EII startup launches flagship wares

Startup Composite Software, headed by former CTO of webMethods Jim Green, on Monday announced what it called an “information server” to provide EII (enterprise information integration).

The company’s flagship product, the Composite Information Server, comes into the emerging EII arena in which IBM and BEA have offerings, as do pure-play EII companies such as MetaMatrix and Nimble Technologies.

Composite’s offering consists of a studio toolset and a stand-alone information server that follows in the lineage of application servers and Web servers. The information server is Java-based and works with application servers but does not require a J2EE application server underneath.

The software serves as an abstraction layer spanning multiple data sources, such as a data warehouse, relational database, or CRM application.  A Composite View presents information from those disparate locations and permits users to run queries against multiple sources and a variety of data formats. Views can be delivered to client devices that support SOAP and WSDL, or JDBC/ODBC, such as portals, spreadsheets, and business intelligence software.

“There is a lot of data in the enterprise that is difficult to access. How to pull that information together is the focus of our company,” said Jim Green, Composite chairman and CEO.

Tom Dwyer, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, said that information integration, as opposed to EAI, is becoming increasingly important in the move toward distributed computing.

“This is the Brave New World and this particular infrastructure component is a significant and necessary piece of that,” Dwyer said.

EII, according to Green, is complementary to existing EAI products.

“EAI is used to automate business processes, it’s a messaging system. EAI is about moving data, while EII is about leaving the data where it exists until you need it, then doing a federated query,” Green said.