SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Widespread research recently published by some of Europe's most respected business intelligence (BI) and data integration analysts points to a rapidly accelerating interest in data virtualization as organizations seek more agile and cost effective solutions for growing data volume and information diversity challenges.
Carsten Bange, managing director of Business Application Research Center; Barry Devlin, founder of 9sight Consulting; Mike Ferguson, Managing Director, Intelligent Business Strategies; Philip Howard, research director with Bloor Research; and Rick van der Lans, principal with R20/Consultancy, have all recently written about the advantages of incorporating data virtualization into the enterprise and the IT scenarios that best fit the virtual data integration approach. The following are some excerpts from their findings:
Carsten Bange, Business Application Research Center (BARC)
Business Application Research Center (BARC), one of Europe’s leading independent IT analyst firms, has recently researched organizations seeking holistic views of business-critical data. “As data sources rapidly proliferate and become more disparate, organizations are challenged to integrate this information to create holistic views of relevant data for BI and analytic applications,” said Dr. Carsten Bange, BARC research director. “Enterprise-wide virtual data layers have the ability to integrate up-to-the-minute data because enterprises can directly access source data without waiting for ETL updates.” Bange’s recent data virtualization report, Integrating SAP and non-SAP data for Comprehensive Business Intelligence, is available at the Data Virtualization Leadership Series™.
Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting
Dr. Barry Devlin, principal of 9sight Consulting and one of the founders of data warehousing in the mid 1980s, recently stated that “there is far too much information of too many varieties to ever truly succeed in getting all of it into a single enterprise data warehouse (EDW). There is also an ever growing business demand for access to near real-time information that ETL struggles to satisfy. The virtualization approach thus makes sense as a mass access mechanism for such big data.” Devlin’s recent posting on data virtualization can be found on the BeyeNETWORK, and will discuss the topic at his Business Integrated Insight (BI2) April 4-5 TDWI half-day seminars in Copenhagen and Helsinki, as well as at a ground-breaking 2-day course in Rome April 11-12.
Mike Ferguson, Intelligent Business Strategies Ltd.
Author of Maximizing Business Value from Data Virtualization, Mike Ferguson, Managing Director, Intelligent Business Strategies, Inc., notes data virtualization provides a number of benefits, with flexibility foremost. “Data virtualization is flexible and can be used to solve multiple problems avoiding the need for additional databases,” said Ferguson. “When deployed widely as an enterprise data virtualization layer it allows complex data to be presented in a form that is commonly understood by users, leveling the playing field across multiple systems.” Showcasing this flexibility, Ferguson will include a demonstration of the Composite Software Data Virtualization Platform in his April 4 Data Management in the Cloud tutorial at Enterprise Data World in Chicago, Il.
Philip Howard, Bloor Research
In January, Philip Howard, research director with Bloor Research, published a blog post, So, what is data virtualization? that describes data virtualization’s evolution, key capabilities and how pure player vendors have a significant advantage in the market over the broader data integration vendors. According to Howard, “data virtualization is almost become de rigeuer in large data warehousing environments where you need to synchronize queries across data marts, warehouses and/or operational systems – and this is clearly an area in which Composite is a market leader.”
Rick van der Lans, R20/Consultancy
Rick van der Lans, principal consultant with R20/Consultancy, also recently published his perspective on data virtualization in Clearly Defining Data Virtualization, Data Federation, and Data Integration. This follows a series of seminal research reports where van der Lans describes data virtualization within the context of a Data Delivery Platform, a modern architecture for developing business intelligence systems where data consumers, such as reporting and analytical tools, are decoupled from data stores in support of decision-making, reporting, and data retrieval.
On March 22, van der Lans will present Virtualizing Data for BI and Data Warehousing in the Business Intelligence Track of the info360 Conference in Washington, D.C. In the talk, van der Lans will discuss the practical advantages of a virtualized data architecture as well as discuss real life experiences with virtualizing data warehouses thus far.
Composite Software Customers Present European Data Virtualization Successes
On March 16, Murat Erder, Director, Enterprise Architecture for Deutsche Bank, and Pfizer's Peter Green, Portfolio Management & Analytics Integration Director, will share their data virtualization expertise and Composite Software Data Virtualization Platform user experiences at Forrester's Enterprise Architecture Forum EMEA 2011 in London, England. Erder will present Deutsche Bank's experiences using Composite to provide timely and consistent reference data globally, while Green will detail multiple Pfizer data virtualization projects he has headed.
"We are gratified to see data virtualization gaining rapid market acceptance and the overwhelming support as a viable data integration infrastructure from the 'who’s-who' of Europe's IT influencer community,” said Paul Phillips, Composite Software's EMEA Sales Director. “This validation aligns with a significant spike in data virtualization interest and customer deployments we have seen in Europe over the past 12 months.”
About Composite Software, Inc.
Composite Software, Inc. is the data virtualization gold standard at ten of the top 20 banks, six of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, four of the top five energy firms, major media and technology organizations; and multiple government agencies. These are among the hundreds of global organizations with disparate, complex information environments that count on the Composite to increase their data agility, cut costs and reduce risk. Backed by nearly a decade of pioneering R&D, Composite is the data virtualization performance leader, scaling from project to enterprise for data federation, data warehouse extension, data virtualization layer and cloud data integration. Composite Software is a privately held, Silicon Valley-based corporation. For more information, please visit http://www.compositesw.com. Or follow Composite on http://twitter.com/compositesw.
Composite Software and Data Virtualization Leadership Series are registered trademarks of Composite Software, Inc. Copyright © Composite Software, Inc. 2011.