Composite Software, the data virtualization performance leader, announced today the availability of a new June 2011 market research report from Forrester Research, Inc. entitled Data Virtualization Reaches Critical Mass. The report states that technology advancements, new patterns and customer successes are making data virtualization both a short and long term solution to today's data integration challenges.

“Firms are looking to solve tough data and process integration challenges as they once again begin to invest in new business capabilities,” the report said. “Driven by new capabilities and fueled by customer successes, data virtualization delivers on the promise of information-as-a-service (IaaS) by enabling tactical solutions that also deliver a stepping stone to enterprise data management. Introduce this technology into your integration toolkit.”

Commenting on technology advancements delivering new value to data virtualization, the report cited Composite Software's distributed edge caching capability which allows incremental updates to cache data using IBM MQ Series to manage cache across several geographic locations, reducing network traffic requirements and increasing query performance.

The Forrester report details several data virtualization success stories, including Composite Software customers Pfizer and Qualcomm. For Pfizer, moving to a single BI platform was simply not cost effective; however, operating with several platforms presented integration challenges that affected quality, speed, and cost. The drug company implemented virtualization technology from Composite Software early in the integration process to prototype new data sources prior to adding them to its enterprise data warehouse, and achieve better integration of data with existing BI tools. As a result, it significantly reduced the integration cycle time as well as its cost.

Qualcomm initially procured Composite Software's virtualization technology to access customer data in salesforce.com and combine it with ticket information from internal systems. It implemented a system leveraging vendor-supplied out-of-the-box integration to create a relational virtual database within its firewall. This provided better performance and was much simpler to implement that a straight web service approach; the company accomplished the project in a matter of weeks. Based on this success, Qualcomm has now deployed an enterprise information fabric architecture using the Forrester hourglass strategy.

“After more than 10 years of research and development, hard work and dedication to our customers' successes at more than 200 organizations worldwide, it is extremely gratifying to see the data virtualization market characterized by a leading market research firm as 'ready for prime time' in helping organizations manage today's complex data integration challenges,” said Composite Software CEO Jim Green.

A copy of the Forrester Research report is available here.