By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Boz Scaggs's Hits!:
Stratature, a vendor of master data management software, has announced the general availability of +EDM Version 4.0, the latest release of Stratature's +EDM platform for dimension, hierarchy and master data management.
Stratature officials bill the product as a "comprehensive MDM security model," bolstering support for Product Information Management applications.
Customers use +EDM for operational and analytical MDM, to support data governance and data quality initiatives across ERP, GL, CRM, data warehouse, business intelligence and financial applications.
Val Lovicz, VP of Research and Development for Stratature, said "although simple in concept, the practicalities of allowing security assignments to any combination of dimension members, across any number of hierarchies, with unlimited master data supported by unlimited business rules, are a challenge."
Company officials say the product's file object management, was developed in conjunction with several customers interested in "tackling enterprise-scale product information management initiatives."
The functionality is being highlighted in the company's marketing for "CPG and pharmaceutical companies storing product images, documents and presentations, this functionality is proving equally useful outside of the product dimension -- such as in the location dimension for storing maps of a store location, or the employee dimension for storing pictures of employees -- anywhere that external documents and images can benefit from being treated as master data," officials say.
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Interesting bit from Reuters this morning, reporting that Microsoft is flipping the switch on its "largest server farm to date -- big enough to house seven soccer fields" today, an installation in Quincy, Washington comprising tens of thousands of computer servers in what Reuters calls "a physical manifestation of the company's giant ambitions to be a force in the world of Web services."
Well, that and the $550 million data center in San Antonio. Hey when you take on Google you need such infrastructure.
The data centers "provide the base infrastructure upon which Microsoft can create a range of web services such as its Xbox Live online video game system to its upcoming CRM Live business software," Reuters observes.
The article quoted Morningstar analyst Toan Tran saying that since data centers are "the basic infrastructure that enable Web services," if Microsoft wants to compete in services "this is the price of admission. The software industry is headed toward Web services, so this is what Microsoft has to do."
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Adobe Systems and salesforce.com have announced the availability of the Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex, described by Adobe officials as "a set of programming tools that combines the capabilities of Flex and salesforce.com's Apex platform" to enable new Internet business applications.