A new view on data

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a fundamental change in the way we think about data. And the new way of thinking comes not from technologists but from business users who want more insight into their business, from the effectiveness of marketing to understanding the real basis for profits.

What’s been discovered is that the answers come from combining or joining data from multiple sources and then analyzing that data in the aggregate, not in separate application silos. This aggregated data, or composite data as it is also called, is the foundation for EII (enterprise information integration).

Composite applications, last year’s buzz, promised to use Web services to combine the logic from different applications to create new ones. EII, on the other hand, uses composite data to join data from files, relational databases, and Web services XML documents, and present it in a single view. The user tailors the view the way he or she wants to see it. It doesn’t matter what the shape of the data is on the back end. Once that data is presented in a single view, users can run analytics against the combined data.

Composite Software is at the forefront of this trend. Here’s what EII is not, according to Jim Green, Composite’s CEO and chairman: EII is not EAI (enterprise application integration). EAI pushes data around; EII is a pull system. If an address changes in your CRM application, EAI will push that information out to your ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, for example. Conversely, EII, pulls only the data you need out of ERP and CRM systems and offers it up in a single view for analysis.

Composite Software’s Information Server stores the meta data (the data about the data), the fields, and the relationships between them. When the user executes the query, it fetches the data from the underlying systems to present a synthetic view.

“Composite Software’s Composite Information Server joins data from different types of resources and creates an alias so it looks different than when it was stored,” Green says.

EII is also not BPM (business process management). It has nothing to do with changing business processes. Composite Software’s Murthy Nukala, vice president of marketing, pointed out some of the benefits of EII.

“Data takes up most of the cost of an integration effort. Increased understanding of that data is mission-critical, and you need to have a strategy about how you handle data,” said Nukala.

I called on Wesley Bertch, director of software operations, and Gary Lien, enterprise systems architect, at Life Time Fitness, a company about to launch Composite Software’s solution. Life Time has a fitness company as well as spas, salons, and cafes, all on three different systems.

Rather than making a major and costly intergration effort using a central database, Life Time used EII to create a virtual database that pulled transactions from the three different systems.

“Behind the scenes, I am doing a database query against Composite, and Composite is querying those three systems simultaneously, pulling them together and returning a single result,” Bertch said.

The changes we are seeing in data integration come from the fact that package vendors lacked imagination, according to John Parkinson, CTO at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young.

“BI answers every question after the fact. That is giving way to the idea that you need the answer right now,” Parkinson said.

Using analytics embedded into these virtual or synthetic views of aggregated data may just be the answer.