Commentary from Mike Seashols on how Global Data Synchronization Powers The Real-time Enterprise

By Mike Seashols
May 14, 2003

Article URL: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=6667

In the Information Age, data is an organization's most valuable asset. From a business perspective, organizations that can efficiently capture, move, and manage data are better able to generate and uncover information that drives success. A clearer understanding of customers and prospects leads to better service and more new business. Insight into markets, supply chain, and partners enhances decision making, and helps organizations gain market share and outmaneuver the competition.

Many of the business initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s were built on these precepts. ERP systems were widely embraced as a way for organizations to leverage data more effectively. Data warehouses, data marts, and operational data stores became standard technologies for gaining insight into the enterprise, and conducting marketing analyses and long range planning. Web-based applications became critical for customer- and partner-facing processes including sales, operations tracking, and customer service.

From an IT perspective, these initiatives have led to two significant challenges: (a) corporate data loads have grown by orders of magnitude — to the point where terabyte-size databases are now common; and (b) enterprise data has become silo-ed within heterogeneous systems. While these problems have become more acute, demand has grown for timely, or instantaneous, access to critical data. As reflected in initiatives such as Microsoft's .Net, HP's Zero Latency Enterprise, and the Gartner Group's Business Activity Monitoring, the real-time enterprise is becoming the working model for twenty-first century organizations.

For CIOs, the challenge lies in providing real-time access to the vast amount of enterprise data residing in ERM systems, data warehouses, storage area networks, and other systems across the organization. Achieving this sophisticated level of data availability requires solutions to a number of difficult issues, including application integration, business continuity, and data movement and transformation on an enormous scale. Point solutions can be effective for some of these individual matters, but solving the larger challenge requires a unified approach. A strategy that enables CIOs to quickly implement real-time processes and maximize the value of data throughout the organization is the logical path.

GoldenGate is a software provider that delivers an innovative new approach to real-time computing: Global Data Synchronization. Enabling businesses to integrate high volumes of data in real time throughout the enterprise, the GoldenGate Global Data Synchronization platform captures, transforms, and delivers data at the database layer, which provides important advantages in the areas of performance and adaptability. GoldenGate's innovative technology is compatible with all major database platforms, hardware architectures, and operating systems.

GoldenGate provides secure data synchronization for some of the largest corporate implementations with the highest transaction volumes. For instance, GoldenGate is used to provide 24x7x365 business continuity on the busiest shared ATM network in the world. A major teaching hospital uses the platform to stream real-time patient information to doctors and nurses whether at the hospital, in the office, or on the road. Finally, a major payment solutions provider uses GoldenGate to integrate data across heterogeneous systems in order to provide up-to-the-minute information on transactions through its customer Web site.

In order for a corporation to transform itself into a real-time enterprise, it must be able to meet certain key criteria:

• Speed — Moving data at sub-second speeds
• Volume — Handling terabyte-sized data loads
• Diversity — Interfacing with a variety of databases and operating systems

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