Mountain View, CA — May 6, 2003 — The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent to Contivo, a provider of automated data integration solutions, for a key element of the company's flagship application.
U.S. Patent No. 6,560,608 applies to the method and apparatus for automatically selecting a rule, which enables Contivo's products to resolve data differences through the automated selection and application of a business or data transformation rule.
The patent protects a key element of the core technology driving Contivo's Enterprise Integration Modeling (EIM) solution. The provider said that this technology helps enterprises save time and money by reducing the complexity of integration projects.
Comprised of Analyst and EIM Server, Contivo's solution automates data transformation for application integration with runtime support for existing integration platforms. Systems integration requires that data and messages between systems be mapped to each other, which requires a sophisticated conversion procedure or computation called "rules" to reconcile the different format types.
Contivo's technology allows users to add new rules that are reusable for subsequent mapping operations. A persistent repository of rules in EIM Server captures the characteristics of source and target message types for automatic retrieval and reuse. Contivo said that this method improves the accuracy and efficiency of mapping because it is not necessary to re-enter a rule multiple times, and the provider asserts that this method is much faster and more scalable than traditional hand-coded data integration.
"Contivo was the first company to develop semantics-based modeling software for data integration," said Dave Hollander, chief technology officer for Contivo. "The patent for our automated method of selecting and applying transformation rules asserts Contivo's leadership in automating data integration."
