Composite Software announced the newest release of its flagship product, the Composite Information Server. Composite Information Server 4.6 provides a range of new functionality that enhances performance, services-oriented architecture (SOA) enablement, access and development process capabilities. Now businesses and government agencies can scale their data virtualization initiatives to the enterprise level.

“Data virtualization, like its server, applications and storage virtualization counterparts, is proving an excellent, non-invasive strategy for delivering better agility and lower total cost of ownership,” said Jim Green, chairman and CEO of Composite Software. “In a world of extreme data complexity, endless disparate data silos and exponentially growing data volumes, new data integration approaches that help overcome this complexity have become critical. It is refreshing to see how customers are successfully adopting and benefiting from data virtualization. And you know it is real, when the early adopters advance from tactical to enterprisewide deployments.”

Composite customer, General Manager Dean Alms of Visage Mobile, noted, "We are excited about the possibilities that the newest Composite Information Server provide to us for virtualizing and abstracting complex data from across our mobility management data sources."

To support enterprise-scale workload and performance demands, Composite Information Server 4.6 features a 64-bit native Java Virtual Machine that dramatically improves the performance of large, complex queries. With the increased capacity, more of Composite’s data query and federation functions now run in memory, with fewer hits to disk. The newest Information Server’s 64-bit technology also accelerates Composite’s query and caching toolset.

With SOA becoming ever more prevalent as an enterprise architecture strategy, strong support for SOAP/JMS is a critical requirement. Composite Information Server 4.6 now publishes data services using SOAP/JMS binding, consumes SOAP/JMS based services, and describes SOAP/JMS services in WSDL. TIBCO Enterprise Message Service and Progress SonicMQ are the first platforms supported, with others planned for future releases.

Further enhancing enterprise-wide data virtualization deployments, Composite Information Server 4.6 adds several new or enhanced data sources and clients to the already long list of technologies supported. Composite customers can now access any data source supported by DataDirect  Technologies’ Shadow RTE Server driver for mainframe databases, such as DB2, Adabas, IMS DB, CICS and VSAM. This release also includes updates to Composite’s PeopleSoft and salesforce.com data access offerings. And on the client side, Composite Information Server 4.6 now supports native ADO.Net driver functions, allowing customers to leverage their investments into ADO.NET based client and development environments.

Whereas the Composite Information Server 4.5 and the Active Cluster option announced in June 2007 focused on enabling the run-time management aspects of enterprise data virtualization, the 4.6 release delivers several new features targeted at design and development. In moving from project to enterprise, team development enablement, intelligent use of resources and alignment with common software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes become critical. Composite Information Server 4.6 now offers improved collaboration capabilities, including resource externalization and resource locking to enable better resource sharing across projects and tighter design-time controls as new data virtualization services are designed and developed.