Composite Software announced today the availability of two new white papers from leading industry analysts Rick van der Lans and Rick Sherman. The white papers are the latest additions to the Composite Software Data Virtualization Leadership Series™, a forum for white papers, articles and webcasts by leading IT industry analysts and advanced data virtualization practitioners.

van der Lans is an independent analyst, consultant, author, and lecturer specializing in data warehousing, business intelligence, service oriented architectures and database technology. He founded R20/Consultancy in 1987 and in recent years has focused on data virtualization, resulting in his new book Data Virtualization for Business Intelligence Systems: Revolutionizing Data Integration for Data Warehouses.

In his white paper, SAP HANA and Data Virtualization: Competitors or Complements?, van der Lans writes that because of the data integration capabilities offered by both SAP HANA and data virtualization solutions, organizations often look at the products as competitors, but he recommends they be viewed as complementary. The white paper explains both technologies and clarifies the commonalities and differences between the two solutions. Additionally, the advantages of combining the two are described, and a section presents four different BI architectures in which HANA and data virtualization are deployed and complement each other.

“The SAP HANA database server is a powerful and feature-rich, in-memory, SQL database Server, which includes data integration and other BI-related features,” van der Lans said. “Data virtualization servers, such as the Composite Data Virtualization Platform, offer on-demand data integration capabilities, which results in more agile BI systems. Deploying both technologies in a BI system results in one of the most highly scalable, fastest and most agile BI architectures that can be designed today,” van der Lans added. “Therefore, I recommend architects study both technologies closely.”

Sherman is the founder of Athena IT Solutions, which provides business intelligence, data integration and data warehouse consulting, training and vendor services. In addition to 20 years of experience in BI solutions, Sherman writes on IT topics and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

In his white paper, A Better Way to Fuel Analytical Needs, Sherman writes that as the BI industry matures and businesses learn more about the power of information, the demand for analytics is being driven more by its business value than by its technical value. The potential value of business analytics and the amount of data to fuel it are significantly expanding, yet BI and data-integration backlogs are constraining enterprises from tapping that value, Sherman writes.

“Enterprises have been accumulating and accessing more and more data for years, now is the time to leverage that data using business analytics,” Sherman said. “Unfortunately, business analysts often spend more time reconciling conflicting numbers from each reporting silo than actually analyzing the data to improve the business. The best answer to the limitation of physically integrating data into a data warehouse and direct access to data sources on a point-to-point basis is expanding your data integration to include data virtualization,” Sherman said. “Data virtualization enables IT and data-savvy business people to catalog, provide access to and integrate various data sources.”

“HANA and analytics are top of mind at every large enterprise today,” said Robert Eve, Composite Software Executive VP of Marketing. “We are pleased to provide data virtualization audiences with white papers from two of our industry’s leading authorities on these topics.”

Composite Software, Inc. is the data virtualization market leader. The world’s largest financial services firms, pharmaceutical companies, communications providers, energy producers and government agencies rely on Composite data virtualization offerings to simplify information access. Composite Software is privately held, with corporate headquarters in San Mateo, CA.

To contact Composite, please call (650) 227-8200, visit us on the Web at http://www.compositesw.com, or follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/compositesw. To learn more about data virtualization visit the DV Café microsite, the Data Virtualization Channel and the Data Virtualization Leadership Blog.

Composite Software is a registered trademark of Composite Software, Inc. Copyright © Composite Software, Inc. 2012.