"Virtual Enterprise Information Federation" Defined:

In the post-enterprise application world many organizations are discovering that information critical to decision making is trapped inside their ERP and CRM application databases.  Too often, different database engines have been used to support the different enterprise applications.  Even when IT governance has managed to ensure consistency of the underlying database architecture, the effort required to integrate information stored in different databases can present a formidable obstacle to providing the decision-quality information needed to guide the organization.

In response to this situation, a number of software companies have created new, "Enterprise Information Integration" capabilities which help to overcome this integration challenge.  In most cases, the solutions provided work only with a specific, consistent database architecture (all Oracle, all SQL, etc.), while a few solutions have emerged that are capable of integrating information across different, "disparate" database architectures.

These solutions can also be meaningfully differentiated based on the amount of data actually transferred or moved out of the source database.  At one extreme is the "Data Warehouse" in which most or all of the data is moved into a separate environment for analysis.  This action is commonly referred to as "ETL" - Extract, Transform, and Load.  This approach works well when the data is not too volatile and when the source database really needs to be left alone for operational performance reasons.  At the other extreme is "Data Federation" in which the data is left wherever it exists, and only the specific data that is needed for analysis is accessed for that purpose.  Data Federation solutions characteristically utilize a "middleware" layer to manage the data access and integration functions and deliver the results to the user.  This middleware-based architecture is commonly referred to as an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).  Data Federation is the best alternative when the underlying data is relatively more volatile and the amount of data needing to be accessed can be accurately targeted.

When an integration solution, whether Data Warehouse or Data Federation, also accesses and manages the "metadata" (data about the data or the database), this metadata provides the necessary "context" required to elevate the "Data" to "Information" status.  Hence, a Federation solution that also deals with metadata is most properly defined as "Information Federation".

Finally, the small number of Information Federation solutions that are able to integrate information stored across disparate database architectures also create the opportunity to integrate information that is spread out across multiple organizations, enabling the long sought-after "Virtual Enterprise Information Federation" capability.

Idetix eScore Tools provides this Virtual Enterprise Information Federation capability WITHOUT the negative impact on development time and performance associated with the middleware-based alternatives.