The Distributed Data Challenge

Today’s companies need data to execute cross-functional or cross-location workflows, accelerate product innovation and development, and analyze business trends to respond swiftly to changing market conditions. Sybase Data Federation gives your organization a single, unified framework—a data grid—that provides a set of reusable services for accessing data across the organization, without regard to what the data is or where it resides.

Companies spend too much time and money to accomplish one very simple goal: give users, developers, and applications secure, real-time access to heterogeneous distributed data. For global, distributed organizations, the challenge—and corresponding costs—are magnified by mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations, heterogeneous technology infrastructures, and the sheer number and diversity of data sources.

Sybase Data Federation software helps companies provide more data to more people faster and at lower cost. With Data Federation , IT managers can reduce the backlog of data requests while implementing a simple, secure, and uniform approach to provisioning, access, and integration of distributed data. And they can do so in an incremental, nondisruptive way that lets everyone involved work the way they want to work.

Data Federation is a different kind of information integration software. Other integration solutions might address only a single group’s need for data, yet require significant time and effort to deploy and maintain. Data Federation gives your organization a single, unified framework—a data grid supporting a data services layer—which provides a set of reusable services for accessing data across the organization, without regard to what the data is, where it resides, or how to access it.

Owners of data sources—be they packaged applications, databases or file systems—can provision data and control access to it by setting the appropriate permissions. This provisioned data is accessible and re-usable as named services. Data architects, application developers or anyone with the appropriate permissions can then use a number of techniques and technologies to register services that combine and transform the provisioned data. End users and consuming applications can access this data using standard interfaces and protocols.

For many organizations, Data Federation offers breakthrough reductions in cost and time-to-solution compared with alternatives such as centralized information integration solutions. A solution with a federated approach that leaves data in place, under control of local owners, Data Federation can be deployed easily without disrupting users, applications, or data management procedures. Data Federation creates a linked data layer rather than copying source data. Its pluggable, distributed architecture lets partners create a secure, streamlined infrastructure for sharing only the data they want to share—a major advantage over centrally-controlled solutions.

Data Federation can provide budget relief for projects such as delivering data to business intelligence applications, corporate dashboards, or portals, creating a single view of the customer, or making distributed data available for analytical applications in product design, drug development, or risk management. Once projects are complete it can reduce cost of ownership while enabling the work to be reused elsewhere in the organization.