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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
TECH LEADERS TO SHAPE FUTURE OF
ENTERPRISE DATA INTEGRATION
Avaki Corp, a leading provider of enterprise information integration (EII)
software, announced it has established a strategic Board of Advisors,
comprising of technology industry leaders and customers, to provide the
company with direct feedback and validation of market requirements, product
plans and strategic direction. Among the board's initial findings is a strong
confirmation of Avaki's product vision: to provide an enterprise-wide
framework for managing a variety of data integration initiatives through a
data service layer of distributed data sources, so that businesses can, for
the first time, achieve enterprise-wide data integration efficiencies while
leveraging a range of best-of-breed third-party integration approaches.
Avaki's Board of Advisors is composed of a diverse group of IT experts and
visionaries, including: David Linthicum, a pioneer in distributed computing
and application integration and former CTO of Mercator (now part of Ascential
Software); Bob Metcalfe, best known for inventing Ethernet and founding 3Com;
Dave Henry, a data management expert and vice president at Temtec; Eric Miles,
an authority on business intelligence and former executive at Sybase and
currently CEO of Entopia; and Avaki customer, Kathy Gibson, worldwide head of
research informatics at Pfizer. Philip Russom, renowned data integration
expert and director of research at leading research firm Forrester Research,
is the board's facilitator. Andrew Grimshaw, distributed computing visionary,
founder of Avaki, and professor of computer science at the University of
Virginia, is chairman.
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At its first meeting, the board determined that businesses today need to
gain
enterprise-wide control over their data integration efforts across many
heterogeneous data sources and applications to reduce the overall time, cost
and complexity of making fresh data available to applications. The Board
endorsed the strategic value of Avaki's vision: providing an enterprise data
service layer that can simplify access and integration of data from all
distributed, heterogeneous sources, while at the same time leveraging a
variety of data integration methodologies. The board also supported Avaki's
plan to introduce the Enterprise Data Integration Framework capability as part
of the next release of Avaki Data Grid, the company's award-winning EII
software product. The Enterprise Data Integration Framework will, for the
first time, bring all of a business' data integration efforts under one
enterprise-wide umbrella, increasing data availability and reducing the cost
and complexity of data integration.
The Enterprise Data Integration Framework will enable businesses to "plug
in"
and leverage a variety of data integration approaches that can be re-used as
services across the enterprise. With the Enterprise Data Integration
Framework, companies can select from among a variety of data integration
approaches -- choosing the methods and tools that each best meet the data
access and integration requirement at hand. Companies can leverage their
investments in ETL, data cleansing, data profiling, and other best-of-breed
data integration capabilities, combing them with Avaki's integration
capabilities and surrounding them all with a unified, SOA-oriented, access and
provisioning layer.
"For decades, companies have struggled with data integration issues by
applying in an ad-hoc way, project by project, a variety of approaches that
are now scattered throughout the enterprise. This diversity of discrete
projects results in excessive cost and complexity while preventing the fullest
utilization of integration effort," Linthicum said. "The board determined that
the best way to address this problem is to create an enterprise data service
layer to gain access to all federated data sources and couple that with a
framework to leverage the best-of-breed data integration tools."
Benefits of an Enterprise Data Integration Framework:
- Scale data integration efforts across the enterprise promoting
integration
logic re-use and creating greater efficiencies.
- Select the most appropriate data integration methods and tools for each
project requirement and use each approach within the same data access and
provisioning infrastructure.
- Leverage the best-of-breed data integration tools such as ETL and data
cleansing and gain greater return on those investments.
- Provide an enterprise-wide umbrella for controlling all data
integration
initiatives.
- Respond faster to data access and integration requests and reduce the
overall time and cost of data integration and application
development.
"We are extremely excited that we have been able to attract such an
accomplished, world-class team of experts to our Board of Advisors," said Tim
Yeaton, president of Avaki. "With so much deep experience and expertise in
information technology, this Board will help identify the customer needs and
validate Avaki's strategic direction to fulfill those needs. Their
enthusiastic support of the Enterprise Data Integration Framework is
validation of our vision and is a win for customers."
"In today's complex data environments, companies are spending too much time
and money on data integration projects that don't scale," said Metcalfe.
"Frustration among data users is high, and the impact of high integration
costs on the bottom line has become increasingly unacceptable to business
leaders. Avaki is taking an innovative approach -- one that can greatly
improve the data integration and application development bottlenecks that
exist in today's companies while reducing the cost associated with the
fragmented data integration approaches of the past."
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