IT TRENDS
Connecting the dots across information sources
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In today's competitive business environment, too much data can be a deterrent — unless some one puts it in context, transforms it into information and delivers it in real time.
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THINK OF Web-enabled information this way: Thousands of page-based chunks of information, a lot of it undoubtedly useful, but more like a bowl of exotic fruit. You need to take a knife to it and slice up the individual items to get their taste and flavour. Great— if you have all the time in the world — or the inclination of a gourmet chef.
Now, think of a Net-centric, rather than just a Web-enabled way of doing business. This is a `mixie' that blends the various fruits and delivers all the fruity flavours as one smooth drink you can gulp down. Great — if you want your information on-the-go, and don't want to know how it was put together.
In the real world of competitive, Internet-centred business today, that blender is something called Composite Applications — a new buzzword that Judith Hurwitz, President of leading research consultants Hurwitz and Associates defines like this:
"Let us start with what Composite Applications are not: they are not a new programming model. A composite application links together the right parts of applications in the right way to initiate a new business practice without having to start from scratch.
Composite Applications require a service oriented architecture (SOA) in order to become a reality. A service-oriented architecture is a modular architectural framework that enables software components to interact seamlessly."
Better decision making
And this is what another technology watcher, AMR Research, has to say:
"A new set of high-value applications is emerging called Composite Applications. The objective of these applications is to improve corporate performance by improving decision-making.
This is accomplished by drawing on the information already available and adding rich workflow, event, and client interface capability.''
To continue the gastronomic metaphor, Composite Applications might just be the greatest thing since sliced bread — at least in the `cordon bleu' world of e-business. All major players are into it: Hurwitz lists IBM, HP, SAP, Oracle, Sun, Fujitsu Software among the leading software infrastructure companies who are strongly focused on Composite Applications.
Interestingly, there is one `pure play' Composite Applications company for whom the technology is not just one arrow in the quiver full of weapons — but the very `agni asthra' which has enabled it to garner some of the most demanding clients in the business — military agencies. — as well as a sheaf of peer awards including recently, the Red Herring 2004 Top 100 list of compelling technology purveyors.
The company is Digital Harbor, with its headquarters in Reston, Virginia, U.S. Rohit Agarwal, Digital Harbour's President and CEO, explained how the Composite Applications approach helps users `connect the dots' across many types of information sources.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Digital Harbor, was able to help the U.S. Defence Intelligence community, deal with huge amounts of raw data and ever expanding data repositories without the ability to fuse and relate the data to create useful information. Data must be placed in context to help in decision-making.
The challenge
It should be delivered in a live and interactive format, across multiple sources. Copying data lying in one's own storage was easy; relating it to the task on hand was the challenge.
Composite Applications address this challenge with a handful of tools:
— Component-based `smart clients' using Java (J2EE) and XML for interactive, networked functioning
— Application Linking and Embedding (ALE) which Agarwal calls the `secret sauce' in the recipe and
— A business-specific `ontology' — jargon for a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an object or a community of objects.
The result is a `composite' scheme that works bottom to top across data, messages, services, rules, events, processes and people... spinning them together so that the end user can access the information in a single, fused correlated, contextualized `ready to eat' morsel (see diagram).
Beyond mission critical military logistics applications, Composite Applications are helping users in a variety of situations harness the information they own but never fully exploited, like: providing a bank customer with a single view of cross-sold products like money transactions, bill payments, insurance, investment to helping a prospective house buyer make a decision by providing all the information he may require.
Like an RCA jack
Think of this as an RCA jack that comes with your home music system says Ashish Agarwal, who heads Digital Harbour's India development organization, "You can assemble a number of smaller units — speakers, CD players, amplifiers, TV— and use the jacks to hook them all together into one integrated entertainment centre."
Indian engineers are even now at work, on the next generation of digital "RCA jacks" to plug together tomorrow's Net-centric business.
Anand Parthasarathy
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