White Paper: Composite Discovery In-Detail

Author:

Philip Howard, Research Director - Data
Bloor Research

August 2008

"We are impressed with Composite Discovery: it serves a genuine need yet we know of no other vendor that offers such capability"

Philip Howard

This InDetail paper discusses Composite Discovery, which provides search capabilities against structured data that may be stored in multiple locations. It is primarily targeted at business users, enabling them to explore related data items where no relevant business intelligence capabilities are available. It may also be used by IT personnel searching for data relationships in order to support data governance and other initiatives.

The bottom line
We are impressed with Composite Discovery: it serves a genuine need yet we know of no other vendor that offers such capability. There is one supplier that provides search capability against indexes on OLAP cubes to make access to that sort of information easier for users not used to employing business intelligence tools; and we also know of a couple of vendors that support the discovery of hidden relationships (across sources) from an IT perspective. However, Composite Discovery encompasses all of this functionality and more. In our view Composite Discovery provides excellent complementary capability both to business intelligence on the one hand and data quality and data governance on the other.