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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 4, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 31
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Special Features:
AVAKI ANNOUNCES AVAKI DATA GRID
4.0
Avaki Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise information integration
(EII) software, announced the release of Avaki Data Grid 4.0, software that is
unique in its ability to help businesses easily provision, access and
integrate distributed data from heterogeneous systems in real time within or
across organizations. The only data integration software powered by data grid
technology, Avaki Data Grid 4.0 dramatically reduces the cost and complexity
of data integration while facilitating the best use of information assets and
enabling businesses to make faster, more well-informed decisions.
Unlike other solutions that address only a single data integration
challenge,
and require significant time and capital to deploy and maintain, Avaki Data
Grid's distributed grid architecture enables businesses to address a number of
data integration challenges across the enterprise while maintaining local
control of the data. Avaki Data Grid is the only solution that allows
companies to securely share data on a wide area or cross company basis, and
enables data integration without the need to write custom connectors, create
proprietary data models or conduct extensive programming. Because Avaki Data
Grid is built on grid technology, it can scale across the enterprise while
allowing administrators and data owners to maintain local control.
"In the EII space, Avaki's Data Grid 4.0 stands out for its ability to
handle
distributed, remote, and cross-organization interactions with heterogeneous
data sources, as well as to create a comprehensive picture of a global
enterprise's data automatically" said Wayne Kernochan, managing vice
president, Platform Infrastructure, Aberdeen. "This should deliver added
value to customers especially in scaling EII across a complex organization, in
performing an 'information audit' for strategic use of competitive-advantage
proprietary data, and in extending existing 'point' EII solutions across the
enterprise, as well as in many standard EII tasks."
Designed to work in tandem with or as an alternative to other data access
and
integration approaches, Avaki Data Grid reduces the backlog of requests for
data while also reducing the infrastructure, programming and maintenance
required to access and share real-time information. As a result, businesses
reduce the time, costs and complexities of making current, accurate data
available to both application developers and end users, regardless of where
the data resides. With easier access to data, businesses are able to obtain
more accurate business intelligence, collaborate more effectively in research
and development, supply chain, and distribution chain environments, and
facilitate better data integration for customer-related applications.
A comprehensive solution based on industry standards, Avaki Data Grid
enables
a single view of any structured or unstructured data - including relational
data, files, XML, and application data - from any production data source,
while providing security, performance and data integration. Avaki Data Grid's
XML support and data flow capabilities enable companies to easily format,
aggregate and integrate disparate data.
"Avaki Data Grid 4.0 provides an innovative means to provision, access and
integrate distributed data throughout the extended enterprise without having
to make data replicas. Other integration approaches require massive
development effort, long services engagements and overhead, but still can't
scale the way customers need them to," said Tim Yeaton, president of Avaki.
"Until now, no one has been able to effectively and securely provision
relational, application and file-based data to both developers and end-users
over a wide-area and in real-time, and we are already seeing growing customer
success as a result."
Avaki Data Grid in Manufacturing, Financial Services and Life
Sciences
The new software is ideal for a number of applications over many different
industries such as manufacturing, financial services, and life sciences where
companies need to access and format information from different systems across
diverse groups and locations. Manufacturing organizations can improve their
product development processes by sharing and formatting product design and CAE
data across multiple groups and engineering organizations. Financial services
companies can provision customer data from multiple customer databases to fuel
more accurate business intelligence and market analysis. Life science
organizations can speed drug discovery and development by sharing genomics,
proteomics, and clinical data from many databases and files systems across
multiple research groups and partnering companies. Financial services and
manufacturing companies can pull together customer information from a variety
of databases and files to get a better understanding of market drivers.
Avaki Data Grid 4.0 Simplifies Data Integration
The business problem of gaining access to the most timely, accurate
information has been growing for many years. Many businesses now have
hundreds of different software applications and data stores in many
geographically distributed departments and business units. Getting data out
of these systems becomes expensive and complex and new data requests result in
bottlenecks and often go unfulfilled. Data is often duplicated and quickly
goes out of date, affecting the quality of analysis. Businesses also need to
integrate data with R&D partners, suppliers and distributors. Project-
oriented data management approaches do not provide a means to control the
entire data provisioning process across the organization. Furthermore,
business owners often need to obtain data in diverse formats and aggregate
data from many different data silos into single views.
Avaki Data Grid 4.0 software provides a comprehensive way to simplify the
provisioning, access and integration of distributed data across the enterprise
and extended enterprise. Avaki Data Grid meets a variety of data integration
needs across large, distributed businesses particularly within life sciences,
manufacturing, and financial services industries where real-time data is
critical.
- Provision - Avaki Data Grid provides federated access to distributed
structured and unstructured data across departments, locations, systems and
companies, while leaving data in place and under the control of local owners.
Data owners securely "publish" files and database queries without programming
and data is made available to others through a global data catalog. Data
owners control access to shared data in a selective, granular way to ensure
security while leveraging their existing authentication systems. Users and
applications access a locally cached representation of the live production
data without having to create managed replicas or warehouses while at the same
time shielding the production system from uncontrolled access.
- Access - Avaki Data Grid provides a single unified view of distributed
data. Users and applications can access data as if it were local using
standard database and file access methods such as file system access, JDBC,
ODBC, and Web services. Avaki Data Grid makes remote data access practical by
caching data either proactively on a scheduled basis, or only when a specific
data object is requested by a user or application. A flexible caching
infrastructure provides for a variety of caching strategies for different data
objects and performance needs, enabling organizations to optimize use of
storage and network resources, while ensuring consistency and timeliness of
data. Relational data caching reduces the load on production databases and
administrators while making current data available transparently to
applications and users.
- Integrate - Avaki Data Grid provides a streamlined, database-neutral means
of integrating data for use across the enterprise. With Avaki Data Grid, data
owners are able to respond to many different requirements without programming,
and as a result, address new data requests much more quickly and with less
effort. Avaki Data Grid can convert SQL results to XML documents
automatically, enabling automatic transformation into any structure and format
using XSL style sheets. In addition, data owners can provide data directly to
end-users in simple forms, such as Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files that can
be used directly in spreadsheet software for business analysis. Companies can
also create more complex transformations and data flows where data from
multiple sources is transformed, aggregated into single views or integrated to
provide the data structure needed by specific users or applications.
- Architecture - Avaki Data Grid 4.0 has a unique, distributed grid
architecture that provides flexibility, scalability and resilience. It enables
businesses to provision data across the enterprise while enabling data owners
to control their data locally.
Packaging, Pricing and Availability
Avaki Data Grid 4.0 is a single software package that includes everything
needed to deliver immediate value without the need for separate application
servers, database storage, middleware, security software, or administration
tools. Available immediately, pricing starts at the workgroup level, and
scales for enterprise-wide deployments.
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