Composite Software Data Virtualization The Five Most Popular Uses of Data Virtualization Composite Software, Inc. June 2011
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION... 3 DATA FEDERATION... 4 PROBLEM DATA CONSOLIDATION IS NOT THE ONLY DATA INTEGRATION SOLUTION... 4 SOLUTION ACCELERATE BI PROJECTS SPANNING DISPARATE DATA SILOS... 4 LEARN MORE... 4 DATA WAREHOUSE EXTENSION... 5 PROBLEM BUSINESS CHANGE OFTEN OUTPACES ENTERPRISE DATA WAREHOUSE EVOLUTION. 5 SOLUTION INCREASE RETURN ON ENTERPRISE DATA WAREHOUSES... 5 LEARN MORE... 5 DATA VIRTUALIZATION LAYER... 6 PROBLEM BUSINESS SUCCESS REQUIRES RESPONSIVE ENTERPRISE-WIDE DATA SHARING... 6 SOLUTION SHARE DATA MORE EASILY WITH DATA VIRTUALIZATION... 6 LEARN MORE... 6 BIG DATA INTEGRATION... 7 PROBLEM ANALYTICS PUSH THE LIMITS OF TRADITIONAL DATA MANAGEMENT... 7 YET ANALYTICS ARE CONSTRAINED BY THREE KEY DATA INTEGRATION CHALLENGES INCLUDING:... 7 SOLUTION TURBOCHARGE ANALYTICS WITH BIG DATA AND ENTERPRISE DATA INTEGRATION... 7 LEARN MORE... 7 CLOUD DATA INTEGRATION... 8 PROBLEM CLOUD COMPUTING INCREASES DATA INTEGRATION COMPLEXITY... 8 SOLUTION SIMPLIFY CLOUD DATA INTEGRATION WITH DATA VIRTUALIZATION... 8 LEARN MORE... 8 CONCLUSION... 9 Composite Software 2
INTRODUCTION Large enterprises and government agencies face similar challenges: Constant business change pressuring rapid business and IT response; Growing data volumes and complexity increasing business risk and reducing agility; and Financial constraints driving more cost-effective IT solutions. Data virtualization provides organizations with the timely information required to meet today s ever-changing business requirements, with greater agility and lower costs. Validated by leading analyst firms including Gartner and Forrester, data virtualization is now considered a must have in every enterprise s data integration portfolio. Data virtualization includes high-performance query middleware and complementary offerings that integrate data from multiple, disparate sources anywhere across the extended enterprise in a unified, logically virtualized manner for on-demand consumption by a wide range of business solutions. For nearly ten years, Composite Software has focused solely on data virtualization, making Composite the data virtualization gold standard in large enterprises and government agencies around the globe. As our customers across multiple industries have adopted our offerings, five common usage patterns have proven most valuable. These include: Data Federation Data Warehouse Extension Data Virtualization Layer Big Data Integration Cloud Data Integration This white paper introduces these most frequently deployed data virtualization usage patterns, the challenges behind them and the data virtualization solution that Composite delivers to successfully address these challenges. Composite Software 3
DATA FEDERATION Problem Data Consolidation Is Not the Only Data Integration Solution In a dynamic business environment, business intelligence teams are continuously challenged to provide their business colleagues with new information. When querying data from a single warehouse or a set of well-understood cubes, responding quickly is easy. But when data is needs expand across multiple sources, BI teams need to add data integration to the requirements, often delaying business responsiveness. A number of business, data source and data consumer considerations must be factored into the data integration decision. Increasingly, data federation is proving the right approach, especially when: The business needs new information fast; Business and IT do not have a sizable budget to spend on data integration and storage infrastructure, nor development staff; and IT wants minimize the risk involved in deploying a new BI solution, queries and ETL scripts. Solution Accelerate BI Projects Spanning Disparate Data Silos According to the TDWI Checklist Report Data Federation, It makes a lot of sense to use data federation tools when it takes too long or costs too much to create a persistent store of consolidated data, such as a data warehouse or data mart. Composite Software helped to pioneer data federation starting in 2002. Leading BI vendors including IBM Cognos, SAS, Tibco Spotfire and more extend their BI offerings with Composite s data virtualization products to make the Composite the most deployed data federation offering today. There are many ways to leverage data federation to accelerate your BI projects. Your flexible deployment options include: Federated Views Data Services Data Mashups Caches Virtual Data Marts Virtual Operational Data Stores Learn More For more insight on these data federation options including more specific data federation challenges, Composite data virtualization solutions and actual customer examples, please go to http://www.compositesw.com/index.php/solutions/data-federation/. Composite Software 4
DATA WAREHOUSE EXTENSION Problem Business Change Often Outpaces Enterprise Data Warehouse Evolution Supporting critical, yet ever-changing information requirements in an environment of everincreasing data volumes and data source complexity is a challenge well understood by large enterprises and government agencies today. This inexorable pressure has and will continue to drive the demand for enterprise data warehouse-centric solutions to support the array of business intelligence applications that rely on data warehouses. However, business change often outpaces enterprise data warehouse evolution. And while useful for physically consolidating and transforming a large portion of enterprise data, significant volumes of enterprise data continue to reside outside the confines of the EDW. Further, EDWs themselves require support throughout their lifecycle. This ongoing workload drives demand for solutions that prototype, migrate, extend, federate and leverage these assets. Solution Increase Return on Enterprise Data Warehouses The Composite Data Virtualization Platform complements your EDW with a range of flexible data integration techniques that preserve and extend existing EDW investments. By extending the warehouse schema to include additional data, data virtualization increases business value. In practice, data virtualization users extend their EDWs in the eight ways listed below. This flexibility allows users to solve immediate problems quickly while avoiding the costs, risks, and time required to modify the warehouse structures and supporting ETL themselves. These options include: Data Warehouse Augmentation MDM Hub Extension 360 View Data Warehouse Federation Hub & Virtual Spoke Enterprise Architecture Complementing ETL Data Warehouse Prototyping Data Warehouse Migration Learn More For more insight on these flexible data warehouse usage options including specific data warehousing and business intelligence challenges, Composite data virtualization solutions, and actual customer examples, please go to http://www.compositesw.com/index.php/solutions/datawarehouse-extension/. In addition, you can also read our white paper, Eight Ways Composite Data Virtualization Adds Value to the Enterprise Data Warehousing. Composite Software 5
DATA VIRTUALIZATION LAYER Problem Business Success Requires Responsive Enterprise-wide Data Sharing Large enterprises learned long ago that effective sharing of data across lines of business was a critical success factor. But achieving this objective in large organizations has been especially complex due to: Thousands of information consumers with varied roles and responsibilities; A range of analysis and reporting applications addressing different business problems; Multiple approaches to access, combine, and deliver data to these applications; and Extreme data source volumes, variety, velocity and complexity. Further, traditional information architectures have not been agile enough to keep pace with today s frenetic business change. Solution Share Data More Easily with Data Virtualization Data virtualization layers combine SOA principles including, decoupling, reuse, and agility with key information governance principles such as abstraction, shared semantic models and data standards. These enable organizations to build and deploy enterprise-wide data virtualization layers in a simpler, faster, more consistent, and scalable manner. The Composite Data Virtualization Platform supports several general-purpose data virtualization layer architectural patterns as well as those proscribed by leading IT analyst firms so you can flexibly provide the information required to meet broader enterprise information requirements in a more consistent way including: Data Abstraction Layer Standards-based Data Services Layer Globally Distributed Data Virtualization Layer Forrester Information-as-a-Service Gartner Data Services Gartner Logical Data Warehouse Bloor Information Oriented Architecture van der Lans Data Delivery Platform Data Virtualization Layer Learn More For more insight on these data virtualization layer usage options including specific SOA and abstraction challenges, Composite data virtualization solutions, and actual customer examples, please go to http://www.compositesw.com/index.php/solutions/data-virtualization-layer/. Composite Software 6
BIG DATA INTEGRATION Problem Analytics Push the Limits of Traditional Data Management The book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, found a striking relationship between the use of analytics and business performance High performers were 50 percent more likely to use analytics strategically and five times as likely as low performers. Yet analytics are constrained by three key data integration challenges including: Data silo and complexity challenge Effective predictive analytics applications leverage data from multiple internal and external sources, including relational, semistructured XML, dimensional MDX, and the new Big Data data types such as Hadoop. Query performance challenge Large volumes of data must be analyzed, making query performance a critical success factor. Agility challenge Dynamic businesses require new and ever changing analyses. This means new data sources need to be brought on board quickly and existing sources modified to support each new analytics requirement. Solution Turbocharge Analytics with Big Data and Enterprise Data Integration Data virtualization integrates your enterprise data with all the major types of massively parallel processing data warehouse appliances (e.g., EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica, IBM Netezza, SAP Sybase IQ, etc.), columnar/tabular NoSQL data stores (e.g., Hadoop, Hypertable, etc.), XML document stores (e.g., CouchDB, MarkLogic, MongoDB, etc.), key/value stores (e.g., Cassandra, Memcached, Voldemort, etc.) The Composite Data Virtualization Platform provides an agile, high performance data integration approach that overcomes data complexity and disparate silos to provide analytics with the both the Big Data and enterprise data needed to outperform the competition. Learn More For more insight on these big data integration usage options including specific challenges, Composite data virtualization solutions, and actual customer examples, please go to http://www.compositesw.com/solutions/big-dataintegration/. Composite Software 7
CLOUD DATA INTEGRATION Problem Cloud Computing Increases Data Integration Complexity Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offer a range of functionality and computing resources at an attractive, pay-as-you-go price. However, each new cloud source and consumer must be integrated with your existing IT environment, typically using new integration methods rather than traditional direct database queries and ETL script techniques. For example, when you integrate data from SaaS providers such as salesforce.com with an onpremise customer data warehouse, you will need deep knowledge of the salesforce.com APIs, the ability to query data through a firewall across the Web, and on-demand, rather than batch mode, operation. Solution Simplify Cloud Data Integration with Data Virtualization The Composite Data Virtualization Platform lets you flexibly integrate on-premise and cloud data as required to meet a range of use cases. Among its key capabilities that are especially well-suited to cloud data integration are: Composite supports a wide range of cloud-based sources and consumers via industrystandard APIs that simplify and speed new development. Data integration services authored and run by Composite are perfectly suited to operate across the Internet. Because Composite accesses, federates, abstracts and delivers queried data on demand, no additional cloud-based data storage is needed. Further, Composite s support of multiple security models ensures proper authentication, authorization and encryption both on-premise and in the cloud. Composite easily integrates with popular SaaS applications such as salesforce.com, IaaS cloud-hosted applications such as SAP and Oracle E-Business. Learn More For more insight on these cloud data integration challenges, Composite data virtualization solutions, and actual customer examples, please go to http://www.compositesw.com/index.php/solutio ns/cloud-computing/. Cloud Data Integration Composite Software 8
CONCLUSION Data virtualization, as described in this paper, is a proven data integration approach widely adopted by large enterprises and government agencies today. Data virtualization overcomes business and IT challenges and fulfills critical information needs, significantly faster with far fewer resources than other data integration techniques. In this paper, the five most commonly deployed data virtualization usage patterns are identified. Each pattern includes key challenges, the Composite data virtualization solution and guidance on where you can learn more. If your enterprise is facing similar challenges, consider Composite Software, the gold standard in data virtualization.. Composite Software 9
ABOUT COMPOSITE SOFTWARE Composite Software, Inc. is the data virtualization performance leader. Backed by a decade of pioneering R&D, Composite Software is the data virtualization gold standard at 10 of the top 20 banks, six of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, four of the top five energy firms, major communications providers and the world s largest IT organization, the US Army. These and hundreds of other global organizations rely on Composite Software to fulfill their ever-changing information requirements with greater agility and lower costs. Composite Software is a registered trademark of Composite Software, Inc. Copyright Composite Software, Inc. 2011. 2655 Campus Drive, Suite 200 T / 650.227.8200 info@compositesw.com San Mateo, CA 94403 F / 650.227.8199 www.compositesw.com 2011 Composite Software, Inc. All rights reserved.