Ipedo Seeks to Bridge Web Services with Business Intelligence

by Alex Woodie

As companies begin to adopt Web services and allow Web services to update their production databases, they're finding a gap in the lineup when it comes to reporting tools that can access the data carried by Web services, according to Ipedo. The Silicon Valley startup says it has a solution to this problem with the latest release of its data integration software, XIP 4.1, which brings a new SQL-to-XML buffer called Web Services Tables.

Ipedo describes XIP as an Enterprise Information Integration (EII) product that leverages the tried and true (SQL-based access) with the new (XQuery-based access) to integrate and manage information from disparate and complex data sources, such as relational databases, Web Services, CSV files, legacy applications, message queues, file systems, and heaps and heaps of documents. The product overcomes the hurdles presented by these disparate systems by using "federated queries across virtual views," Ipedo says.

Basically, data isn't physically moved in Ipedo's scheme, but paths to the data are mapped and stored, and the right keys--whether they're based in traditional SQL, or use newfangled XQuery--are kept on hand to unlock the data when the need arises.

With XIP 4.1, Ipedo is tackling this data integration dilemma as it applies to business intelligence (BI) and reporting. "Business intelligence and SOA [service oriented architecture] are the two main drivers of the EII market, and now we're seeing a confluence of the two in our larger customers," says Nick Zhang, CEO of Ipedo. "This release bridges those two worlds, increasing the data reach of BI tools and improving the ROI [return on investment] of existing IT investments."

This new capability is delivered via Web Services Tables, a new feature introduced with XIP 4.1 last week. With this feature, XIP creates a virtual relational table based on the schema described in a Web services description language (WSDL) file. When a client application accesses the virtual relational table using standard SQL, Ipedo XIP manages the invocation of the underlying Web Service dynamically, the company says, which allows BI and reporting tools--or any other SQL-based client application--to consume Web Services data as if it were relational data.

Ipedo, which was founded in 2000, sees its technology being applied to solve information integration issues as it applies to business intelligence. The company cites a recent study by The Data Warehousing Institute that is forecasting a fourfold increase in EII use in the next two years.

Other changes made with XIP 4.1 include a new Web-based management console designed to provide easier access to more detailed information in enterprise deployments and performance enhancements to XIP's query technology. The product can now seamlessly join large partitioned data sets across multiple instances, while conserving system memory for handling large result sets, the company says.

XIP was written in Java and, therefore, runs on all major platforms. The majority of Ipedo's 50 or so customers run on Solaris, Windows, and Linux, but the company does have several customer running the software on OS/400 servers, says Tim Matthews, Ipedo co-founder and vice president of marketing.

XIP 4.1 becomes available December 20. For more information, visit www.ipedo.com.