Integrating Information for On Demand Computing

Information integration provides a competitive advantage to businesses and is fundamental to on demand computing. It is strategic area of investment by software companies today whose goal is to provide a unified view of the data regardless of differences in data format, data location and access interfaces, dynamically manage data placement to match availability, currency and performance requirements, and provide autonomic features that reduce the burden on IT staffs for managing complex data architectures. This paper describes the motivation for integrating information for on demand computing, explains its requirements, and illustrates its value through usage scenarios. As shown in the paper, there is still a tremendous amount of research, engineering, and development work needed to make the full information integration vision a reality and it is expected that software companies will continue to heavily invest in aggressively pursing the information integration vision.