Informatica Corporation and Viador Inc. announced a joint partnership to develop a single, end-to-end, Web-based architecture to provide global businesses with access to critical enterprise data assets. The jointly developed solution, which initially will be targeted at emerging e-business applications, will feature two products for integrating and accessing enterprise data: Informatica’s data-integration platform, anchored by the PowerCenter data-integration hub, and the Viador E-Portal Suite, an enterprise portal that allows users to securely search, access, and distribute business information from any source via a single, personalized view. The Viador and Informatica integration effort will exploit the capabilities of XML. The two company’s products can already exchange metadata through the use of Informatica’s MX (metadata exchange) interface, the data warehousing industry’s first viable solution for exporting metadata to business intelligence reporting and query tools, and enterprise portals. The planned integration of Informatica and Viador products is a logical next step as XML takes center stage and becomes a widely accepted language for exchanging data and metadata among a whole of new class of Web- and e-business-enabled applications. The PowerCenter data-integration hub consolidates data from any source, including ERP systems from SAP and PeopleSoft, and delivers it and the underlying metadata to a data warehouse, data mart or operational data store (ODS). The data can also be written to message queues, flat files and XML files. www.informatica.com, www.viador.com