Digital Harbor Announces New Version of PiiE Designed to Help Organizations Connect the Dots and Achieve Real-Time Access to Information

RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 8, 2004--

Composite application platform PiiE(TM) 4.5 adds new dashboarding, semantic web services, and EII features

“Today's managers have so many applications and so much information that their primary challenge is to link many pieces of information together to get a complete picture of the situation. The features in this release place the power of information linking in the hands of the user”

Digital Harbor, the leading provider of software for composite applications, today introduced the newest version of its award-winning PiiE(TM) platform. Designed to help end-users in both government and commercial enterprises easily and quickly respond to dynamic business events, PiiE 4.5 links existing information from many different sources into a single hybrid application, so users can form a complete picture of a situation. This advancement in the industry--integration designed for users--is significant and timely because an increasing number of people in mainstream enterprises are knowledge workers--people who need ready access to information to make informed decisions. As the number of applications proliferates and the amount of data grows, the need for business people to easily "connect the dots" is becoming increasingly acute.

To help organizations connect the dots, PiiE 4.5 offers new dashboarding, semantic web services, and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) features that help knowledge workers in a variety of industries including financial, energy, transportation, and healthcare perform cross-functional tasks like compliance, case management, cross-selling, logistics, and incident management. Government agencies such as the Department of Defense can use PiiE 4.5 to address multi-dimensional problems like horizontal fusion, network-centric warfare, and threat analysis and response.

"Today's managers have so many applications and so much information that their primary challenge is to link many pieces of information together to get a complete picture of the situation. The features in this release place the power of information linking in the hands of the user," said Rohit Agarwal, Digital Harbor's president and CEO. "Using PiiE allows for very fast deployment of integrated composite applications -- companies can deploy an operational system within 60-90 days rather than the usual 6-12 months."

The combination in PiiE 4.5 of dashboarding and analysis capabilities with semantics, ontologies, and EII means that users can link information contained in ERP applications with web services, XML documents, JMS messages, and business processes, as well as data in custom-developed financial applications, providing greater transparency without expensive modifications to these installed systems. The new features include:

-- Live dashboards: which allow users to see real-time information from several systems on one interactive screen for business activity monitoring (BAM). Live dashboards allow users to interact with information in the form that makes the most sense, using rich client components like maps, timelines, and charts, along with the ability to set thresholds, apply highlights, and get live updates.

-- Case management: which helps users link structured with unstructured data, business processes, and events. Users doing investigation to build a case or conduct project research can follow train-of-thought linking to perform ad-hoc analysis by asking questions, and can annotate semantic objects to provide context for collaboration.

-- EII functions: which allow IT to perform easier logical integration of multiple datasources (including relational, XML, JCA, JMS, and web services) via embedded semantics, transformations, and virtual joins. The ontology-based approach provides intelligence to event- and service-oriented architectures (Intelligent SOA) through web services linking and semantics.

-- Standards support: which enables portal interoperability via JSR-168 and event and messaging compatibility via graphical JMS, EJB, and Web Services binding. PiiE 4.5 also supports the new W3C Semantics Standard for OWL Import/Export (Ontology Web Language)

In addition, the release enhances the architectural underpinnings which make it fast and easy to link different pieces of information and functionality required in composite applications. Enhancements include new security capabilities to pass the most stringent authorization and network configurations required by the US military (such as logging into multiple external databases using different credentials), centralized management of reusable resources, extensibility via customizable menus and logic, and support for complex data types.

PiiE 4.5 is available now. For more information, please visit http://www.digitalharbor.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. The platform consists of two primary components:

-- The PiiE Smart Client 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 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.