06/04/2008

Composite Software, the virtual data integration company, today unveiled an appliance named Composite Discovery, the newest addition to its award-winning product line.

ebizQ received the following:

For the first time, non-technical business users who normally depend on IT teams to access data for analysis and decision-making, can easily and quickly "discover" the business-critical information they need, delivered with the relevant data relationships context, regardless of data source or location.

Currently, managers spend an average of two hours per day looking for information, with nearly half of the information, once found, to be useless. These fruitless searches are compounded by the exponential amounts of data in information systems. According to Framingham, Mass.-based industry analyst firm IDC, enterprise data is growing by a factor of ten every five years, or at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 60 percent.

Enterprises have already invested millions of dollars in information repositories and business intelligence (BI) technology to deliver information in usable formats; yet IT teams using today's most advanced technologies still struggle to keep pace with the demands made on them. Further, business executives are often unable to access the information in a form that is useful to them.

According to the February 8, 2008 report, 'Emerging Technologies Will Drive Self-Service Business Intelligence,' by Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, "Integrating search into analytical applications will make it easier to index large amounts of structured data, and to deliver reports and information to users via a mechanism (search) that is much more intuitive than traditional ad hoc query and reporting."

Composite's newest solution, Discovery, leverages key elements of BI and enterprise search to empower users to get to and work with source data and intermediate stores such as warehouses and marts with unprecedented ease. Discovery provides visibility into the data without the time-intensive set-up traditionally involved, while enriching enterprise search with powerful IP that delivers data relationship discovery.

Among Composite Discovery's key features are: * search functionality for easily and quickly finding structured data * data relationship discovery that reveals relationships among the information contained in disparate sources and delivers this context with the data, so users can easily identify what's relevant * drag and drop tools that make it easy to view and work with data in a familiar tabular format * high-performance query optimization and integration with Microsoft Excel(R) to maximize the user experience * "recipes" for repeatable searches, as well as Enterprise 2.0 information support for greater collaboration and higher productivity *a range of security options including integration with LDAP and Active Directory to ensure compliance with IT data security and governance mandates

Composite Discovery can be used as a stand-alone appliance. Or, when integrated with the Composite Information Server, Composite Discovery leverages developed views and other virtual stores that abstract and federate complex data including data from SAP, Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft and salesforce.com using Composite Application Data Services.

"Business knows that IT can not do it all alone," says Jim Green, Composite's CEO. "Requirements change too fast. Unique combinations of data arise. Acquisitions take time to integrate. Composite Discovery helps business by empowering users to quickly access and analyze data in a way that complements existing reporting systems. This, in turn, supports the business's immediate needs, while freeing bandwidth for IT to work on longer-term projects and infrastructure."

Available now, Composite Discovery is sold as an appliance, including hardware, software and service, with two pricing models: perpetual use and monthly subscription. To download a data sheet, go to http://www.compositesw.com/products/discovery.shtml.