IRI, The CoSort Company
Transforming and Protecting Big Data Faster and More Affordably

To speed data's time to value within managed data infrastructures, most CIOs are still facing a complex, costly exercise of cobbling together data integration platforms and new hardware, and/or unproven Hadoop, NoSQL, or analytic projects that are still hard to staff. That's because those technologies—along with specialized platforms for DLP, EMM, ETL, MDM, and self-service BI – have been the ones addressing newer data sources and getting the hype.

What's driving this unfortunate reality is the need for technical solutions, including software, which can handle the variety, velocity, and veracity of modern data sources, and can scale linearly as their volumes increase. What those responsible for monitoring, munging, and monetizing data would prefer, however, is a way to combine and mine data in a robust “single pane-of-glass”—a standard interface in which to profile, cleanse and harmonize disparate data, perform suitable analysis, and mask it to comply with privacy laws at the same time.

“Big data promises to deliver quality insights by blending and analyzing internal and external data sources,” says David Friedland, Vice President and COO, Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. And he adds that although that blending is no trivial matter, “it need not lead to a disillusioning, over-priced failure, either.”

The company’s flagship CoSort utility “began as a mainframe sort and data migration tool, became an ETL tool accelerator and alternative, and is now also a simple, scalable, and secure way to package, protect, and provision big data without Hadoop.”

CoSort is now a constituent product in the IRI Data Manager Suite alongside FACT for parallel database unloads, and NextForm for data migration and replication. “These products use the same metadata as CoSort, and are faster for data transformation, reporting, and preparation than COBOL, SQL, and ETL. “They are also easier to code and cheaper than last generation ETL tools, and less risky than Apache projects,” points out Friedland.

CoSort also gave rise to products in the IRI Data Protector Suite. RowGen uses the same CoSort metadata and Eclipse GUI to create and populate realistic, structurally, and referentially correct test data for databases, without the need for production data. FieldShield finds and protects sensitive data to comply with data privacy laws such as GLBA, HIPAA, LOPD, PCI, and POPI. “IRI's seamless protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in its core products allays data privacy concerns during mashups between internal and external data sets,” states Friedland.

IRI's seamless protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in its core products allays data privacy concerns during mashups between internal and external data sets

Friedland revealed that IRI is completing a total data management platform that will “include the current products, support multiple Hadoop engines, collaborate with legacy ETL tool conversion technology and eventually, feature self-service BI that leverages the same metadata infrastructure.” IRI Voracity will be “that one pane of glass built on Eclipse, CoSort, and Hadoop for data discovery, integration, migration, governance, and analytics,” he explained.

The platform will offer ergonomic job design and management choices for different kinds of users who want to use the same product, and work in the same space. Friedland expects that IT managers in the SMB (Small and Medium Business) segment and budget-conscious CIOs in large companies should be the most receptive to Voracity, as “it can speed their transition to digital business devoid of the costs and risks of proprietary hardware, complex software products, and disjointed code,” he concluded.