Blog: Colin White

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EII Acquisitions and Developments You May Have Missed

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) was a hot topic last year. If, however, you ask IT folks to name EII vendors and products, the list will most probably be quite short. Most people can name the Composite Software Information Server and the IBM WebSphere Information Integrator, but after that they begin to struggle.

There are a lot of companies involved in EII, but many of these are small and several of them very acquired last year. There are a few left that are ripe for the picking (and so watch this space).

Here are some EII developments you may have missed.

Business Objects acquisition of Medience, a small French EII software start-up. Business Objects is positioning this product as a federated data integration tool alongside its Data Integrator ETL tool.

Sybase acquisition of Avaki, a privately held provider of EII software. Sybase intends to incorporate the Avaki technology into its information management software suite. It’s also worth noting that Sybase has also purchased ISDD Ltd., a privately held provider of unstructured data management software. ISDD technology queries unstructured content, such as e-mails, Microsoft PowerPoint and PDF documents, as well as structured data from databases and Web sites.

BEA acquisition of Plumtree Software and creation of new AquaLogic product family. Plumtree is a leading independent supplier of portal software. The Plumtree software is now known as BEA Aqualogic User Interaction. BEA’s EII product (formerly known as Liquid Data) is now a component of this new product family and is called the AquaLogic Data Services Platform.

Informatica announcement of the PowerCenter Data Federation option. This option extends PowerCenter’s ETL and RT-ETL capabilities with EII data federation capabilities. Composite Software’s EII technology was used to build this product feature.

Cognos announcement of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Data Integration. Buried in this announcement was a statement that Cognos’s data integration software can, in conjunction with partner software, use EII to provide virtual data integration. One of Cognos’s partners here is Composite Software.

You can see from the above that that EII is being used in a variety of different software environments. As I was writing this, Ipedo (an independent EII vendor) sent me the results of an EII study they did with ebizQ (a business integration Web site) and Decideo (a European on-line BI community). The results showed that companies are embracing EII to access disparate information more easily (49%), to complement other data integration approaches (37%) and to facilitate migration to a service-oriented architecture (30%).

Remember EII is not a panacea, but a component of an enterprise-wide data integration architecture that brings together technologies such as EII, ETL and EAI.

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