEO, CFO, Business analyst, or Human Resources, Design, Finance, Shipping or other departmental clerk – who would like to be able to maximize the speed of metadata/data discovery and the flexibility of ad hoc querying capability in generating reports and analysis, especially as the demands of the Sarbanes-Oxley-Act compliance imperative looms ever larger on the horizon . . .

If you are a Consulting company field auditor on assignment at a client company
responsible for auditing the client’s IT/data resources. Currently this is a
cumbersome, time consuming process of extensively conferring with the client IT department to determine, frankly, even where to begin, and you would like to be able to make the process far more efficient and independently viable . . . . . how do you do it? Now, ‘implement MetaTrieve!’ is the simple answer for each scenario noted.

Underscoring this, it is relevant to once again allude to the November 3, 2003
InfoWorld article, “Search Gets Serious”. Noting the urgency of the need, the article observed: “Now, more and more enterprises are turning to search technology for answers”. Given the overwhelmingly favorable Cost/Benefit profile it provides, we might easily paraphrase: ‘Now, more and more enterprises should turn to MetaTrieve! technology for answers’, if they would truly like to fulfill the promise of “Finding Data, Freeing Time; Freeing Data, Finding Time.”