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Composite Information Server (CIS) 4.5 Simplifies and Speeds Access to Business-Critical Data in Disparate Sources and Geographic Locations. |
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| Composite Software announced a major release of the company’s flagship
product, the Composite Information Server™ (CIS) 4.5, and introduced a compatible Composite Active
Cluster™ option that enables enterprises to further scale their data services deployments. CIS 4.5 and Active
Cluster extend the capabilities of creating and publishing data services for SOA and data virtualization, allowing
users in data-intensive industries such as financial services, pharmaceutical/biotechnical, ecommerce, telecomm as
well as government agencies, easier and faster access to a wider breadth of data. |
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Composite Software Boosts Federal Government Team with Veteran Sales and Operations Appointments
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Composite Software announced the appointment of Katy Mann and Pamela Sotnick as Federal Account Managers to its Federal Government practice. Mann and Sotnick bring more than 35 years of combined experience in high-technology solution sales and operations to Composite. |
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“Composite is experiencing tremendous growth within
the federal sector,” said Christian Nall, Vice President Sales at Composite Software. “With
increased information sharing, ‘net-centric initiatives and service-oriented architecture (SOA), the
federal government is recognizing the compelling need to access sensitive information on demand, which
plays directly to Composite technology’s strengths.” |
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Analysts' Take: Composite's CIS 4.5 Offers Broader Virtualization |
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| Virtualization is an important information management goal for
organizations that have numerous sources from which they must integrate data easily and quickly. While the
complexity of implementing SOA remains a challenge, Ventana Research believes that organizations should evaluate
Composite's new release as a potential infrastructure for delivering information integration and data services
that require more support than traditional data warehouses can supply. |
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Executive Roundtable: The Myths And Realities of Legacy Systems |
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| IT executives are routinely blamed for not letting go of legacy systems fast enough and holding back business innovation as a result. But three execs resoundingly took issue with this criticism at a recent roundtable held by InformationWeek. The participants – Craig Murphy, former CTO at Sabre Holdings; Ken Harris, Senior VP and CIO at Shaklee, and former CIO at PepsiCo, Gap, and Nike; and Paul Whatling, Clinical Director at BT Health in the United Kingdom – discussed the myths and realities they see surrounding legacy systems. |
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SOA Begins at the Data Layer |
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Those who build SOAs have one thing in common—the use of services to create an architecture that’s
both agile and better supports reuse. While services are a key component to SOA, the “A” in SOA
stands for “Architecture”, and that’s where you need to begin...working from the data up
to the services. |
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| So, given that SOA is so complex, why focus on the data first? It’s really
about building the right foundations for your architecture, and data is the place to start. Indeed, as we build SOAs, the first step
is having a clear, semantic understanding of the problem domain, and then dealing with logical abstraction of the data, and how the
data exists within services. Let’s start from the beginning. |
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Using EII to Fast-Track Your Way to SOA |
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| Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is proving to be an amazingly effective vehicle
for traveling to the new space known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). As modern-day technology navigators, SOA architects are
finding that EII or data federation provides an excellent charter for their voyage from planning and design to implementation. |
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| According to Colin White, president of Oregon-based industry analyst
firm BI Research, "Data Integration provides a unified view of the business data that is scattered throughout an
organization. This unified view can be built using a variety of different techniques and technologies." |
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When Thinking SOA Think DFSS |
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Those that are creating an SOA are jumping right to services, and in most cases that's a huge mistake. Understanding that the S in SOA is services, however, without a good foundation of data understanding you're creating services won't be of much use. Indeed, the foundation of a good service design is a good data design, or use of data abstraction. Without that you're putting lipstick on a very ugly pig, and you'll have to revisit the data issue at some point in the future. Thus, when you're thinking SOA, think DFSS or Data First, Services Second. |
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Using a Common Data Model with SOA |
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| Data is important, and you need to figure out management,
aggregation, and abstraction approaches before you begin bolting on services. While many agree that starting
with the data is a sound approach, the majority of SOA projects I see are starting with the services, and
working back to the data. While that's not a horrible approach, you'll find that you'll be redesigning and
redefining services after you figure out your data layer, and in many instances the services will have to
change significantly. |
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SOA Principles Apply to Data Access And Management |
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| The same principles that guide service-oriented architecture (SOA) for application
development can be applied to providing a loosely coupled approach to data access, says Anne Thomas Manes, Research Director at
the Burton Group Inc. In an existing SOA environment the data services approach can provide business users with access to a large
variety of information stored in everything from legacy flat files to desktop spreadsheets, she explained in a Burton teleconference
on Tuesday. |
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| "One of the features of the data services approach is that it allows loosely coupled access to data for a large variety of clients," Manes said. "Basically anything that can access a service will be able to access this data." |
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