Apatar Partners with ColourBlack to Integrate Unstructured Data into Corporate Applications

Apatar, Inc., the leading provider of open source software tools for the data integration market, today announced a technology and marketing alliance with ColourBlack, Ltd., a Microsoft Partner that provides enterprise solutions for data migration, integration, and enhancement for unstructured data sources. Under the alliance, the companies will support unstructured and semi-structured data from Microsoft SharePoint and other electronic document management systems as both sources and targets of data integration initiatives, all without custom coding. With this new agreement, Apatar and ColourBlack enable both developers and business users not only to link information between SharePoint Server, various document repositories, and third-party applications or databases, but also conduct searches and perform MS Office document type conversion and text restructuring.

Enriching corporate data flow with unstructured information from knowledge management systems

According to the Gartner group, as much as 80 percent of actual or potentially mission-critical enterprise information takes the form of unstructured or semi-structured data. The Apatar–ColourBlack partnership will enable corporate users, DBAs, and developers to integrate, migrate, and consolidate data between knowledge management systems (such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Documentum, Meridio, and FileNet) with other enterprise information stored in corporate applications (CRM/ERP systems), databases, files, and top Web 2.0 destinations.

Beyond that, Apatar users will now be able to conduct searches, detect duplicated or similar documents in user file systems, generate document summaries, extract keywords, and perform content-based categorization. As a result, documents and digital content (including e-mails, PDF and text files, Excel spreadsheets, and diagrams) may be extracted from various knowledge repositories and included in the company’s existing information flow, creating a unified company perspective.

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By helping Apatar to tap into such sources of unstructured data as electronic document and knowledge management systems, we hope to empower corporate users and developers to analyze and extract the most of the value from these information sources,” said Andrew Denby, Director of ColourBlack, Ltd. “Over time, we hope to work with the Apatar Community to offer a range of language-specific analytical tools, and cover such functionality as entity/keyword extraction, automatic document summary generation, document categorization, and document type conversion.”

“The corporate sector has treated structured and unstructured data sources as completely separate for a very long time,” said Renat Khasanshyn, founder and CEO of Apatar, Inc. “By partnering with ColourBlack and providing both-way data synchronization between document management systems and structured corporate applications and databases, we not only strive to tie them all together, but we hope to give business users the possibility to unify and enrich their intellectual assets and ensure better decision making.”

Apatar Open Source Data Integration features and benefits:

- No coding! Visual job designer and mapping enable non-developers to design and perform transformations, shortening implementation time.

- Distributed under an open source model, reducing integration and maintenance costs
- Connectivity to SalesForce.com, SugarCRM, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, GoldMine, DB2, Sybase, PostgreSQL, dBase, EnterpriseDB, vTiger, InnoDB, Compiere ERP, .CSV, XML, RSS, ATOM, HTTP queries, POP3, LDAP, FTP, WebDav, Autodesk Buzzsaw, any JDBC data sources, Amazon S3, Flickr, StrikeIron and CDYNE Web services, and more
- Job scheduler and synchronization automate the data integration process.
- Improves data quality with a variety of verification, filtration, and validation features
- Users have the ability to create, share, and re-use pre-built data transformations and publish data integration output as a custom RSS feed to ApatarForge, the online Apatar community.
- Platform-independent, runs from Windows and Linux

About ColourBlack

ColourBlack provides enterprise solutions for data migration, integration, and enhancement for unstructured data sources. The company is a Microsoft Partner that specializes in getting the most out of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. ColourBlack solutions connect SharePoint with document repositories, such as File System, Lotus Notes, Meridio, FileNet, and more. The company has a number of packaged solutions that allow users to extract keywords/entities, create document summaries, convert documents between various object types, and categorize documents without the need for any custom programming. More information on ColourBlack can be found at http://www.colourblack.com.

About Apatar

Apatar is the leading provider of open source software tools for the data integration market. With powerful Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) capabilities, Apatar enables its users to easily link information between databases (such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle), applications (Salesforce.com, SugarCRM), and the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3). Apatar provides support, training, and consulting services for its integration solutions. Headquartered in Western Massachusetts, Apatar operates a development center in Minsk, Belarus. Apatar is currently used by 3500 organizations and individuals worldwide. For more on Apatar, please visit http://www.apatar.com and http://www.apatarforge.org.