The Story of How Data Virtualization Became Data Virtualization

Someone recently asked me about the origin of the Data Virtualization category name. From my unique perspective as the software marketer who drove the term and category’s successful adoption, I enjoyed the chance to share the Data Virtualization category story with them.  And in this blog, I thought I might also share it with you.

So, like every good story, I’ll begin at the beginning.

In the early 2000s the data management term Enterprise Information Integration (EII) came to the fore.  EII was driven by advancements in high-performance query optimization that made data federation at enterprise scale possible for the first time. Wikipedia’s entry on EII claims the vendor Metamatrix, was the source of the term. And organizations such as TDWI and Gartner identified EII as an essential complement to Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), often depicted by three intersecting circles as follows:

In 2005, JP Morganthal published EII’s first book, “Enterprise Information Integration: A Pragmatic Approach.” In that same year,SIGMOD also published a groundbreaking EII compendium white paper authored by Alon Y. Halevy; et al., entitled “Enterprise information integration: successes, challenges and controversies.”

Always on the lookout for new enterprise software opportunities, nearly 30 venture-backed software firms were quick to move into the EII market.  Perhaps you remember Avaki, Ipedo, Journee Software, Metamatrix, XAware and more.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was also a hot market at that time.  Although the goal of SOA is to enable business processes (rather than business intelligence and analytics), business processes also required data on demand.  Examples might include SOA Data Services to look up prices, customer discounts and ship-to-addresses and more within a SOA-enabled order management process.

Gartner’s October 2005 “Management Update: Data Services: The Intersection of Data Integration and SOA,” by Ted Friedman and Jess Thomson was amongst the first pieces of analyst research to address data from the SOA point of view.  Gartner’s definition of Data Services expanded the role of EII from BI to also serve both business process requirements.  Technically it also expanded EII beyond SQL into more SOA type approaches that leveraged then-emerging technologies such as SOAP and XML.

I joined Composite Software, one of the venture-backed EII firms, as Chief Marketing Officer in 2006.