12/20/2004

Composite Software, a provider of Enterprise Information Integration (EII) tools, today announced the release of Composite Information Server (CIS) 3.0. Composite said its new version gives enterprises the highest-performance access to distributed data across the enterprise, enables access to a wide range of data sources, and streamlines administration.

Composite 3.0 introduces Composite Intelligent Query™ (IQ) technology, which, Composite said, formulates the optimum data integration plan in real-time. The company also reported that according to third-party tests, CIS with IQ is faster than other EII servers, including IBM® DB2® Information Integrator.

Composite said that Cognos recently announced that it has embedded CIS 3.0 into its ReportNet product and has invested $4.5 million in Composite Software.

“As EII gains momentum in the marketplace to tackle the knottiest BI and reporting problems, performance will become the number one driver of vendor success,” said Colin White, an industry analyst from BI Research. “Composite started with a good lead here and they have extended it in 3.0 with Composite IQ.”

Composite said that Composite IQ is the only EII optimization technology to evaluate both data shape and sub-query costs to select the optimal query plan. "This allows users to run more complex analyses, against more data sources, in less time, than ever before. For example, in the financial services industry, insight into aggregate interest rate fluctuation is necessary to assess the proper market position for large customers."

The company said a Composite customer has addressed this requirement using EII: prior to Composite, a key management report took about three hours to complete; with Composite, the report runs in under 30 seconds, an improvement of 99.7%. CIS 3.0 also includes new parallel-processing enhancements, which improve user scalability on multiple-CPU hardware.

"The success of all EII projects hinges on performance, specifically response time and scalability," said Michael Abbott, founder and CTO of Composite Software. "With Composite IQ, we have cracked one of the toughest problems of heterogeneous data integration – building a query plan based on the expected results from the individual sources. Combined with the other aspects of CIS 3.0, our customers can now make virtually any application a productive data source."

In addition to performance advances, Composite reported that CIS 3.0 includes the following:

• The most extensive read/write support. Composite is the only EII vendor to provide distributed insert, update, and delete capabilities. Corporate developers can now write applications on top of the Composite Information Server instead of a physical database, resulting in improved portability and lower long-term total cost of ownership for those applications.



• Significantly expanded data sources. Developers can now reach out to XML (static or streaming), LDAP, and Java procedures, enabling a single logical view of all packaged, open, or custom data sources across the organization. A standards-based scripting engine handles any procedural requirements. Flexibility in data delivery. CIS can publish aggregated data in relational form, as XML, and/or via Web Services. Organizations can now transition to a "service-oriented architecture" (SOA) incrementally, while preserving their existing applications and data.



• Simplified deployment and management. CIS includes new features for production migration, meta-data sharing, transaction logging, and performance management. An enhanced, drag-and-drop modeling interface simplifies the creation and management of complex views. CIS 3.0 adds an open management API for view creation and key task management. Composite’s enhanced tools and commitment to standards lowers the total cost of ownership of an EII server.