EII

A new view on data "Composite Software is at the forefront of this trend. Here's what EII is not, according to Jim Green, Composite's CEO and chairman: EII is not EAI (enterprise application integration). EAI pushes data around; EII is a pull system. If an address changes in your CRM application, EAI will push that information out to your ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, for example. Conversely, EII, pulls only the data you need out of ERP and CRM systems and offers it up in a single view for analysis.

Composite Software's Information Server stores the meta data (the data about the data), the fields, and the relationships between them. When the user executes the query, it fetches the data from the underlying systems to present a synthetic view.

"Composite Software's Composite Information Server joins data from different types of resources and creates an alias so it looks different than when it was stored," Green says.

EII is also not BPM (business process management). It has nothing to do with changing business processes. Composite Software's Murthy Nukala, vice president of marketing, pointed out some of the benefits of EII.

"Data takes up most of the cost of an integration effort. Increased understanding of that data is mission-critical, and you need to have a strategy about how you handle data," said Nukala. "