Technology Industry Identifies Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF) as Key Market Segment

Key firms including Intel, the TABB Group, and other industry experts recognize EDF as the solution for data gridlock in distributed computing environments

BEAVERTON , OREGON , NOV. 8, 2005 - GemStone Systems today announced that a wide range of technology industry analysts, vendors and enterprises have lent support to an emerging market segment and solution, the Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF). Larry Tabb of the TABB Group and Intel, are among the leading individuals and organizations to back this initiative.

EDF is a data layer that separates data sources from applications, providing the means to solve the gridlock prevalent in distributed environments such as grid computing, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). The need for EDF is growing exponentially as SOA and EDA move from the concept stage to full-scale deployment in many organizations.

"Access to data, and moving this data among multiple sources is becoming an increasingly complex and unmanageable proposition. IT users have built up tangled configurations of multiple databases, schemas, data adapters, gateways and more" says Carl Olofson, Research Director for Information and Data Management Software research at IDC, "A far better approach is to standardize on a single platform and use that to define the data to be integrated, as well as the rules for integrated access.  The GemStone Enterprise Data Fabric, has embraced this approach."

Market Trends

The current market place is being affected by three key trends happening simultaneously within many organizations. These are:

• Regulatory requirements that force a greater need for data transparency;
• The move to all-electronic, data heavy, systems;
• Increased demand from customers to have real-time access to information.

These trends are taxing already overburdened data systems and the combined effect of these has the potential to wreak havoc on internal operations. The lack of timely information delivery can cost organizations millions in lost opportunities.

"Financial institutions rely heavily on all types of data, including market, customer, historical and reference data. Accurate, real-time data aids everyday operations, and can be utilized to create a competitive advantage," says Larry Tabb, Founder & CEO, of TABB Group. "An Enterprise Data Fabric helps break down the silos that exist within financial services organizations. It allows an increase in the speed of access to data on the trading floor and provides the level of data transparency required by regulations like SOX and the Patriot Act."

Vendor Community Support

Software and hardware vendors pushing the vision of grid computing, SOA and EDA recognize the need to solve the data problems plaguing such deployments. The GemFire EDF solution has helped IBM transition customers onto its widely deployed BladeCenter platform. GemFire provides a common access point and complements the scale-out approach of blade server systems. By providing a means of distributing access to multiple data sources by multiple requestors, GemFire prevents the formation of data bottlenecks.

"The ever increasing competitive nature of the Financial Services industry requires institutions have the ability to make decisions based on the analysis of enormous amount of market data in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Coordinated and complimentary hardware and software solutions are required to handle the analysis of today's market data volumes. Market Data analysis is just one of the areas where Gemstone's EDF initiative helps end users take advantage of the compute cycles available in their distributed compute environments", said Eric Doyle, Global Industry Manager for Financial Service, Intel Corporation

The Seven EDF Requirements

There are data solutions that provide great point-to-point connectivity, but are hard to manage and can't scale with growth. There are solutions that are scalable and that can handle data from distributed sources, but that can't store data, slowing down delivery of information. An Enterprise Data Fabric provides data at low latencies, while also providing a flexible framework for growth.

The seven EDF requirements:

• High-performance, low-latency data distribution and high throughput;

• Caching and persistence for extremely large volumes of data across distributed environments;

• Data virtualization across enterprise data sources;

• Guaranteed quality of service for data access and high data availability for reliable operations;

• Support for multiple data formats and languages;

• Event analytics, notification and stream data management;

• Seamless fit into existing enterprise architectures.

"Many of the benefits gained by modular, flexible architecture approaches such as SOA and EDA are mitigated by poorly designed underlying data structures," says Shankar Iyer, executive vice president, marketing and strategy, GemStone Systems. "An EDF solution delivers on the distributed architecture with flexibility and fulfills application needs for data from multiple sources available on demand."

About GemStone Systems, Inc.

GemStone Systems is a privately held infrastructure software company that provides data services solutions for enterprise business architects and data infrastructure managers that are building, enhancing or simplifying access, distribution, integration and management of information within and across the enterprise. Founded in 1982, and with over 200 installed customers, GemStone is recognized worldwide for its unique competency and patented technology in object management, virtual memory architectures, high-performance caching, and data distribution technologies.

About GemFire

GemFire, the enterprise data fabric (EDF), provides a scalable, distributed platform to manage increasing volumes of enterprise data and streaming events with almost zero-latency. With advanced data virtualization, distributed caching and complex event processing (CEP) capabilities, the GemFire EDF enables the delivery of actionable information to the right application at the right time.

The GemFire product suite includes GemFire Enterprise, GemFire Enterprise - C++, and GemFire Real-Time Events. More information is available at www.gemstone.com.