This is regularly aggregated, combined and analyzed to provide the information needed for corporate decision-making. Once viewed as operational or tactical in nature, enterprise data is now used for strategic decision-making at every business level. Managing the strategic information assets and providing timely, accurate and global access to enterprise data in a secure, manageable and cost-efficient environment is becoming critical. It's also, however, the weakest link in the information management chain. The proliferation of proprietary data management and manipulation tools has resulted in a host of incompatible information technology products, each processing metadata differently.
End users suffer from inaccessible and incompatible metadata locked into individual tools.
Metadata has thus become the number one integration problem in the area of enterprise information and data warehouse management. For enterprise-wide information management you need global and efficient access to shared metadata by all the heterogeneous products found in today's information technology environment. To use tools efficiently, users must be capable of moving metadata between tools and repositories. Java and Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. SYS-CON Publications, Inc. is independent of Sun Microsystems, Inc.