IBM InfoSphere DataStage is an ETL tool and part of the IBM Information Platforms Solutions suite and IBM InfoSphere. It uses a graphical notation to construct data integration solutions and is available in various versions such as the Server Edition, the Enterprise Edition, and the MVS Edition. It uses a client-server architecture. The servers can be deployed in both Unix as well as Windows. It is a powerful data integration tool, frequently used in Data Warehousing projects to prepare the data for the generation of reports. History DataStage originated at VMark Software Inc, a company that developed two notable products: UniVerse database and the DataStage ETL tool. The first VMark ETL prototype was built by Lee Scheffler in the first half of 1996. Peter Weyman was VMark VP of Strategy and identified the ETL market as an opportunity. He appointed Lee Scheffler as the architect and conceived the product brand name "Stage" to signify modularity and component-orientation. This tag was used to name DataStage and subsequently used in related products QualityStage, ProfileStage, MetaStage and AuditStage. Lee Scheffler presented the DataStage product overview to the board of VMark in June 1996 and it was approved for development. The product was in alpha testing in October, beta testing in November and was generally available in January 1997. VMARK and Unidata merged in October 1997 and renamed themselves to Ardent Software. In 1999 Ardent Software was acquired by Informix the database software vendor. In April 2001 IBM acquired Informix and took just the database business leaving the data integration tools to be spun off as an independent software company called Ascential Software. In November 2001, Ascential Software Corp. of Westboro, Mass. acquired privately held Torrent Systems Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts for $46 million in cash. Ascential announced a commitment to integrate Orchestrate's parallel processing capabilities directly into the DataStageXE platform. In March 2005 IBM acquired Ascential Software and made DataStage part of the WebSphere family as WebSphere DataStage. In 2006 the product was released as part of the IBM Information Server under the Information Management family but was still known as WebSphere DataStage. In 2008 the suite was renamed to InfoSphere Information Server and the product was renamed to InfoSphere DataStage. Releases Enterprise Edition (PX): a name given to the version of DataStage that had a parallel processing architecture and parallel ETL jobs. Server Edition: the name of the original version of DataStage