Jul 21

Written by: Karen Lopez
Monday, July 21, 2008 4:38 PM

Greg Keller, Chief Evangelist for Embarcadero, talks to Jason Tiret and Josh Howard about the the directions for ER/Studio and ER/Studio Enterprise Portal. 

One of the nifty things mentioned is that anyone who participates in the Beta program for ER/Studio Enterprise Portal is eligible for a 20% discount on that product when it is releases.  What makes participating in this beta much easier than most is that you can beta test it on their serve, which means no installing, no licensing, no getting the operations folks involved.  Just sign up, get your welcome message, give it a drive and boom, a 20% savings on license fees.

JOSH: The Enterprise Portal was basically designed to help Data Architects share and communicate the metadata stored in the ER/Studio repository, and make it available as a self-service reporting tool to the organization. And since the Portal is accessed through a browser, the Data Architect and their modeling teams can literally share all this rich metadata to hundreds of different users throughout the enterprise, whether they are business analysts, database designers, or application developers. Over the years, we witnessed so many of our ER/Studio customers, large and small, develop these hand rolled solutions to distribute metadata. Some very sophisticated...like what we are productizinig, and others mainly automated macros to pump out information from ER/Studio which was becoming known as this 'hub' of information at these customer sites. So, we made teh choice to productize this need and sell it to our customers in a manner that enables them to distrubute quickly and broadly in a way everyone gets: e.g. using a web browser.

GREGK: Indeed. I spent many hundreds of hourse working on this very problem with customers. So, when does Portal ship?

JOSH: While this product won’t be made available to the public until late August, interested parties can certainly test-drive the Portal by sending an email to betas@embarcadero.com or by visiting the beta center. We’re also throwing in a 20% discount to help incentivize those early adopters into trying the tool during the beta release.

 

:....:Meta Frequency:....:: A Q & A with the ER/Studio product management team

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