IT Staff Perspective On The Integrating Enterprise Information

Welcome to the IT World of Future Shock

In 1970, Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock described how technology was speeding up the pace of life. Toffler predicted our lives would be subjected to greater stress and that technology would advance at a speed beyond most people's ability to cope with it.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps, no one understands this dynamic better than busy IT staff as they scramble to: Keep up with rapid changes in technology;

• Implement solutions that grow ever more complex;
• Struggle to integrate disparate data sources to modern applications;
• Achieve more with fewer resources as a result of corporate down-sizing;
• Perform their work in the new time dimension - Internet time - that demands absolute speed.

Let's face it. You can expect intense pressure on IT personnel to grow as:

• Companies continue to expand their use of technology, and
• Information increases in volume, importance and strategic value.

The Growing Data Integration Challenge!

One key contributor to the pressure on IT is the challenge of information integration. Based on the need to integrate disparate data sources to modern applications, the need to add new data sources to existing applications, and the trend toward making more strategic use of enterprise information today.

• The typical company uses 14 different databases and needs to move data between 49 applications on average.
• Mergers and acquisitions require data integration with the new entities.
• Old legacy applications need to be migrated to new ones along with their data, preserving the value of them.
• Proprietary data sources have given way to modern, open relational databases, yet legacy data still needs to be used.
• Internet applications require data from a host of disparate sources - and rapidly - to make it available to employees, customers, and suppliers.
• Report writers, Business intelligence tools and decision support tools need to access multiple distributed data sources enterprise wide.

Writing code to solve these complex data integration dilemmas is no longer an acceptable option. It takes too long, costs too much, and doesn't position the company for inevitable change.

dbSpaces: Making Life Easier for IT staff

Using dbSpaces, IT staff can create a central data dictionary of their disparate corporate data sources. It's fast and easy.

Once the information is in the data dictionary, applications make a call to access or update data to dbSpaces without needing to know the location of data and without worrying about the data's format.

dbSpaces handles data requests made to it by applications to access multiple data simultaneously sources as if they were a single data source and provide applications the aggregated result set in the required format.

It's fast, transparent and easy. And it helps reduce the stress and workload of busy IT staff.

dbSpaces Benefits for IT Staff

Fast Response to User Needs. It's easy to provide end users with access to any corporate data source for use by report generators, decision support tools, or any other corporate application. Without taking lots of your valuable time to support end user needs.

Simpler Application Development. dbSpaces simplifies application development. If an application makes calls to dbSpaces for data, the application is buffered from having to:

• Handle disparate formats.
• Worry about multiple data sources.
• Know where data sources are located.
• Be modified when data sources change.

dbSpaces also allows simplifies development by allowing existing business logic to be executed without having to be concerned with the issues of the location of the logic.

Quick, Easy Response to Changes. When a data source changes, you use dbSpaces Designer to change the data dictionary instead of having to re-code the application to make use of the data. It couldn't be easier or faster!

dbSpaces believes that data integration should be easy and transparent to the end user and the application. IT staff shouldn't have to perform cartwheels to provide users the data they need, and to produce applications that make use of enterprise data effectively. It should be handled by the dbSpaces Virtual Database Server. That's why we created dbSpaces. To liberate IT staff.

dbSpaces helps IT departments fulfill their mission, while reducing the data integration burden and stress on busy IT staff. It's the perfect solution to the information and application integration dilemma.