INDEPENDENT ANALYST FIRM URGES OVERSTRETCHED IT TEAMS TO EMPOWER BUSINESS USERS BY ADOPTING SELF-SERVICE MASHUPS

Composite Software Named in New Report; Pfizer, a Composite Customer, one of Four Early Adopters Highlighted

 

SAN MATEO, CALIF. — July 29, 2009 – A newly published report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy,” from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, Inc.,  recommends that overstretched IT teams adopt self-service, mashup-style business intelligence (BI) as a way to increase their productivity and empower business user requestors to make simple changes to reports, dashboards and cubes.

In its executive summary, the report states, “Enterprise business intelligence (BI) professionals face severe resource constraints, and the soft economy keeps budgets tight. One consequence is a lengthening queue of user requests to develop and revise reports, dashboards, cubes, and other analytic applications and data structures. To reduce the pressure on IT and satisfy user requests, Information and Knowledge Management professionals provide users with self-service ‘mashup’ capabilities.”

"Mashup-style self-service BI relieves developers from having to respond to an incessant stream of user requests for low-level changes to reports, dashboards, and cubes” the report continues.  "Instead, users can make those view changes themselves at the client level, without affecting back-end data models.”

Within this self-service model, the report explores what it takes to build mashups from both the business and IT sides.  Data mashups are highlighted as the way IT can provide self-service business users with virtualized, federated access to the heterogeneous data required.  Automated source discovery is also identified as a key capability, due to the myriad of data sources and complexity of data models typical in large enterprises today.

Composite Software, Inc. was one of the vendors included in the report with software solutions featuring the majority of capabilities that make up key BI Mashup technology.  These capabilities include an in-memory BI client, data virtualization/EII, interactive browser-based visualization, and automated source discovery. 

One of the report’s four early-adopter use cases is Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical corporation.  Using Composite Software’s Composite Information Server™, Pfizer’s IT group developed an intranet BI mashup supporting ad-hoc query, forecasting, planning and modeling for its pharmaceutical sciences product executives making investment decisions.  The intranet delivers--in a “virtual data mart”--information from disparate internal data sources (global information factory, project and portfolio management, inventory and supply chain) as well as reuse of data across multiple subject marts. 

Once again, Forrester Research is on the trend vanguard with its keen observations of what’s happening in business technology today,” notes Robert Eve, executive VP of Marketing, Composite Software.  “This report echoes what our customers are telling us:  that our data virtualization middleware makes them more efficient, agile and productive.  In Pfizer’s case, they’ve shaved months off the multi-year discovery-to-market drug cycle.”    

The report is available for purchase at Forrester Research, http://web1.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47806,00.html

              

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About Composite Software, Inc.:  Composite Software, Inc. is the leading independent provider of data virtualization software.  Global organizations including 10 of the top 20 banks, five of the top ten pharmaceuticals, leading energy, media, and technology companies along with U.S. Defense and Intelligence agencies, use Composite's technology to integrate disparate data--regardless of location or source format--and fulfill critical information needs, faster with fewer resources. Composite’s platform scales from individual business applications to enterprise-wide Information-as-a-Service architectures, automating the entire data virtualization life cycle, while complementing traditional data warehousing investments.  Founded in 2002, Composite Software is a privately held, venture-funded corporation based in Silicon Valley.  For more information, please visit www.compositesw.com.  Or follow Composite on http://twitter.com/compositesw.

Composite Software and Composite Information Server are registered trademarks of Composite Software, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks belong to their respective companies. Copyright © Composite Software, Inc. 2009.