Digital Harbor's Enterprise Designer Enhances Information Integration by Leveraging Business Ontologies

Business Wire, April 18, 2005

RESTON, Va. -- Modeling Environment Offers Support for Semantic Integration Standard OWL to Improve Speed and Value of Composite Applications Across the Enterprise

Digital Harbor, a leading provider of software for building and using composite applications, today announced the availability of Enterprise Designer(TM), a modeling environment for composite applications that combines Enterprise Information Integration (EII), Business Process Integration, and Event Integration in a single, user-friendly graphical environment. A key component of Digital Harbor's comprehensive composite application platform, PiiE(TM), Enterprise Designer is a powerful graphical tool that logically links pieces of information from disparate systems as if they were one. This allows enterprises to achieve results three to five times faster than using traditional integration methods.

Many of today's most pressing problems demand the capability to understand, both visually and conceptually, links among different types and sources of information, including composite dashboards, compliance solutions, logistics, cross-selling, and homeland security. Enterprise Designer enables developers and business analysts to use pre-existing models created in ErWin(R) or Rational Rose(R) as a starting point, but goes far beyond traditional "design-time" modeling environments by leveraging the concept of a business ontology to reach across systems to link and relate different types and sources of information in real-time.

"With the release of Enterprise Designer, Digital Harbor has embraced the semantic web," said Mills Davis, senior vice president of TopQuadrant. "Developers using this tool will experience how semantics and open standards such as OWL can simplify and streamline information integration, process interoperability, and deployment of composite applications."

With Enterprise Designer, Digital Harbor delivers the most comprehensive implementation of semantic integration for the enterprise available today. It is:

--Unified: Enterprise Designer is the only product that offers a unified environment for development, integration, deployment, and end user interfaces -- making it easier for enterprises to deliver composite applications without having to rewrite existing applications.

--OWL-Compliant: Enterprise Designer is one of the first enterprise software tools to support the Ontology Web Language (OWL) standard, published by the W3C Organization, to describe relationships at a higher logical level of abstraction.

--Run-Time Deployable: The model -- or ontology -- created using Enterprise Designer can be exported to other OWL-compliant modeling tools, or -- in contrast to today's design time models -- it can be deployed directly in Digital Harbor's run-time environment so that users can interact with the data and relationships in real-time applications.

"As an innovator in composite applications, Digital Harbor is helping to ensure that enterprises are able to leverage the latest advances in standards and capitalize on the power of semantic relationships to deliver integrated real-time information across the enterprise," said Austin Wells, vice president of product management at Digital Harbor. "Digital Harbor's Enterprise Designer provides business analysts and developers an easier approach to integration that uses semantics and relationships to govern how systems interact -- enabling them to complete their work faster and deliver business users a more complete picture of the situation."

Enterprise Designer is available now. For licensing information, contact sales@dharbor.com.

About PiiE(TM)

Built on J2EE and XML, PiiE is designed to enable enterprises to extract more value from their existing information, and to help IT departments radically reduce IT budgets and application development time. Enterprise Designer now joins the platform's two existing components:

--The PiiE Smart Client -- which is Digital Harbor's Composite Application Interface layer, based on its innovative Application Linking and Embedding(TM) technology. PiiE Smart Client provides a secure, standards-based way to deliver internet applications with the functionality of the desktop. It allows organizations to move beyond HTML to XML.

--The PiiE Fusion Server -- which provides a layer of information architecture that sits on top of existing computational infrastructure including J2EE application servers, data sources, and message-based middleware.

About Digital Harbor

Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Digital Harbor develops PiiE(TM), the leading platform for intelligent Composite Applications that help enterprises respond to dynamic events. 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 KPMG/AlwaysOn. Digital Harbor has raised $10M of funding from Insight Partners. For more information, please visit http://www.digitalharbor.com.