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Digital Harbor Injects Intelligence Into Service-Oriented Architectures

Ontology-Based Approach to Composite Applications Turns Integration "Right Side Up" to Offer Increased Business Value

RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 2, 2004--Digital Harbor, a provider of award-winning composite application software, today announced a new solution that makes service-oriented architectures and composite applications more intelligent. Digital Harbor's solution, a standards-based "Business Ontology(TM)," offers a blueprint for how web services can be related to other information sources to deliver more value to users. This advance is revolutionary because it turns SOAs -- powerful for their benefits to IT -- into intelligent information networks that deliver the benefits of services to end-users. The result is radically reduced data integration costs for businesses and improved decision quality for application users.
Deployed by themselves, SOAs promise easier interoperability among systems by providing the interfaces for web services to work together. But the end-game is not just to make life easier for developers; rather, it's to assemble services into composite applications that help users obtain maximum value from their information. Digital Harbor helps make associations among services and other information so that applications more closely match the way people think.

"We're turning integration 'right-side up,'" said Rohit Agarwal, CEO of Digital Harbor. "Beyond the deep plumbing, what organizations need is the ability for business workers and managers to interpret their data and functionality in the context of all related data, people, and processes. Current SOA and Composite Application architectures provide the mechanics to string pieces of data and functionality together, but do not capture their meaning or dynamic relationships. Our Business Ontology injects service-oriented architectures with the intelligence required to help users interpret and act on the information."

Digital Harbor's approach addresses the key problem in cross-functional applications like cross-selling, compliance, logistics, exception analysis, incident response, and business activity monitoring (BAM), where users must put information from multiple sources in context in order to make decisions. The powerful approach extends the computational infrastructure provided by J2EE and SOAs with an information architecture that captures information relationships across systems. These relationships enable business analysts and application developers to build applications against a model of the business without having to code complex functions to connect the pieces by hand. With Digital Harbor, end users can also navigate these relationships dynamically to discover associations among information in different systems. For example, a compliance officer can trace the fact that a mutual fund trade falls just below a discount threshold, and is performed by a person that routinely fails to pass along such discounts to other customers. Because such analysis can be done ad-hoc, this "discovery" capability extends the value of the base application without any recoding.

"Correlation, synthesis, and analysis of cross functional applications, such as compliance solutions, require someone to understand the context in which they are performing their task," states Beth Gold-Bernstein, VP of Strategic Services at ebizQ. "The underlying systems themselves do not contain information regarding the relationship with other applications. A cross-application relationship model, or ontology, is the missing link for making SOA and composite applications a reality."

About PiiE(TM)

Digital Harbor's PiiE platform provides the missing pieces required to connect back-end systems together and deliver them to users in an interactive composite application. The platform fills gaps in today's enterprise software stack with EII, Ontology, and Smart Client technologies that enable business analysts to fuse information from multiple sources and enable business users to consume the resulting applications seamlessly in a live interface. Built on J2EE and XML, PiiE is designed to enable enterprises to extract more value from their existing information, and to help IT departments reduce IT budgets and application development time.

About Digital Harbor

Headquartered in Reston, Virginia with offices in Provo, Utah and Bangalore, India, Digital Harbor develops and markets PiiE(TM), the leading platform for Composite Applications. Digital Harbor is the recipient of the prestigious 2004 Crossroads A-List award, and has been named one of the Top 100 Private Companies by both Red Herring and Always On. Digital Harbor is privately held, profitable, and has raised $10M of funding from Insight Partners. More information is available at www.digitalharbor.com.

Contacts


MindShare PR for Digital Harbor
Heather Fitzsimmons, 650-947-7400
heather@mindsharepr.com

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