Expanding its commitment to help data professionals work more closely and effectively in the design and implementation of enterprise data architectures, Embarcadero® Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: EMBT), a leading provider of data lifecycle management solutions, today announced the latest release of Embarcadero ER/Studio®, its award-winning data architecture and database design solution for the discovery, documentation, and reuse of data assets. Embarcadero ER/Studio 7.0 incorporates powerful new collaborative enterprise model management capabilities and new data warehousing and integration support designed to help data professional teams visualize, understand, document, and share knowledge across the enterprise with increased consistency. Embarcadero ER/Studio 7.0 also includes improved physical modeling for database design. These new features, along with the data integration and enterprise modeling capabilities, make ER/Studio 7.0 an elegant, powerful solution that enables data professionals to proactively and strategically manage data resources.

"The ability of an enterprise to share relevant and accurate information with its partners, customers, and other stakeholders is a pre-requisite for success. This means that technical, business and information architects and data management professionals charged with implementing enterprise-wide solutions must approach the planning and execution of their applications strategically," said Michael J. Blechar, research vice president, Gartner. "Methods and tools that help document, understand, share and reuse knowledge about data and processes are crucial to organizations looking to move from tactical project-to-project deployments to more enterprise-wide, value-added business-driven solutions."

Enabling Communication and Collaboration Across Data Management Teams

Years of siloed and uncoordinated application and database development have left corporations without any visibility into their existing data assets. In the face of managing growing volumes of inaccurate, inconsistent, data, data professionals require solutions that help them understand what data they have, manage information for ongoing consistency, and provide documentation to the rest of the organization. Embarcadero ER/Studio 7.0 incorporates new enterprise modeling capabilities that enable organizations to collaboratively manage large models by facilitating standards enforcement across these models, and creating highly-readable, richly annotated diagrams.

As ER/Studio captures key metadata such as data lineage in a model-driven format, data stakeholders will quickly gain understanding of existing information and how it should be used. This knowledge facilitates highly productive relationships between data professionals and radically reduces the amount of time spent on integration and data warehouse development projects.

"Inadequate documentation, redundant data, and lack of visibility into existing data sources mean that workers spend up to 50 percent of their time researching what information means," said Greg Keller, vice president of product management, Embarcadero Technologies. "With ER/Studio 7.0, Embarcadero is providing powerful tools organizations need to analyze, document, interpret, merge, and share enterprise data. ER/Studio 7.0 is proof of our commitment to empower data professionals to make the transition from handling data management from a project-by-project to a more enterprise or strategic level."

"Accurate, timely, and relevant data is at the heart of the marketing services we provide our customers. By standardizing on ER/Studio for enterprise model management, we are assured of the consistency we need." said Mark Peterson, senior database analyst at Valassis. "All systems, whether reverse engineered or built from scratch, are designed using ER/Studio. Its rich documentation and data lineage functionality allow us to track database schema changes."

New Data Integration and Data Warehousing Support and Enterprise Data Management Features

Embarcadero ER/Studio 7.0 incorporates innovative new features that provide visibility and control over data management systems and help data professionals promote consistency, accuracy, and reuse. These new features allow users to manage change more quickly and proactively. New features in ER/Studio 7.0 include:

• Enterprise model management - Embarcadero ER/Studio 7.0 enables the creation and consolidation of project models into one global model for holistic data management. ER/Studio 7.0 helps organizations manage large models through team-centric collaboration, utilities to automate key tasks, promotion of shareable and tiered elements, and enabling standards enforcement to promote consistent data usage across the enterprise. Advanced metadata management capabilities include the consolidation of metadata into one repository in a highly navigable, visual format. A model-driven approach makes it easy to understand business rules and dependencies. Other new features include the advanced management of sub-models and enhanced versioning control, which enable standards to be enforced throughout the organization.
• Improved data integration and data warehousing support - Embarcadero ER/Studio 7.0 brings rich data lineage documentation capabilities, so users can easily track how data flows through an organization. ER/Studio can track multiple stages of data lineage throughout online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, enterprise data warehouses (EDW), and data marts. This feature helps raise data quality, improve communications, and facilitate integration projects, radically reducing the amount of time required to research data and increases the accuracy of the data.
• Improved physical modeling - In order to better support the transition from logical to physical, ER/Studio 7.0 gives database administrators (DBAs) two new features: capacity planning and security modeling. Capacity planning allows modelers to communicate how they expect a database to grow, and security modeling functionality will allow data management professionals to develop access roles in the logical model to that can be transferred to the physical model - a key part of today's compliancy and security focused world.

"To manage consistency and promote reuse of data we need to fully understand the underlying databases of the packaged applications essential to our organization before they can be deployed," said Paul V. Ennamorato, manager, Database Administration at Foley & Lardner LLP. "With ER/Studio 7.0, we can reverse engineer more complex systems to create database schema models and data dictionaries required to better understand their exact structure and the database table relationships. We are also using the new capacity planning features to help us plan for growth and effectively manage storage requirements."

Embarcadero ER/Studio

ER/Studio, a model-driven data architecture and database design solution, helps companies discover, document, and reuse data assets. With round-trip database support, data architects and database developers have the power to thoroughly analyze existing data sources as well as design and implement high quality databases that reflect business needs. The highly-readable visual format enhances communication across business roles and functions. ER/Studio Enterprise addition also enables organization-wide collaboration with its repository.