Startup Charts Enterprise Information Integration Course
October 24, 2003 4:00 PM ET
Young company Composite Software has an old hand at its helm: Chairman and CEO Jim Green, considered by many to be the father of enterprise application integration (EAI).
It's now Green's job to guide the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup through the uncharted waters of an emerging market known as enterprise information integration (EII).
This isn't the first time Green's been charged with guiding a fledgling operation. In 1995, he founded EAI pioneer Active Software, where he was CEO, and he became CTO of webMethods, Fairfax, Va., when that company acquired Active Software in 2000. Earlier, Green led the Sun Microsystems team that developed the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), widely considered the precursor of today's services-oriented architecture.
With Composite, Green once again faces the challenge of competing in a nascent market that's technically complex. In mid-October, Composite launched its first product, called Composite Information Server, which presents a unified view of information culled from disparate data sources throughout an organization.
That launch helps put EII products and technology in the spotlight. Now it's up to systems integrators and solution providers to figure out how the technology can help them make money.
 VENDOR PROFILE Jim Green, CEO, Chairman, Composite Software "Describing exactly what enterprise information integration does is really simple, but it turns out that building this kind of technology is really hard. Our job [at Composite] is to package it and make it pragmatic for everyone." Newly launched Composite Software offers software that reaches throughout the enterprise to query all types of data,both structured and unstructured. The application then reshapes the information into a usable format and presents it as a single, cohesive view to the end user
> HEADQUARTERS: San Mateo, Calif. round of funding |
To help make sense of the alphabet soup, Green offers an explanation of EII: "While EAI is all about automating processes, messaging buses, workflow and business-process modeling, EII is about transforming the data," he said. In essence, EAI knits together disparate applications by moving small amounts of data used in app-to-app messaging. EII presents continually updated views of large data sets from widely dispersed data sources.
"That makes EII useful for business intelligence and corporate dashboards, which constantly need to view large amounts of fresh data as close to realtime as possible," said Philip Russom, an analyst at Forrester Research. "EAI focuses on the transaction; EII focuses on the query."
The Composite Information Server allows users to glean data from any source, including relational databases, XML documents, flat files and spreadsheets. Once the user creates a query by way of the software's graphical interface, Composite Information Server generates subqueries to find the data on the network.
The server then 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 spreadsheet. To the user's eye, information resides in that front-end application. 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.
Composite said this week that webMethods will resell its software. The agreement also includes joint marketing and product development activities.
BEA Systems, San Jose, Calif., competes with Composite with its Liquid Data software, and so does IBM, Armonk, N.Y., with its Information Integrator. Other competitors include Avaki, Burlington, Mass.; Journee, Austin, Texas; and MetaMatrix, New York.
Unlike other EII players, Avaki uses a different approach for serving up large amounts of data. The Avaki Data Grid doesn't support distributed queries. Instead, Avaki has modeled its software on the computer science concept of the data grid, which names the computing resources within an organization. Avaki's approach emphasizes the distributed data grid rather than the distributed query.
"Avaki can support distributed processing to larger data sets on the fly, which means it can grab more data from more data sources," Russom said. "That's Avaki's strength."
That strength appears to resonate with the channel. Avaki's channel partners include IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun, as well as small professional services firms focused on data integration. Behemoth IBM has a particularly strong relationship with 45-person Avaki, whose software is sold by IBM's life sciences, industrial and DB2 groups, and through IBM Global Services.
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