You MUST check this tool out. Simply put, this is not just a one time data migration tool! You can literally have your high power sales folks on SalesForce.com and then your calling center on something like SugarCRM do a join and send an RSS feed to the mobile sales force. This startup with offices outside of Boston and also Belarus is creating a shift in the way we look at data. Tools like this should go a long way towards commoditizing metadata in your company.
Apatar, Inc.
195 Meadow St., FL2
Chicopee, MA 01013
This open source java product can be downloaded from their web site (beta version) lives on sourceforge and already has a small but growing community of supporters. Through a cooperative effort, the Apatar developers have worked with their community to release connectors for data sources like: AmazonS3, MySQL, MS-SQL, Postgres, SalesForce.com, SugarCRM, Oracle and many more.
So in this example, you can drag data items onto the screen from both sides of the data transformation and do operations like lookups, appends or simply migrate data to the correct fields on the other side. Notice that these data connectors have dots on BOTH sides, since the data transformation isn't just a one way affair.
Just think, I've paid LOTS of money for custom programming to do all of the above and have really felt the pinch of my wallet. Not only that, I've had projects that would have been a terrific help to my customers, but the return on investment was so small that I just couldn't justify it. Now I can give folks readonly access to my company database and let them pull data out and push it into their desktop contact tool. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Their CEO Renat Khasanshyn and I visited with each other while at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas and soon drew a small crowd of the other Interop Team Members (ITM's) oohing and awwwing over this super cool tool. One of the ITM's figured he could pull data from all his legacy applications in the courts and be able to do test migrations while he works out the bugs. Another gent told a story about how he has a customer on an AS/400 that would so love to migrate some of their DB2 data into SugarCRM. I could smell the burning rubber as the gang brainstormed over how they would use this tool when they got home.
Renat and I had a great conversation, and we had a chance to polish the crystal ball on where he thinks the open source world is moving. Give me a little time and I hope to post an audio file withthe highlights.
/brian chee