Information-As-A-Service: Delivering Real-Time Information Drives Market Toward The Mainstream

Increasing business demand for near-real-time delivery of high-quality information in context is driving enterprise architects and application developers toward new service-oriented ways of accessing and integrating enterprise information. Earlier-era technologies such as enterprise information integration (EII), extract, transform, and load (ETL), and replication are failing to support the requirements of these new service-oriented technologies. New technologies that enable information-as-a-service (IaaS) overcome these challenges, delivering quality, federated information in near-real time to support multiple applications and provide deep business insight. The IaaS market is growing rapidly, around 40% annually, with top vendors such as BEA Systems, Composite Software, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat offering comprehensive IaaS solutions. Architects and developers should now include IaaS middleware in the top tier of options for delivering integrated information in context with applications, driving deep business insight, especially where service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives are under way.