Composite Software tackles the speeds and feeds angle of SOA

As the amount of enterprise data explodes, so does the need to access this data from disparate and widely flung sources, increasing the market for data integration and management.

Composite Software this week announced a major release of its Composite Information Server (CIS), as well as a Composite Active Cluster, designed to enable companies to further scale their data services deployments.

Composite Software provides on-demand data integration. Its CIS 4.5 -- the first major release since CIS 4.0 was announced last November -- and the new Active Cluster will extend capabilities for creating, publishing, and consuming data for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and data virtualization. It is aimed at such data-intensive industries as financial services, pharmaceutical/biotech, e-commerce, telecom, and government.

CIS 4.5 includes:

• An all-new, Web-based server management console that allows administrators to monitor and manage the environment from remote locations.

• Improved security management capabilities that simplify the management and control of large groups of enterprise users.

• A foreign key relationship analyzer, that helps the query optimization engine improve execution of complex, independent queries.

The release also includes enhanced XML data type support, HTTP connectivity pooling, and user/group export and import.

According to Composite Software, Active Cluster improves data virtualization and data reuse capabilities by allowing users to deploy massively scalable, adaptable clusters. It also exploits native “active/active” clustering to help reduce total cost of ownership of the data services layer.

Both CIS 4.5 and Active Cluster will be available by the end of the month. The two will be sold separately and pricing will be based on the number of CPUs.

As we've said before, getting your data act together is an important foundation for moving to SOA successfully. The lesson many are learning the hard way is that getting you data act together means addressing both the management from an integration and consolidation perspective -- but just as importantly more a volume and load perspective. It's been a thorny issue for 40 years ... making all that data jump through the hoops you want, and at a speed that meets or exceeds the pace of the business tasks at hand.