November 16, 2007
Does Ab Initio need to be taken seriously?
Users and vendors occasionally mention Ab Initio to me. But when I inquired about details at their booth at the Teradata conference, I was told to go away by a “gentleman” who seemed quite amused with himself for doing so. And when I checked Ab Initio’s website right now, I found it to be rather content-free.
Is Ab Initio all flash — and Flash — and no substance? Do they rely on selling to a few enterprises they can bamboozle, free from interference by prying analysts? Obviously, I don’t know for sure, but that’s how my guesses are leaning right now.
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2 Responses to “Does Ab Initio need to be taken seriously?”
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I’ve seen two big Ab Initio sites up close but we are going back a few years now. There was nothing quite like it in terms of ability to load lots of data quickly. All huge sites in terms of data volume- financial services co’s. I’d probably still reckon that, because of the way their architecture works (or at least the way I understood it to work), that they can do things that might worry even the current version of Informatica (and maybe DataStage too though their parallel stuff has been around a while).
Undeniably though they are odd (and more than a little secretive) in terms of the way they go about doing business. Go back a few years and their website was basically a single page with a phone number on it- their current one is positively overloaded with information in comparison. Heard a few interesting things about the way the company works too.
All that being said, I’m not really an ETL guy so perhaps best take my perspective with a pinch of salt.
Thanks, Alex.
My general approach to small companies that don’t want attention is to leave them in peace. With that attitude, they’re unlikely to become big ones anyway, or (absent being acquired) find the resources to develop their technology dramatically further.
Sometimes that’s a waste of some clever technology. Thunderstone is probably one example, and Ab Initio is probably another. But so be it.
CAM