Data Mashups
Problem – Demand for Data Outstrips IT Resources
With business intelligence teams facing severe resource constraints, the queue of user requests to develop and revise reports, dashboards, cubes, and other analytic applications and data structures is growing. To reduce the pressure on IT and satisfy user requests, end users are adopting self-service “mashup” approaches to integrate and present data. Data mashups virtually integrate and surface the diverse enterprise data that these end users require. While presentation mashups are used to compose and visualize the data from these reusable data objects.
Solution – Use Data Virtualization to Simplify Data Mashups
You can use Composite data virtualization to simplify and accelerate data mashup development. Composite provides a unified platform that lets your mashup developers discover, access, abstract, federate and deliver existing enterprise data in a complete and consistent way. By supporting a range of interface standards including REST, SOAP over HTTP, JMS, POX over HTTP, JSON over HTTP, ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET, your presentation mashup developers can quickly and easily consume all the data that Composite provides.
Data Mashups
Forrester Research Confirms Composite’s Position in the Data Mashup Market
In it’s July 2009 report Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, Inc., recommends that overstretched IT teams adopt self-service, mashup-style business intelligence as a way to increase their productivity and empower business user requestors to make simple changes to reports, dashboards and cubes.
Within this self-service model, the report explores what it takes to build mashups from both the business and IT sides. Data mashups are highlighted as the way IT can provide self-service business users with virtualized, federated access to the heterogeneous data required. Automated source discovery is also identified as a key capability, due to the myriad of data sources and complexity of data models typical in large enterprises today.
Composite Software, Inc. was one of two vendors included in the report who met the majority of capabilities including data virtualization/EII, interactive browser-based visualization, and automated source discovery.
One of the report’s early-adopter use cases is Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. Using Composite Software’s Composite Information Server™, Pfizer’s IT group developed an intranet BI mashup supporting ad-hoc query, forecasting, planning and modeling for its pharmaceutical sciences product executives making investment decisions.
Selected Examples
- Mashing-up Research Data to Speed Time to Market – Composite data virtualization helps pharmaceutical research scientist quickly mash up heterogeneous research, clinical trial, FDA submission data, and more to improve decision making and thereby accelerate time to market and revenue for new drugs.
- Mashing-up Sales Management Data to Increase Productivity – To provide sales managers with the information required to more effectively manage their sales representatives and increase revenues, this pharmaceutical used Composite to mashup highly sensitive prescriptions, sales compensation, expenses, and physician visits data, making is readily available for consumption by an easy to use, end-user presentation mashup tool.
