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A faster, efficient, more capable Astera with same licensing cost Astera 11.2 is available now for every product on the platform: Centerprise, ReportMiner, EDI Connect. High-volume jobs process up to 2x faster, extraction templates are generated under five seconds with AI-powered Auto-Generate Layout, and Dataflows can run a full retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline without a separate tool. The release also simplifies deployment, and adds email-driven workflow triggers.

Establishing a data warehousing system that meets all your business intelligence targets is by no means an easy task. It traditionally involves profiling source systems, designing a dimensional model by hand, writing the DDL to deploy it, building the load pipelines, and scheduling them to run, work that can take weeks. Astera's manual, step-by-step approach to this is covered in Building a Data Warehouse – A Step by Step Approach.

If you've spent any time researching accounts payable automation, you've probably run into the term RPA — robotic process automation. It's one of the oldest and most widely deployed forms of business automation, and it still plays a real role in AP departments today. But it's also frequently confused with newer, AI-powered approaches to invoice processing. This guide breaks down what RPA actually does in accounts payable, where it holds up, and where it runs out of road.

TL;DR: Fiserv platforms generate fixed-width.rpt files where every field sits at an exact character position. Astera ReportMiner maps those positions through a visual template editor, extracts the data, validates it against your business rules, and writes it directly to Excel, CSV, or 200+ other destinations. One template handles every future instance of the same report type, and the full pipeline runs unattended on a schedule.

Mainframe reports are one of the oldest and most persistent data extraction challenges in enterprise IT. They are generated by COBOL programs, printed by JES2/JES3 spoolers, and exported as fixed-width text files from IBM i Series, z/OS, AS/400, and similar systems. They power critical operations in banking, insurance, government, healthcare, and manufacturing. They also look nothing like the documents that modern AI extraction tools are designed for.