Hidden Agenda

Information integration technology BINDS portals, Web services, and enterprise apps

As corporations increasingly rely on business intelligence (BI) data extracted from multiple, often incompatible systems, a new breed of strategic enterprise solution is emerging - what Aberdeen Group calls enterprise information integration (EII). The research firm recently launched an EII practice and published its findings on the fledgling EII market in "Enterprise Information Integration: The New Way to Leverage E-Information."

According to Aberdeen's research, EII technology will be part of a $6.4 billion market in leveraging Internet information by 2003. Organizations need EII to bridge gaps between portals, legacy databases, and complex packaged applications for CRM, ERP, and other functions. At the same time, companies are trying to pave the way for major Web services initiatives dependent on integrated BI data while cutting administrative and IT costs. EII, which Aberdeen credits with the ability to "merge streams of data from different sources in real time," is one approach to this multifaceted challenge.

"Three years of fragmented efforts to link key applications one by one, followed by a proliferation of enterprise portals that crisscross various back-end data sources, have left users with an unnecessarily complex and costly e-business architecture," says report author Wayne T. Kernochan, Aberdeen's managing vice president for databases, development environments, and software infrastructure. "The key to cutting administrative and new application development costs is to implement a common software infrastructure architecture - and EII infrastructure lies at the core of such an architecture."

EII solutions "stand between enterprise portals and 'common information store' databases," according to Aberdeen and serve as data collection points to disseminate data to diverse systems. Companies can use EII to send data to partners outside the enterprise - bypassing portal interfaces that complicate data exchange and interaction.

While a number of emerging EII vendors started as ETL players, their products have moved beyond extract, transform, and load functions to encompass operations such as database caching, object and multimedia data support, browser analytics, front-end user support, and access to unstructured information residing in nondatabase files.

For example, a vendor profiled in Aberdeen's report, Attunity Inc., specializes in Web-enabling legacy systems, e-marketplace support, supply chain integration, portal support, and legacy-middleware integration. One Attunity customer, a U.S. Veterans' Administration (VA) hospital with three branches in Massachusetts, uses Attunity Connect to link patient records residing in a legacy mainframe system (OpenVMS) and a proprietary HP-UX database with diagnostic images stored in a Windows NT graphics database. VA physicians and staff access the EII system through Web browsers on desktop PCs.

"Attunity Connect allows us to manipulate and secure this data - across distributed databases and different operating platforms - while preserving data integrity and keeping each database's business rules intact," says Craig Miller, a clinical information specialist at the VA hospital.

Other companies competing in the EII market include Acta Technology Inc., Cerebellum Software Inc., Evolutionary Technologies International (ETI), and MetaMatrix Inc. Acta and ETI currently bring in the most EII revenues, however, that could all change as the market matures and more competitors swell the EII ranks. EII's success also depends on the fate of enabling technologies such as application servers, portals, XML, and Java, according to Aberdeen. Big vendors dominating those markets are already testing the EII waters with their own technology.

— Claudia Willen

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