Ardent Software, Inc. announced a strategic initiative designed to allow organizations to deploy a single enterprise information infrastructure (EII) to support a wide variety of strategic solutions, including e-business, analytical applications and enterprise information portals. The EII initiative is a direct response to the growing need to include unstructured information sources, and provides a uniform, enterprise-wide approach to information integration across data, applications and processes. Ardent’s EII initiative will provide users with reliable, timely, and relevant information from structured or unstructured enterprise data sources to support the decision-making process using the best information available. The approach is based on XML and is content- and application-independent. Ardent will deliver its EII solutions in several phases. The first solution is the DataStage Suite for Business Information Infrastructure (BII), The DataStage Suite includes the DataStage data movement tool, DataStage XE, which includes data movement, meta data management and integration, and data quality assurance capabilities, and DataStage Enterprise, which adds mainframe processing and activity management services. In the second phase, Ardent will Web-enable enterprise access to the rich business and technical meta data provided by its BII, delivering broader access to BI reports, associated meta data and related unstructured data such as spreadsheets, presentations, and other content. In the third phase, Ardent plans to deliver the essential foundation for an enterprise portal. Ardent’s EII for enterprise portals will incorporate an integration layer that unifies related content from both structured and unstructured sources, enabling a personalized view of information from across the enterprise. EII for enterprise portals will provide a content- and application-independent platform to support information-intensive applications, including e-business and analytical applications. www.ardentsoftware.com