BEA FORR InformationFabric2 0

TRENDS
April 9, 2007
Information Fabric 2.0: Enterprise

Information Virtualization Gets
Real
by Noel Yuhanna and Mike Gilpin
Making Leaders Successful Every Day

TRENDS
April 9, 2007
Information Fabric 2.0: Enterprise Information Virtualization
Gets Real
by Noel Yuhanna and Mike Gilpin
with Katie Smillie and Jacqueline Stone
EXECUT I V E S U M MA RY
Forrester’s information fabric vision of enterprise information virtualization has evolved as enterprises
have implemented more parts of the vision and as vendors have extended information-as-a service
(IaaS) products to deliver broader capabilities. Although a complete information fabric implementation
is still rare, many large enterprises already have some elements and a number of information services
deployed or are planning deployment over the next two to three years. Although no vendor offers a
complete information fabric solution, Forrester expects that by 2008, a few vendors will have sufficient
breadth and depth to support a comprehensive fabric solution. Information fabric 2.0 has been updated
to reflect support for more business requirements, with an added focus on information quality, security,
integration, and performance. Enterprise architects should evaluate Forrester’s definition of information
fabric 2.0 and use it to guide their IaaS strategy.
TABLE O F CO N T E N TS N OT E S & R E S O U R C E S
2 Enterprise Information Fabric Addresses A Forrester interviewed 36 vendor and user
Broad Range Of Applications companies, including: BEA Systems, Cingular
8 Information Fabric Will Become A Strategic Wireless, Citibank, Composite Software, eBay,
Resource For Enterprises Endeca Technologies, GemStone Systems,
GigaSpaces, IBM, Informatica, Ipedo, JPMorgan
10 Information Fabric Architecture Is Maturing
Chase, Merrill Lynch, MetaMatrix, Microsoft,
13 The Information Fabric Vendor Landscape Is Modus Operandi, Oracle, Sybase, Tangosol,
Growing And Also Consolidating Terracotta, United Parcel Service of America
RECOMMENDATIONS (UPS), Wachovia, and Xcalia,.
18 Information Fabric Should Guide Your IaaS
Strategy Related Research Documents
19 Supplemental Material “Information-As-A-Service: What’s Behind This
Hot New Trend?”
March 22, 2007, Question & Answer
“EDA, SOA 2.0, And Digital Business Architecture”
September 1, 2006, Trends
“Information Fabric: Enterprise Data Virtualization”
January 9, 2006, Trends
© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, and Total Economic Impact are
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usage information, go to www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are
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2 Trends | Information Fabric 2.0: Enterprise Information Virtualization Gets Real
TARGET AUDIENCE
Enterprise architect professional
ENTERPRISE INFORMATION FABRIC ADDRESSES A BROAD RANGE OF APPLICATIONS

This report updates an earlier one in which Forrester introduced the concept of information fabric.1
During the course of the past year, we conducted extensive research on vendor offerings and
customer case studies in the rapidly evolving market of information-as-a-service (IaaS).2 Although
no vendor today offers an entire information fabric solution, many are extending their offerings to
align with strategies that closely resemble Forrester’s vision. Some of the key vendors that continue
to lead this market are BEA Systems, IBM, and MetaMatrix, while Composite Software, GemStone
Systems, Ipedo, Microsoft, and Oracle are working to offer broader and more integrated solutions.
While investigating customer deployments, Forrester did not find a complete information
fabric implementation. Some large enterprises have a few elements of the fabric deployed with
a goal to expand in the coming years, while others are still in the early planning stages of their
implementations. However, most of the enterprises that we interviewed envisioned information
fabric as an essential strategy to overcome their data integration challenges. Architects
implementing a complete information fabric are often engaged with one key vendor for most of the
solution, filling in gaps with either homegrown or other vendor solutions.
In the course of our research, we examined customer deployments across multiple industries that
use information fabric architectures to overcome integrated information management problems.
Modus Operandi Helps The US Air Force Achieve Real-Time Integrated Information
Modus Operandi is a software vendor that provides enterprise-level information integration for
federal agencies and prime contractors. Founded in 1984, it continues to deliver information
integration technologies and services to enterprises. Forrester spoke with Alan McCutchen, vice
president of product development, about how Modus Operandi is helping customers like the US Air
Force to support data virtualization and integration. Modus Operandi chose to partner with BEA
Systems to deliver its AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) as part of the solution.
The US Air Force was dealing with many data sources, causing data integration and real-time data
access challenges and driving the need for a federated engine capable of serving a broad range of
application domains. It needed to support various portlets, applications, and executive dashboards
to provide an integrated view of information from multiple locations. In spring 2005, Modus
Operandi helped the Air Force to deploy the Wave Platform, a model-driven data services solution
using BEA’s ALDSP. This solution provided the Air Force with an object-oriented view of the
integrated information necessary to support its operations. As Alan stated:
April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Trends | Information Fabric 2.0: Enterprise Information Virtualization Gets Real 3
“Out of the box, the Wave Platform, combined with BEA AquaLogic Data Services
Platform, provided Web services interfaces necessary to access all available enterprise data
in a semantic context. This represents a significant paradigm shift from traditional EII
[enterprise information integration] implementations on multiple levels. An important part
of our solution to the Air Force was that all of the data integration and virtualization was to
be machine-consumable, not just applications or end users, [and] therefore had to be high
performance, scalable, automated, secure, and seamlessly integrated.”
The solution enabled the Air Force to integrate semistructured and unstructured document archives.
ALDSP was able to integrate data in real time from many different data sources, which was essential
in providing stakeholders with relevant, integrated, and real-time information. Although ALDSP
was a critical component of the solution, Modus Operandi also had to build custom extensions,
especially in the areas of abstraction and support for OWL Web Ontology Language ontologies.
Alan told us:
“The BEA solution did an excellent job at the schema level for both logical and physical
design, along with tapping various metadata repositories and information, but did not excel
at the semantic layers of abstraction — transformation, aggregation, and rollup, which
was the missing piece. We were able to customize the solution to fill in the gaps to meet
customer requirements.”
Merrill Lynch Uses MetaMatrix To Achieve A Unified View of Information

Merrill Lynch is a leading financial services company with total client assets of more than $1.5
trillion and offices in 37 countries worldwide. It is one of the leading global underwriters of debt
and equity securities and is a strategic advisor to corporations, governments, institutions, and
individuals.
Like the Air Force, Merrill Lynch faced challenges with multiple data sources and large amounts
of data. It wanted a solution that could create a single view across multiple data sources, cut the
amount of time required to integrate new applications with databases, and provide real-time
information access to meet growing new requirements. The company identified the need for a
standard, global interface to all of its data sources beginning with core enterprise data in five
categories: product, pricing, party, organizational, and corporate actions.
Merrill Lynch chose MetaMatrix to help create a unified view of information stored in DB2,
Oracle, and Sybase systems. The key benefits cited were increased operational efficiency, reduced
development time and effort, and a more accurate view of enterprise data, all of which helped
business users make faster decisions. Previously, developers had to write custom programs to
pull data from various data sources, which created a challenge for information managers to keep
track of all of the different ways information was being accessed and used. According to Merrill
© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

Lynch, “Using MetaMatrix has cut the amount of time needed to integrate new applications with the
databases and reduced the integration workload for the programmers.”
MetaMatrix provides a single view of enterprise data to portals, dashboards, desktop applications,
and traditional applications. It also has helped Merrill Lynch provide information more quickly to
end users to help them make faster business decisions.
Wachovia Chooses Tangosol To Meet High-Performance Application Requirements

Wachovia is one of the largest financial institutions in the US, operating in 21 states and with more
than 40 offices around the world. It is highly diversified, providing a broad range of banking, asset
management, wealth management, and corporate and investment banking products and services.
Forrester spoke with Dipen Mehta, vice president of utility computing - corporate and investment
banking technology, to understand Wachovia’s strategy when dealing with high-performance
applications.
Wachovia was suffering from the data-access demands of a high and growing volume of credit risk
transactions, and it concluded that distributed caching technology was the answer. It evaluated
several off-the-shelf caching solutions and chose Tangosol as the best fit for the requirements of
credit risk processing. This application needed to process hundreds of gigabytes of information with
low latency, so architects used Tangosol to spread this data across 150 cache nodes in a larger grid of
more than 6,800 compute nodes, managed with technology from DataSynapse. This not only spread
out the data-access workload but also increased the total computing power available to the credit
risk application. The credit risk application stores more than 200 million objects in this cache, and
Wachovia has not yet encountered any major limitations, even though objects can reach up to 3.5
megabytes in size. Dipen told us:
“Tangosol maintains a single state image — every node always knows about every other
node. Each node knows whether a particular object is on that node, and this is true whether
it’s five or a thousand nodes. No matter how large a cluster is, there’s always a single owning
node of a particular piece of data. Access to that data is serialized, so the integrity of the
data is assured. The scalability and performance of Tangosol works as advertised. In fact, we
had to tune Windows’ frame and MTU [maximum transaction unit] sizes to get network
performance to live up to the potential of Tangosol.”
One important lesson from the credit risk implementation is the importance of designing the
application while keeping in mind the dynamics of data access within the cache. Wachovia ensured
that each cached object was most likely to be accessed by application code residing on the same
node, minimizing network chatter to sync the cache. Each application object ensured integrity, as
well as performance, by providing the serialized access interfaces for managing locally cached data.
Future information fabrics will automate more of this optimization, reducing application design
complexity.

A Manufacturing Company Applies IBM’s Information Server To Enhance Business

Decisions
Forrester spoke with a manager of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions at a large
manufacturing company in North America to understand how the company deals with data
integration and information management challenges. According to the manager, the company has
a number of heterogeneous databases, including DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server, that support a wide
range of information across the business. This includes information about business performance,
customer analytics, finance, product lines, and key company metrics. These databases run on
various IBM AIX and Windows servers across several data centers. The manager told us:
“Lots of business projects are driving the demand for information. Our system landscape is
extremely heterogeneous, so we are tapping more than 50 different data sources. They are
all very heterogeneous from a database perspective, besides ftp files, flat files, Excel, XML,
you name it.”
A key challenge for the company is to ensure that the correct information is supplied to applications,
with sufficient speed. In addition, the company needs to support business intelligence requirements.
The manager stated:
“Prior to using IBM’s Information Server components, we had nothing comparable. The
technologies we had were whatever the particular application provided, or else we had to
write program code to get the data.”
The manufacturing company is a longtime customer of IBM and has used several information
server components even before they were bundled into IBM’s new offering. These included
different editions of DataStage, ProfileStage, QualityStage, and SOA/RTI. The manager indicated
that Information Server helps integrate these and other components to deliver higher business
value. Since using the IBM solution, the manufacturing company was able to develop 22 analytical
applications in areas including customer management, dealer financial performance analytics,
employee analytics, corporate safety, product diagnostic analysis, labor and time reporting, product
costing, product line profitability, parts and accessories, warranty claim analysis, rental product
operations, dealer/call-center single point of contact, pricing analysis, and retail pricing analysis.
According to the manager:
“The key requirement for IBM’s Information Server was the business demand for business
intelligence, delivering the right information at the right time. We wanted the most cost-
effective solution to meet functional requirements, besides features and functionality, and
IBM Information Server delivered that. We also found it’s best not to propagate data more
widely than necessary, keeping it organized and cleansed and controlling the growing

volume. We used the Information Server middleware to support common information

requirements on a common integrated platform, rather than building a custom solution.
This has helped us reduce cost.”
A Year Of Experience Teaches Many Information Fabric Lessons

Information fabric deployment continues to grow, but this growth is concentrated in the financial
services, telecommunications, retail, and government sectors. Most enterprises deploying
information fabric are large companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, although a few midsize
companies are also participating. Since most of these projects take up to three or four years to
reach all of their goals, incremental implementation is essential. A common lesson from several
deployments is that a complete information fabric deployment isn’t necessary to begin receiving
benefits; benefits begin to accrue even when only a few fabric elements are in place. For example,
architects can deploy fabric technologies such as distributed caching, federated queries, metadata
repositories, and enterprise search functionality independently of each other. Additional lessons
learned during the past 12 months include:
· Most usage of the fabric is read-only. Although more than 90% of current information fabric
deployments are read-only, several architects are planning to add write capability in the near
future. Forrester expects that by 2010, one-third of information fabric deployments will support
both read and write capabilities. Most fabrics begin as read-only and add write capability only
later (if at all), after establishing reliability and accuracy. The most common update pattern
today is to read through the fabric but update by sending a service request (message) to a
transactional business service that updates the underlying system of record.
· Additional components are needed to support an enterprisewide fabric. Although the

logical view of the information fabric architecture has not changed, Forrester now views
additional fabric components, such as information quality, transformation, and search, as key
requirements for a comprehensive deployment (see Figure 1). Since the information access layer
taps disparate and redundant data sources that may disagree, architects are likely to find that
ensuring information quality is a critical requirement. Moreover, data is often stored in different
formats in different applications and databases, so architects are also likely to find it necessary
to transform the data to meet the needs of new information consumers. Thus, information
quality and transformation are critical components for many successful information fabric
deployments.
· No single vendor offers a complete information fabric solution. Although vendors have made
considerable progress in the past year in offering more features and functionality, no single
vendor has a complete solution yet, although in partnership, they can sometimes get close. BEA,
IBM, and MetaMatrix still lead the pack, with strong potential shown by Composite Software,
GemStone, Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, and Xcalia.

Figure 1 Logical Design
Users
& apps Applications Portals End users Other fabric
Info
Virtual view of enterprise information
fabric
Catalog Discovery Transformation Management
Info Integration Events Quality Security Metadata
mgt
Info
sources
Data Other
Infrastructure Applications Grids Databases warehouses fabric Files Backups
41387 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
· Large enterprises are planning to deploy complete information fabric solutions. Many large
enterprises, especially in the financial services, telecommunications, and government sectors,
are focusing on enterprisewide information fabric deployment. Most of these customers are
either looking to support a single version of the truth or improve business decisions through
portals and executive dashboards. Forrester expects that one-third of all enterprises with
revenues of more than $1 billion will have an information fabric architecture by 2012 as part of
an overall IaaS strategy.
· Both design-time and runtime metadata repositories are important. Information fabric is
not just about delivering data to applications at runtime; it is also about helping developers and
architects to develop new applications more easily. The design-time metadata repository helps
developers to more easily discover and consume information services to deliver data through
the fabric for the new applications they are building.
· Performance and scalability are still critical barriers. When applications decouple from the
data to support information fabric architecture, a key concern that many architects have is
the impact on the application’s response time. When companies are using high-performing
applications or dealing with large amounts of data, Forrester highly recommends that architects
put special emphasis on distributed data caching capabilities to ensure acceptable response
time to consumers. A persistent cache or other intermediate store may also be needed when the
resource cost to reconstitute the intermediate representation is high compared with the cost of
redundancy and synchronization.

· Information consumers and architects are concerned about data quality. As one architect
stated: “I don’t know where the data is coming from when it comes through the fabric. My
first question is ‘How accurate and reliable is the data provided through the middleware?’”
Architects should verify that all semantic mappings and other metadata are thoroughly tested
and that ongoing procedures for maintaining the fabric metadata will be rigorous in protecting
quality. If the information provided by the fabric is to become a trusted critical resource,
architects should make data quality assurance and reliability testing a high priority.
· Information users need a friendly interface to the fabric. Although information fabric
1.0 primarily focused on applications, Forrester found increasing demand for the ability to
dynamically discover, search, and browse the newly integrated information provided by the
fabric in real time. Such searches enable information users to address business requirements,
such as compliance and audit reporting, business intelligence, and analytics.
INFORMATION FABRIC WILL BECOME A STRATEGIC RESOURCE FOR ENTERPRISES

Although information fabric 1.0 put a special emphasis on applications that needed a single version
of the truth for enterprise information, our research found that IaaS is also supporting other uses,
such as transaction processing, decision support, business intelligence, content management,
B2B, and radio frequency identification (RFID). In addition to supporting applications, the fabric
can also be used by end users using a Web browser to search and browse all types of enterprise
information. An information fabric can provide a 360-degree view of all enterprise information,
not just customer or financial data, although architects should work incrementally toward this goal.
Forrester expects that information fabric will become a strategic resource and the primary source
of information for new applications over the next seven to 10 years. Some of the key consumers of
information fabric include:
· Applications that need a single version of the truth for enterprise information. Many
enterprises struggle to deliver accurate data to applications in real time because many deal with
hundreds and thousands of databases and large amounts of unstructured data, making it hard to
find a single version of the truth. Information fabric overcomes this challenge by focusing on a
virtual view of cleansed enterprise information to deliver consistent and reliable data to support
all types of applications and end user requirements.
· Business intelligence and dashboards. In addition to supporting traditional applications,

information fabric also offers greater flexibility in delivering aggregated information for better
business decisions. These decisions are supported through business dashboards, metrics, and
reporting. As information flows through the fabric, it provides data cleansing and also offers the
ability to perform aggregation, summarization, and transformation. Forrester found that several
large enterprises are using information fabric architecture to support industry-specific metrics,
financial management and reporting, asset and liability management, and risk management.

· Compliance and audit reporting. Nearly all enterprises are feeling increased pressure
to deliver regular reports to meet compliance requirements, as well as real-time business
information to support auditors’ requirements. Information fabric helps enterprises get
information quickly and accurately to meet such dynamic requests, which may be aggregated,
transformed, or accessed from several sources seamlessly. An important feature of advanced
fabric implementations, and one that is critical to enabling its use for auditing, is the ability to
show the complete provenance of any information the fabric provides, citing original sources,
extraction time, and transformations.
· Searching and browsing of enterprise data. Searching enterprise information is usually not as
straightforward as performing an Internet search. This is because enterprise data is stored across
hundreds of disparate databases and files and must deal with both structured and unstructured
data. An information fabric can help developers or even users access any type of information
more easily without having to know the data structure or other metadata information or its
location. Forrester believes that searching and browsing virtualized data in real time will
ultimately become the most widely used application of information fabric.
· Content management applications. As many of today’s leading content repositories

have added industry-standard Web services interfaces, it is no longer necessary to employ
proprietary technology that is unique to each vendor to obtain content.3 Information services
that need to combine content from multiple repositories from different vendors can now use
industry-standard protocols to access and aggregate this content in the fabric. This is often part
of a master data solution that bridges structured data from databases to this aggregated content.
A common pattern for customer information services is to provide cleansed, master customer
data combined with content such as contracts, faxes, or photographs (i.e., pictures of a damaged
car to support an insurance claim). Content is usually linked by references that point to the
content repository, rather than by embedding the content directly into the merged customer
information record.
· Other fabric. Forrester expects that in the future, enterprises will have multiple information
fabrics deployed, catering to different business domains. To support unified information across
the enterprise, a consumer of information fabric can also be another fabric: a flexible, federated
architecture that can expand the scope of information availability (see Figure 2). Over the next
two to three years, Forrester expects that architects designing integration with business partners
and other enterprises will begin to make use of IaaS and fabrics, creating an even more flexible
architecture for information sharing and delivery.

Figure 2 Multiple-Fabric Integration
Enterprise B
Enterprise A
Partner A
INFORMATION FABRIC ARCHITECTURE IS MATURING

Based on our interviews of customers and vendors over the past year, Forrester’s definition of
the architecture of an information fabric has evolved to support more applications and business
requirements. From the original four components in information fabric 1.0, there are now 10
key technology elements that comprise information fabric 2.0 (see Figure 3). Forrester expects
information fabric technology to provide industry-standard interfaces, including XML, SOAP,
ODBC, Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), and HTTP, to support all types of applications and end
user requirements. Besides the 10 key technologies needed within the fabric, it will also be critical
for architects to ensure that monitoring and management infrastructure can also manage the fabric.
This requires holistic monitoring of all relevant servers, applications, databases, and middleware.
To facilitate holistic monitoring, fabric components should interface with industry-leading
management solutions, such as CA’s Unicenter, HP’s OpenView, and IBM’s Tivoli. These are the 10
key elements of information fabric 2.0:
· Service registry and discovery (new). Application integration with the fabric can be done
either by incorporating services at design time or by having the application automatically
discover services at runtime. Most developers today are binding application data to information
fabric services at design time, but many are looking at auto-discovery of services as a future
requirement, especially to support search and browse or dynamic applications. A UDDI service

registry acts as a directory or catalog that provides an index of services available to handle
applications’ information requests. For example, a dynamic application might require accurate
information pertaining to a customer’s address; therefore, the application could search the
service registry for address information and retrieve the address via the service it discovers. In
addition, end users can directly browse or retrieve information related to services using the
service registry.
· Distributed information cache. One key concern that most architects face when dealing with
information fabric is delivery response time. As one architect pointed out, “If middleware
takes on the information management role, it needs to guarantee reliable and fast delivery.”
Applications traditionally have been tightly coupled with data sources such as databases and
often are highly optimized to deliver fast response time. With a middle-tier data access layer,
response time is bound to be affected because of the latency added by retrieving data from
disparate sources. To overcome this, a distributed data cache becomes a critical component.
Forrester expects that over the next five years, large, mission-critical applications are likely to
use a distributed data cache as the initial tier for all data access, with traditional databases as the
persistent store.
Figure 3 Physical View Of Information Fabric
Search RFID
Other fabric dashboards Portals Applications B2B apps
Compliance
Business intelligence
Decision-support apps
XML SOAP SQL ODBC JDBC HTTP Transactional apps
Information fabric Web services
Service registry and discovery Content mgt apps
Transaction management
Information security
Information quality
Distributed information cache

Transformation
IT policies IT/industry standards

Business rules Design-time Distributed runtime Business taxonomy
metadata repository metadata repository
Integrated enterprise search engine
Distributed information access

Unstructured data Structured data Semistructured data
Data Other
Devices Databases Files fabric
warehouses

· Design-time metadata repository (new). Applications that are being written to work with
information fabric need to know what services to invoke. For this, developers must interface
with a design-time metadata repository and service registry to ensure that appropriate service
requests are made. The design-time metadata repository also provides semantic mapping to
integrate disparate information sources, as it is the locus of the canonical information model
and the mapping from that model to original information sources.4
· Distributed runtime metadata repository (new). A runtime metadata repository is similar

to the design-time metadata repository, except that it also contains information about the
location of data and its state (if cached data is consistent with the back-end persistent data store
or if metadata guides the sync of remote caches). The runtime metadata repository provides
semantic mapping, the access path, and other metadata pertaining to aggregation, rollup, and
summarization. One key customer observation regarding metadata repositories is that since
the industry still lacks a comprehensive standard to tie repositories together, architects have no
choice but to deal with proprietary, vendor-driven metadata repositories for now.
· Integrated enterprise search engine (new). A frequent requirement in most enterprises is the
ability to search or browse enterprise information in real time. For example, an auditor may
request company information from all of the sources available in an organization. Such requests
are dynamic and real-time and would, therefore, require a search engine to interact with
various metadata repositories and provide the relevant results, whether the data is structured,
unstructured, or semistructured. An information fabric search engine provides seamless access
to all enterprise data, just as Google delivers information on the Internet.
· Distributed information access. This component provides access to disparate data from
various sources, including databases, files, devices, backups, data warehouses, and even other
fabrics. The critical requirement is to support all types of data and be able access them quickly
and consistently. The more widely distributed and diverse the underlying information sources,
the more likely that it will be a requirement for the information access layer to implement
advanced distributed query optimization, driven by dynamic metadata and network behavior.
· Transaction management (new). Two-phase commit technology supports transactions across

multiple databases, but has several limitations: 1) It typically does not support multiple database
management system (DBMS) products in the same transaction; 2) it requires a transaction
coordinator and all the resource managers to be available throughout the transaction; and
3) it often consumes large quantities of server and network resources. The XA protocol can
overcome some of these limitations, such as support for both synchronous and asynchronous
transactions across distributed databases, but it still suffers from many others, such as a lack of
support for unstructured information.

In the future, support for the WS-Transaction specification may bring richer transaction
capabilities for Web-services-based information services, but today, no industry standard has
been widely deployed to support granular transactions for an information fabric. Therefore,
where fabric implementations provide more advanced support for transaction models, such
as compensation, architects must use proprietary approaches that today work only within the
confines of one vendor’s fabric implementation.
· Information quality (new). Since information fabric can integrate with all types of disparate
data sources, information quality becomes a top priority. Data might require cleaning, filtering,
and consistency checking to ensure high quality, and this has to be done in real time. None
of the pure-play IaaS vendors have a strong focus on information quality in an information
fabric, but many vendors are putting more focus on this area for upcoming releases. Therefore,
information quality features will become a common capability of information fabric solutions
over the next two to three years.
· Transformation (new). The consumers of the information fabric can be any type of application,
an end user, a portal, or other fabrics. Each consumer might require data to be received in a
particular format and size; therefore, translation and transformation becomes an important
requirement. For example, one application might want dates provided according to US
convention (month, day, year), while another wants the European format (day, month, year).
· Information security (new). An important component of the information fabric is data

access security. The information fabric architecture enables centralized data access and
control, enforcing an even stricter level of data access security than what is found in traditional
applications and DBMS. With the information fabric, each person’s access to information is
based on confirmed identity in a specific usage context, offering a more granular level of access
control. Therefore, when designing an information fabric strategy, architects and security
professionals should make data access security a top priority, right from the initial planning
stage.
THE INFORMATION FABRIC VENDOR LANDSCAPE IS GROWING AND ALSO

CONSOLIDATING
Although several leading information fabric vendors have made considerable progress with new
features and functionality, no single vendor currently offers a complete integrated information fabric
solution. BEA, IBM, and MetaMatrix continue to exhibit technology leadership of the information
fabric market by having the largest number of integrated fabric elements (see Figure 4). Composite
Software, GemStone, Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase are also ramping up their solutions, extending
features, and driving more integration within their product offerings. Forrester expects that by 2009,
some vendors will offer a complete integrated information fabric, with some offering complete
solutions in 2008 that are not yet fully integrated. Key vendors of information fabric include:

Figure 4 Vendor Landscape
Composite Software
GemStone Systems
Progress Software
BEA Systems
GigaSpaces
MetaMatrix
Informatica
Terracotta
Microsoft
Tangosol
Sybase
Oracle
Xcalia
Ipedo
IBM
Service registry and discovery
Distributed information cache P P
Design-time metadata repository
Distributed runtime metadata repository
Integrated enterprise search
Distributed information access
Information quality P
Information transformation and assembling
Information security
Distributed transaction management
Yes Partial P = Partner
Note: A blank cell indicates that the vendor’s product does not support the functionality as it relates to IaaS.
· BEA Systems. Recently, BEA announced its Q4 2006 earnings, and its AquaLogic revenue grew
more rapidly than other BEA product lines and now represents 25% of the firm’s license revenue.
This indicates strong momentum in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure and
data services space for BEA, although a good part of this growth was driven by its business
process management (BPM) product. Except for its lack of support for comprehensive data
quality and distributed data caching components, BEA remains a strong and innovative player
in the information fabric space. It already has several large customer deployments in the
financial services, insurance, government, and manufacturing sectors. ALDSP is capable of
supporting heterogeneous data sources, including support for packaged applications such as
SAP. The recent release of ALDSP 2.5 offers fast path integration with AquaLogic Service Bus,
add-in support for Microsoft Excel, and a native SQL engine that can also access the fabric in
real time.

· Composite Software. Although Composite Software also began as an EII player and is still
positioned in that way, it offers several information fabric components, including service
registry, caching, metadata repository, distributed information access, security, and distributed
transaction management. It focuses on leveraging existing data assets to enable SOA and is
likely to have a more visible position in the information fabric market in the future. Composite
has several large customers in the financial services, insurance, telecommunications, and
government sectors. The company offers integration of its metadata repositories with packaged
applications, such as Oracle (including Siebel), salesforce.com, and SAP. Customers using
Composite claim that information access is often fast, easy to use, and secure. However,
Composite still lags in addressing information fabric architecture in the areas of data quality
and enterprise search.
· GemStone Systems. GemStone offers a middle-tier data layer that supports data virtualization
across disparate data sources and data types. The firm focuses on distributed resource
management, in-memory distributed caching, object management, and event processing.
GemFire is a suite of products that deliver a distributed data infrastructure to enable real-time
delivery and access. GemStone has strong support for distributed data caching, performance
and scalability, and access to information using C++, SOAP, XML, C#, and SQL. However,
it lacks comprehensive support for a metadata repository, unstructured data, enterprise
search, data quality, transformation, and security components to support information fabric
architecture.
· GigaSpaces. Focused primarily on high-performance transactional and real-time analytical

applications, GigaSpaces provides a middleware-virtualized layer with clustering, caching,
and high-availability functionality for Java/J2EE, .NET, and C++ applications. GigaSpaces
supports data grids via JDBC (SQL), Map/JCache interfaces, and JavaSpaces. Common caching
topologies supported by GigaSpaces’ data grid architecture include replication of the data.
GigaSpaces has customers in various verticals, including financial services, telecommunications,
and government. Although the company has strong support for transactions caching, it still
lacks comprehensive support for data quality, enterprise search, and design-time metadata
repository.
· IBM. During the second half of 2006, IBM made a strong move in the IaaS market by
announcing the IBM Information Server, which combines several existing technologies
and leverages shared metadata across products.5 IBM is one of the leading vendors in the
information fabric space, but it still needs to do more to integrate all of its various fabric
components seamlessly, which is likely to take two to three years to complete.
· Informatica. Positioned primarily as a pure-play data integration vendor that focuses on

integration of disparate data sources, Informatica also offers an extract, transform, and load
(ETL) solution. It has strong support for data quality, transformation, and movement, but when

it comes to information fabric, it still lags in distributed data caching transaction management,
security management, service registry, and shared metadata repository. Informatica purchased
Composite Software’s EII source code and offers a data federation option based on this code,
which is tightly integrated with the PowerCenter product, providing a single, unified enterprise
data integration platform.
· Ipedo. Founded in 2000, the company primarily focuses on EII. It offers access using common
protocols, including SQL, SOAP, UDDI, JDBC, ODBC, XML, XQUERY, and WSDL. It provides
built-in aggregate computation on Web services and has a built-in XML rules engine. The
recent Ipedo XIP 4.2 release focuses on data governance, Web services publishing, and dynamic
failover redirection. Ipedo offers support for most packaged applications, including salesforce.
com, SAP, and Siebel, as well as heterogeneous DBMSes. It supports modeling tools to build
logical and physical views. The firm supports metadata repositories, caching, and transaction
management but lags in data quality, transformation, and enterprise search as it pertains to
information fabric.
· MetaMatrix. Previously an EII player, MetaMatrix is now one of the technology leaders
in information fabric, along with IBM and BEA. Although it has comprehensive support
for information fabric components, it lacks support for enterprise search and data quality.
MetaMatrix has credible customer deployments that span various vertical industries, including
financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail. In August 2006, MetaMatrix
further extended its data services offering by making enhancements to include XQuery
transformation, Web services metadata import, XSD message visualization, and performance
improvements. In addition, by partnering with DataDirect Technologies, it now extends its
data source coverage to mainframe data, including Adabas, Natural, CICS, DB2, IMS/DB, and
VSAM.
· Microsoft. Microsoft has support for a service registry, design-time metadata repository, search,
data quality and transformation, and transaction and security management, yet it still trails
behind IBM and Oracle in the information fabric space. Microsoft has not yet integrated all of
its information fabric components and therefore requires architects and developers to do the
integration themselves. In addition, Microsoft does not offer strong support for distributed
data caching or federated data access across different platforms and databases. However, the
company is developing a new technology that will be relevant to information services: the
Entity Data Model (EDM). EDM is part of a future release of ADO.NET, which is purely for
programmers but will provide developers with an abstraction similar to some information
service use cases.
· Oracle. Oracle’s focus on IaaS has been average, mainly concentrating on homogeneous
data like Oracle-related applications and databases. However, it does offer many of the
information fabric components, including metadata repository, caching, search, data quality

and transformation, security, and transactional management. These are not offered as an IaaS
integrated solution, although Oracle Consulting has done some projects to integrate these
components for individual customers doing IaaS. Recently, the firm announced an agreement
to acquire Tangosol, which puts it ahead of other DBMS vendors in distributed data caching
and in-memory technologies and one step closer in offering a complete IaaS offering. Forrester
expects Oracle to integrate these components in the near future, and it could offer a complete
IaaS solution as early as 2008.
· Progress Software. Progress Software is another player that has some of the key components
needed to assemble an information fabric solution, but it has not yet done so. Its capabilities are
spread across many product lines: DataDirect, DataXtend, Sonic Software, and others. Some of
Progress’ customers have integrated its technologies to implement information services within
a broader IaaS strategy, but Progress does not yet market these elements combined in this way.
Forrester expects it to do so, albeit gradually and with a conservative business approach.
· Sybase. Nearly two years after the acquisition of Avaki, a company that focused on enterprise
data virtualization, Sybase has not aggressively exploited its market potential. The company
does have several key information fabric components, including metadata repository, service
registry, data quality and transformation, transaction management, and enterprise search, but
it trails in security management and runtime metadata repository as it relates to information
fabric. Forrester expects to see Sybase integrating its information fabric components over the
next two years.
· Tangosol. This company focuses primarily on in-memory data management and caching
solutions for J2EE and .NET applications. Tangosol virtualizes data and services, which it
performs by coordinating updates of data using clusterwide concurrency control. This is
an advanced approach, but it doesn’t work equally well for all customer use cases requiring
caching. Tangosol supports application servers such as Apache Tomcat, BEA WebLogic, IBM
WebSphere, and JBoss. Although its distributed caching solution is among the most advanced,
it lags behind other information fabric players in support for service registry, enterprise search,
data quality and transformation, security management, and transaction management to support
data virtualization. Combined with other vendors’ information fabric products, Tangosol can
provide a good solution when the partner product supplies these missing elements but requires
a caching partner. Recently, Oracle made a bid to acquire Tangosol. This is a win-win situation
for both companies that will help take in-memory and distributed data caching technologies to
the mainstream, especially when implementing IaaS.
· Terracotta. Terracotta offers a distributed data cache to deliver high-performance throughput

for large Java applications, but its main business focus is on the use of its Java Virtual Machine
(JVM) clustering technology to enable Java applications to scale more easily. Terracotta
currently does not support a global metadata repository or data access across heterogeneous

platforms. Recently, it moved to an open source licensing model for its Java clustering product
in an effort to increase adoption.
· Xcalia. Founded in Paris in 2000 to provide data access middleware, Xcalia now provides a
data services solution for building composite applications using SOA. Xcalia has more than
50 customers across several vertical industries, including insurance, banking, retail, and
telecommunications. Its solutions are primarily focused on meeting the needs of developers
building new applications that need to integrate access to a wide range of disparate data sources
and application services. Its earlier solutions were more comparable to a Java object/relational
mapping technology, but since mid-2006, Xcalia has added support for information services.
Although the firm has strong support for several fabric components, including distributed
transaction management, distributed information access, and transformation, it does not offer
data quality and information security. The solution features the Xcalia Intermediation Core
(XIC) as an enterprise-service-bus-like foundation that includes dynamic business process
orchestration and a metadata repository.
R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S
INFORMATION FABRIC SHOULD GUIDE YOUR IAAS STRATEGY

Implementing the full information fabric architecture remains complex, and not all enterprises
require all components; therefore, architects should focus on a few components initially and
build the architecture over time. Only architects facing the most advanced requirements should
consider a broader implementation in the near term. To start building the information fabric,
enterprises should keep these key points in mind:
· Look at vendors that offer comprehensive information fabric solutions. Architects who
want to take a fast path to a more complete information fabric architecture should begin
with vendors that offer the broadest set of components, such as BEA, IBM, and MetaMatrix.
· Expect customization and integration efforts. With no single vendor offering a complete
and integrated information fabric solution, architects and developers will initially need to
expend additional efforts to fill gaps and integrate best-of-breed add-ons.
· Don’t ignore information quality. When architecting information fabric, data quality is an
important component that sometimes takes a back seat. Architects should ensure that data
quality is given top-priority rights from the initial planning stages.
· Existing applications will usually require changes to integrate with the fabric. For
existing applications to invoke information fabric services, architects should plan for some
application customization, except where the fabric happens to provide the style of interface
already in use, such as SQL. Architects and developers should usually plan to begin with a
read-only interface to the fabric and extend to include write capability after proving the

initial architecture. Another factor that can drive the need for application change is design
optimization for cache usage, as in the Wachovia example.
· Distributed data caching remains critical. Since accessing disparate data sources in real
time is often a slow process, firms should consider distributed data caching to deliver fast
response times, along with other options like staging information to intermediate storage
managed by the fabric.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Companies Interviewed For This Document
BEA Systems JP Morgan Chase
Cingular Wireless MetaMatrix
Citibank Microsoft
Composite Software Modus Operandi
eBay Oracle
Endeca Technologies Sybase
GemStone Systems Tangosol
GigaSpaces Terracotta
IBM United Parcel Service of America (UPS)
Informatica Wachovia
Ipedo Xcalia
ENDNOTES
1
Enterprises are facing growing challenges in using disparate sources of data managed by different
applications, including problems with integration, security, performance, availability, and quality. Business
users need fast, real-time, and reliable information to make business decisions, while IT wants to lower
costs, minimize complexity, and improve operational efficiency. New technology is emerging that Forrester
has dubbed “information fabric,” defined as a virtualized data layer that integrates heterogeneous data and
content repositories in real time. See the January 9, 2006, Trends “Information Fabric: Enterprise Data
Virtualization.”
2
IaaS has exploded on the scene over the past two years, moving from an obscure topic to one of the top
usage scenarios in SOA. Forrester expects that in 2007, a majority of large enterprises will add SOA to the
list of ways they integrate information. See the March 22, 2007, Question & Answer “Information-As-A-
Service: What’s Behind This Hot New Trend?”

3
As an example of this trend, consider Microsoft’s enterprise content management (ECM) support in Office
SharePoint Server 2007. The platform consists of a common content storage layer based on Windows
SharePoint Services — a core set of ECM services powered by Office SharePoint Server 2007 — and
specific ECM Suite components addressing document management, records management, Web content
management, and eForms management. It offers user interface options within the Microsoft Office 2007
client applications and Office SharePoint Server 2007 and to third-party applications via Web services. See
the March 2, 2007, Tech Choices “Microsoft’s 2007 Enterprise Content Management Platform.”
4
Although a canonical model is not an essential feature of an information fabric or an IaaS strategy, it is a
common pattern in more mature organizations using IaaS. See the March 22, 2007, Question & Answer
“Information-As-A-Service: What’s Behind This Hot New Trend?”
5
IBM’s Information Server puts IBM ahead of its competition in total functionality, but integration of its
various components will still take time and effort. See the December 28, 2006, Quick Take “Information
Server Takes IBM One Step Close To Delivering Information-As-A-Service.”

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TRENDS

Information Fabric 2.0: Enterprise

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION FABRIC ADDRESSES A BROAD RANGE OF APPLICATIONS

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Merrill Lynch Uses MetaMatrix To Achieve A Uniﬁed View of Information

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

Wachovia Chooses Tangosol To Meet High-Performance Application Requirements

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

A Manufacturing Company Applies IBM’s Information Server To Enhance Business

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

volume. We used the Information Server middleware to support common information

A Year Of Experience Teaches Many Information Fabric Lessons

· Additional components are needed to support an enterprisewide fabric. Although the

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Figure 1 Logical Design

41387 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

INFORMATION FABRIC WILL BECOME A STRATEGIC RESOURCE FOR ENTERPRISES

· Business intelligence and dashboards. In addition to supporting traditional applications,

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

· Content management applications. As many of today’s leading content repositories

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

Figure 2 Multiple-Fabric Integration

41387 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

INFORMATION FABRIC ARCHITECTURE IS MATURING

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Figure 3 Physical View Of Information Fabric

Distributed information cache

IT policies IT/industry standards

Integrated enterprise search engine

Distributed information access

41387 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

· Distributed runtime metadata repository (new). A runtime metadata repository is similar

· Transaction management (new). Two-phase commit technology supports transactions across

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

· Information security (new). An important component of the information fabric is data

THE INFORMATION FABRIC VENDOR LANDSCAPE IS GROWING AND ALSO

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

Figure 4 Vendor Landscape

Distributed information cache P P

Design-time metadata repository

Distributed runtime metadata repository

Integrated enterprise search

Distributed information access

Distributed transaction management

Yes Partial P = Partner

41387 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

· GigaSpaces. Focused primarily on high-performance transactional and real-time analytical

· Informatica. Positioned primarily as a pure-play data integration vendor that focuses on

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

· Terracotta. Terracotta oﬀers a distributed data cache to deliver high-performance throughput

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

INFORMATION FABRIC SHOULD GUIDE YOUR IAAS STRATEGY

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited April 9, 2007

April 9, 2007 © 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Headquarters Research and Sales Oﬃces

For a complete list of worldwide locations,