Composite Software, Inc., a provider of data virtualization middleware, has expanded its federal operations in response to accelerating government agency demand. The company increased its federal team with key new hires in sales, sales engineering, and services, and solidified a new GSA partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp., a government IT solutions provider, to build upon a second consecutive year of greater than 50% revenue growth.
"In 2008, our business grew 70% and, in 2009, our business grew another 50%," Jim Green, CEO of Composite Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The growth continues, he adds. "Q1 of this year was 62% above Q1 of last year."
According to Composite, government agencies including the Business Transformation Agency (BTA), the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and the Department of Transportation (DOT), as well as several unnamed intelligence agencies, joined the ranks of Composite customers in 2009. Addressing the challenge posed by siloed data spread across multiple source systems, these agencies have adopted Composite's data virtualization to fulfill both project-level data federation and to share data across the enterprise in service-oriented architectures (SOAs), as well as extend their data warehouse investments.
"The proposition that our company is based on is that people need to share information. Our technology is quite complicated, but it basically allows everybody to have access to all the information that is available," says Green. This is particularly difficult in large organizations, he points out. "We work with enterprises and agencies that may have thousands of databases literally" and so information sharing can be a "very big technical" problem in those scenarios.
To better serve its federal customers, Green says, Composite is adding a substantial number of people in the DC area. Composite Software's Reston, Va.-based federal division now includes Mike Aube, formerly of Computer Associates, and David Heller, formerly of Metastorm Inc., who join as sales engineers; Mike Tinius, formerly of BEA, who joins as an enterprise architect; and Ed Anderson, who joins in inside sales. Composite's federal professional services team also added two new senior-level consultants: Michael Gardner from Verizon Communications Inc., and Mike Shen, formerly with Northrop Grumman Corp. Bolstering its internal team, Composite Software also entered into a new reseller partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corporation, to provide federal agencies with deep expertise in Composite and other leading software solutions, along with extensive procurement process assistance.
With the addition of Carahsoft, Composite's federal partners now include integrators such as CSC, Data Interfuse, Information Management Solutions Consultants (IMSC), Integrated Secure, Lockheed Martin, The MITRE Corporation, and SAIC.
The traditional way of dealing with the need to aggregate siloed information is to build a data warehouse. "But if you are dealing with inter-agency cooperation, you can't do that," says Geen. "In fact, it is sometimes illegal to do that. The base idea as opposed to information consolidation is let's deal with information sharing," he explains. If you have got a mountain of data and someone is interested in a small part, you can carve that off and share that part with them so they can be more effective.
The concept of information sharing "is very, very technical," says Green. "It turns out that we are the company that has focused on it and made it work, as opposed to numerous others that have participated in this general area but never really had that technical expertise to succeed at the level that we have, and we are seeing a significant amount of demand."
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