Stone Bond Keeps Focus On Data Integration For The Masses

Version 8 of Stone Bond Technologies' flagship data integration solution, Enterprise Enabler, has added Virtuoso to its branding, but the company is maintaining its commitment to time-to-value, addressing the big-data challenges of data virtualization, federation and orchestration. Targeted at non-technical line-of-business users, EE Virtuoso provides a single, integrated environment to develop, test, deploy and monitor the real-time access and availability of information in a fraction of the time and cost of alternative offerings, says the company.

At the heart of the metadata-driven EE is AppComms, an intelligent adapter technology that is reusable across similar instances of an application, and is aware of and communicates with other AppComms in separate applications. This approach enables the creation of cross-application, bi-directional data relationships without the use of traditional adapters.

Time-to-value is a big differentiator, says Stone Bond. It can get customers up and running with a bare-bones solution in one day, and within three weeks for a customized solution. That's a significant advantage over alternatives like Informatica, Cast Iron (now part of IBM) and Boomi (Dell) that can take a year or more for time to value, the company says.

V8 additions include new AppComms that seek and orchestrate data from a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Enhancements include performance upgrades to the EE Database and SQL Replication trigger and SharePoint 2010 Custom Connector for reduced runtime, as well as increased network performance and reduced engine-processing time.

More than 20 customers are using the new release, with another 120 evaluating it. Stone Bond reports that it has also been getting a lot of calls recently from companies that have historically looked at Cast Iron and Boomi, as well as from companies nearing the end of their quarters and looking for data fast but unable to get it from their overworked IT departments.

Giving people faster access to data at a lower cost is an important part of Stone Bond's value proposition, agrees Dana Gardner, principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions. "One of the things that intrigues me about Stone Bond is they allow people who function at the business process level access to data," rather than having to spend the time and money to try and get it from the IT department, says Gardner.

As for EE Virtuoso, Gardner says the company is keeping its focus on making access to data easier and faster. "It's a combination of the ability to scale and the inclusion of more data types or ease of access to them. Becoming more inclusive is more important to their value."

He says people are starting to recognize that being competent at data manipulation is essential and core to success because of the need to do analytics and understand in near real time what's going on in their businesses. "The fact that you can get to data fast and provide it to people who are not programmers. ... data is not just an asset but their lifeblood.”

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