Donna Burbank

The explosive growth in the amount of data generated by organisations has made management of information a complex task. The procedure has become even more difficult with an increasing number of organisations moving from legacy to new systems. This move has also served to highlight the need for a data repository, which will not only provide metadata facilities but will also provide an increased return on investment (RoI) by cutting down on the amount of time spent on searching for information. In an effort to tap this burgeoning segment, Computer Associates (CA) recently launched their metadata solution called Advantage Repository (AR) in the Indian market.

Donna Burbank senior consultant for FSG TAG AIM Portal at Computer Associates said, “Metadata is like an accounting system for IT. It enables an organisation to take informed business decisions. AR is based on this technology and provides information like location, description and length of the data asset.” Data administrators can leverage AR to identify and document data, thus enabling them to analyse and predict future business trends. It also provides a single source to view logical, physical and process aspects of application environments. AR also supports business and technical metadata for data warehousing, data administration and application development.

Burbank sees huge opportunities for data warehousing in India. She believes that CA’s solution will find a huge market in India as it is based on an open non-proprietary architecture and metadata stored in relational client server databases. She said, “The technology has picked up rapidly in the West but the concept is fairly new in India. Though most organisations haven’t realised the need for such a solution, they do realise that increasing the speed of development time is crucial. Early adopters of this technology will gain from increased productivity, lesser development time and better RoI.”

Gartner has estimated the global metadata repository market at around $250 million per year. According to Burbank, India should generate close to half a million in revenue in a year’s time. Banks were earlier a major focus vertical for CA. But of late, with more and more companies facing the problem of efficient data management, CA has started concentrating its efforts on other verticals like government organisations, insurance companies, financial service providers and large corporates, handling huge volumes of data. CA is currently in talks with software developers and system integrators and Burbank expects them to adopt the solution on a large scale in a few months.