Composite Software, Inc., began shipping Composite Information Server 5.1 as the company announced its leadership in a number of industry milestones.

Composite Information Server 5.1 continues to provide industry-leading data virtualization capabilities such as the ability to access data in various formats, abstract data complexity, federate data from disparate sources and deliver the data on demand in the format that is required by the consuming application. Among its key features are:

• Integration with a comprehensive list of data sources including new sources, SQL Server 2008, HP Neoview and Oracle 11g;
• Numerous enterprise-ready data virtualization capabilities such as clustering, version control, monitoring, management and advanced caching;
• Performance that is easily scalable due to the highest number of optimization techniques and algorithms;
• Access and delivery of data to a large set of business applications that uses REST Services, and other standard protocols; and
• Security based on popular Java Authentication, Authorization Service (JAAS) plus user token authentication plug-ins, and other pluggable authentication systems.

According to Kenny Sargent, product manager of MIL and DBMS Services at Compassion International, “We initially selected Composite as our data virtualization middleware because of its successful track record and industry recognition as a leader in data virtualization technology. The continued improvements to Composite Information Server are indicative of how well Composite listens to and responds to evolving market needs.” Compassion International, a non-profit charitable organization, is the world’s largest Christian child development organization that permanently releases children from poverty. Founded in 1952, Compassion has served more than one million children in 25 of the world's poorest countries, working through local churches and individuals to address the needs of children to enable them to thrive, not just survive.

As the only independent company that focuses solely on data virtualization, Composite Software has become the de facto market leader through innovative data integration/data virtualization technology leadership over six years. This is unlike larger corporations that have made data virtualization a later addition to product offerings, often through acquisition off the technology. Understanding the technological complexity of the data virtualization challenge, customers have chosen Composite’s award-winning Composite Information Server offering to facilitate their mission-critical data integration efforts.

According to Ted Friedman, principal analyst at Gartner, in the Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2009, published in July, 2009, “The potential of data federation technology is compelling. In theory, this technology can create an abstraction layer for all applications and data, thereby achieving flexibility for change, pervasive and consistent data access and greatly reduced costs, because there is less need to create physically integrated data structures. The end result is greater agility from, and freer access to, an organization's data assets.”

Data virtualization adoption is taking a range of forms, including data federation for individual projects, data warehouse extensions for wider reporting use cases, enterprise data sharing for multiple applications using a service-oriented approach, and internal and external cloud data integration.