Introduction

The revolution of business information systems and their corresponding data stores has transformed how global organisations produce and use information. This has happened in three parallel realms: enterprise business applications, personal productivity and content applications, and the internet. With the emergence of holistic and semantic data integration technologies, innovative organisations have started to leverage the immediacy and relevance of unstructured and Web data. This has enabled the use of rich enterprise applications and processes, and in the reverse scenario, real-time data in edge-of-enterprise Web applications.

Key Findings

• The Data Virtualisation Platform – To accomplish the goals of holistic data integration, a data virtualisation platform must be more than the sum of the key capabilities found in separate technology stacks for EII, Web extraction and Search/Indexing.

• Applications of Data Virtualisation – As organisations become aware of the unique capabilities of data virtualisation to merge structured and unstructured information, they are discovering new uses and even new business models to enhance their competitive position.

• Current Strategy – Data warehousing and integration strategies are common place in the market to varying degrees but none of the participating banks have taken the next step towards virtualisation. Where it has been used, it is only in pockets of the organisation, layered on top of the existing integration strategy.

• Responsibility and Stakeholders – There are a number of different areas of the bank which inhabits sponsors and stakeholders at the participating banks. As can be expected, heads of the business lines have a vested interest in Data Virtualisation. Furthermore, a number of the participants commented that IT is the main stakeholder.

• Future Plans – A majority of the respondents highlighted that future plans concern spreading their current techniques across a greater number of areas within the bank.

Conclusion

The goal of making information a strategic asset can no longer be limited to the subset of structured data contained in enterprise databases and applications. Business and government organisations must deal with the reality of the information explosion driven by Web 2.0 and user-generated content. Increasingly, just as much useful and relevant data resides outside enterprise applications as within it.

Tagged with: applications, data, Data virtualisation, indexing, platforms, search, technology, Technology Research Report, virtualization, web, web 2.0