Composite Software, Inc., the data virtualization leader, announced that industry luminary Philip Howard of UK-based Bloor Research evaluated Composite Discovery, concluding it serves a genuine need not served by other technologies and is complementary to business intelligence (BI) and data integration (DI) technologies. Howard’s findings are published as an In-Detail Report and excerpted in Pervasive BI and Information Discovery , an on-demand webinar that looks at the industry trends associated with discovery of data and data relationships.
“We are impressed with Composite Discovery: it serves a genuine need yet we know of no other vendor that offers such capability,” Howard concludes in his In-Detail Report executive summary. “There is one supplier that provides search capability against indexes …; and …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.”
Composite Discovery provides search capabilities against structured data that may be stored in multiple locations. IT personnel use it to search for data and data relationships to support DI, data governance and other initiatives.
According to the In-Detail Report, Composite Discovery provides a means of indexing (and therefore searching) structured data that is stored in any number of heterogeneous data stores. However, Discovery goes beyond search to discover relationships that exist between different data elements and retrieve that related data by means of the search mechanisms provided.
In Bloor Research’s opinion, the following represent the key facts:
- Composite Discovery is delivered as an appliance, pre-installed on an appropriate hardware and operating system platform, so that there is minimal associated administration and implementation required.
- Unlike a conventional search tool that finds data without respect to relationships between search terms (and as a result provides far too many hits), Discovery can either bring back hits within a single data source or across multiple data sources where relationships exist. Results are ordered with multi-related hits first.
- Once results are returned, Discovery provides a tabular workspace for filtering and sorting, as well as removing and re-arranging columns in the result set.
- Along with the returned data, Discovery also returns data relationships for easy data joins from related tables without requiring expertise in SQL.
- If it is installed in conjunction with Composite Information Server™, Composite’s federated software engine, then Discovery can also access non-relational databases, flat files, XML files and so on, as well as SAP, Siebel and other applications.
“With budget pressure increasing, enterprises and government agencies are looking for more cost effective ways to discover and understand their data,” said Robert Eve, vice president of Marketing, Composite Software. “Composite Discovery provides an easy-to-use, automated alternative that saves time and money.”
About Composite Software, Inc.:
Composite Software, Inc. is the leading independent provider of data virtualization software for IT and business professionals. The company’s solutions discover and deliver information—across multiple locations and disparate data sources—to help enterprises solve day-to-day business problems faster, for less. Expanding from its roots in enterprise information integration (EII), Composite’s solutions provide an important link between enterprise data and the desktop , complementing traditional physical data integration, while delivering greater flexibility and control for hundreds of customers, including five of the top six U.S. investment banks, five of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, software vendors including Cognos, Informatica and BMC, and U.S. Defense and Intelligence agencies. Founded in 2002, Composite Software is a privately held, venture-funded corporation based in Silicon Valley.
For more information, please visit www.compositesw.com .