Composite Software Enters 'EII' Realm With New Offering
With the announcement, the San Mateo, Calif., company places itself in the emerging Enterprise Information Integration (EII) category, a rubric characterized by efforts to serve up a seemingly local view of enterprisewide data, regardless of where that data is stored. EII competitors include Avaki, Burlington, Mass.; Journee, Austin, Texas; MetaMatrix, New York; and the Information Integrator software from IBM, Armonk, N.Y.
\
Composite CEO Jim Green previously led Sun's efforts to develop CORBA.
"[Enterprise application integration] is all about automating processes, messaging buses, workflow and business-process modeling. EII is about transforming the data," said Composite CEO Jim Green. Previously CTO and executive vice president at webMethods, Fairfax, Va., Green is a well-known EAI pioneer who led Sun Microsystems' efforts to develop the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), which is widely considered to be the precursor of today's services-oriented architecture.
Composite's product allows users to glean data from any source, in any schema or format throughout a network, including relational databases, XML documents, flat files and spreadsheets. Once the user creates a query by way of Composite's graphical interface, the Information Server retrieves the data, reshapes it into a usable format and abstracts it into a cohesive view within a front-end application of the user's choosing, such as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
To the user's eye, information resides in that front-end app. Users can perform queries against views containing relational, XML and flat-file data, even though data never moves from its original location on the network.
Ultimately, Composite's goal is to create a skein of connected views among multiple servers. "That way you will create a data abstraction layer above your network," said Green. "When that happens, users could express an interest in a topic, and the network responds."
Composite said customers can create an entire project involving development, deployment, training and support for less than $100,000. The company plans to unveil channel partnerships within the next few weeks.