Astera Centerprise

Astera Centerprise is a data integration solution targeted at environments with complex requirements and it addresses the use cases illustrated in Figure 1. Astera ReportMiner extends the capabilities of Centerprise to unstructured data (pdf, text and so on) while Astera EDIConnect does the same thing for the sort of documents used in B2B exchanges, such as HL7, EDIFACT and so forth.

Architecturally, Astera Centerprise (version 8) is microservices-based and runs on a distributed platform that provides multi-threaded parallel (including partition parallelism) processing. While it typically uses a traditional ETL (extract, transform and load) based approach, it supports push-down optimisation so that transformations (many of which come out of the box) can be performed where it is most appropriate. Bulk loading, both workflow and process automation, job scheduling, failover, load balancing, change data capture (CDC), support for mainframe environments (COBOL) and other enterprise features are provided.

Customer Quotes

“Astera has allowed us to do in minutes what whole data extraction teams do in days and/or hours. It’s at the heart of our data extraction process.”
3BG Supply Co

“The Centerprise product is very well suited for business analysts to easily manage and create custom workflows and models to automate complex data integration.”
Conduent

Data integration is a mature market and Astera Software offers all the basic requirements that one would expect, and we do not need to discuss these. However, there are a number of additional capabilities that are worth more detailed consideration. The first of these relates to data quality. The products include data profiling capabilities and the ability to develop (in a no-code environment) your own data quality rules. These leverage Astera’s rules engine (which has a look and feel similar to Microsoft Excel) and, while Astera does not offer a match engine per se, the rules engine does have the ability to do things like fuzzy matching. Moreover, a number of the rules that are delivered with the product (more than 500 of them) provide survivorship options. There are specific data quality capabilities – see Figure 2 – including matching in this instance, in the Astera ReportMiner product.

Beyond data quality there are three recently introduced modules: API Integration, Data Virtualization and Data Warehouse Automation, of which the first and third merit discussion. This isn’t to say that Data Virtualization isn’t nice to have, just that its principles (a virtual view across multiple data sources) are well known. As for API Integration this allows users to expose any data source, or a subset thereof, as a secure, managed, real-time RESTful API. You can publish these APIs to both internal and external users, and you can publish data either to a virtual database, to an API or OData. Service Orchestration is provided. Further enhancements to these capabilities are planned.

Data Warehouse Automation allows you to speed up the process of creating or migrating to a data warehouse. Astera does this by providing data modelling capabilities that allow you to map dimension and fact tables and then automatically load data based on those definitions. Where necessary Astera has the ability to reverse engineer relevant (for example, Snowflake) data warehouse schemas, or it can push a schema (including joins, lookups and so on) to the target.

Finally, we should mention that Astera plans to introduce Data Flow as a Service (DFaaS) in the near future.

There are a plethora of data integration solutions available across the marketplace and, while we are happy that Astera offers the sort of architecture that should provide the scalability, performance and resilience that enterprises expect, there is nothing in particular that stands out about the product’s core capabilities. However, most competitors cannot offer the specialised document-based capabilities that Astera offers through ReportMiner and EDIConnect, few offer API integration, even fewer offer data virtualization and none, as far as we know, offer data warehouse automation integrated into a general-purpose data integration solution. Moreover, all the Astera modules share the same core platform and architecture, providing user interface and functional consistency, something that cannot always be said for competitive “integrated” platforms.

We should add that while there is a significant amount of automation built into the offering, that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t like to see more: recommendations for example. Also, the sooner Astera Cloud is available the better: this is clearly an area where Astera is currently behind some of its competitors. We would also like to see more technology partnerships in adjacent areas such as data governance and data cataloguing.

The Bottom Line

Astera Software is not one of the 800lb gorillas in this market. Nevertheless, we have been pleasantly surprised at how well it stacks up in comparison. Astera Centerprise is worth serious consideration even if you are contemplating one of the behemoths of this industry.