EII: A database of databases

The benefit of all of this for IT departments is that it improves efficiency. EII allows companies to get real-time operating data from multiple systems with minimum effort. In-house testing at IBM indicated that its EII tool can cut the time taken to hand-code programs by as much as 65 percent.

Moreover, EII can dramatically increase both speed and flexibility. "EII fetches data in real-time as it is needed, rather than requiring a complicated data movement process," explains Russom. "Also, because EII relies on virtual metadata constructs, it's possible to create new views of data very quickly, to cope with evolving business requirements."

As with any emerging market, not everyone agrees on precisely what constitutes EII, and there is some confusion as to how EII differs from other data integration tools. For example, data extraction and transformation tools are used to aggregate huge volumes of batch data into data warehouses; and EAI is widely used to pull together data from multiple sources.

EII and EAI: What's the difference?
While there is certainly some overlap between EAI and EII, Aberdeen Group's Kernochen says the two technologies are ultimately complementary. "EAI picks up data associated with an application and places it into another database associated with another application. What EII does it provide a database-management veneer to all of those databases," says Kernochen.

Actual deployments of EII technology are still relatively hard to track down. In the UK, one of the earliest deployments is at the Ministry of Defence, which is using software from MetaMatrix to provide a single view of its complex and long supply chain. In the US, telecoms giant Verizon uses EII software to provide customer-service staff with a single view of customer data.

Kernochen argues that most mid-sized and large enterprises stand to benefit from EII technology. "The potential of EII is enormous for companies with lots of data on the desktops, a data warehouse, a couple of Web sites and half a dozen databases," he says. "What EII does is give you more value from that data by giving users the ability to ask questions of all the data, across all of those systems." Kernochen's own dream EII application is simple enough: "Imagine how powerful it would be if Amazon could combine its recommendations with its supply-chain data and tell me when books by my favourite authors are about to come out," he says.