Progress' New Peerdirect Keeps Data Within Reach

The new company's offering, dubbed Peer-Direct Distributed Enterprise, is a suite of products that distributes data and applications across remote locations.

By moving information from a central data center to the edge of a network, the PeerDirect suite enables users to get to that data more quickly.

"You get a high-quality user experience because we provide local access to the data and let users take data and applications and use them on their laptop, on an airplane or in a hotel room without having to build special-purpose applications for every kind of device," said Britt Johnson, chief strategy officer at PeerDirect, based here.

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The PeerDirect Distributed Enterprise suite gives remote users access to data even when thy're not connected to the network.

Remote workers have access to data even when they're not connected to the network, and each user can replicate only the portion of the database they need, Johnson said.

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The PeerDirect suite offers data protection as well, since there are multiple replicated databases across the enterprise and failover to another database is automatic, he said.

For Aero Systems, which specializes in repairing government and commercial aircrafts and providing the aviation industry with supplies, the PeerDirect suite turned out to be a real time-saver.

Aero Systems needed a better way to feed maintenance information into a central management system developed in-house.

"PeerDirect has solved a fairly large problem for us in how we update information in our central depository," said Mark Probert, operations manager at Aero Systems, Miami Springs, Fla. "With the previous system, [all these updates were done manually and file transfers were incredibly time-consuming and prone to errors."

With PeerDirect, information about ongoing aircraft repairs is uploaded automatically to a central repository, and there are controls in place to avoid the replication of data updates, Probert said.

"Any application that requires the overall configuration of a database to be known at any moment in time is ripe for PeerDirect, and that applies to thousands of apps," he said.

That's why PeerDirect, whose 30 or so customers include AT&T and BankOne, is focusing its channel strategy on ISVs and software developers, Johnson said.

PeerDirect expects to gain "decent traction" in various vertical markets,including retail, which has a lot of distributed workers, Johnson said. "ISVs often struggle when it comes to finding appropriate technology at a price point that allows them to build distributed systems," he said.

Remote workers, in particular, stand to benefit from using PeerDirect, said Ian Campbell, chief research officer at Nucleus Research. "A good example of how [PeerDirect can be used is [to help sales reps interact with CRM systems," Campbell said. "The reps can take information on the road with them and use that information to interact with clients and update [account data on the fly, knowing that when they go back to the office the information will be synced up with the database."

The openness of PeerDirect's technology is yet another feature that should appeal to IT shops, Johnson said.

The suite's patented bidirectional replication technology allows any database, whether from Oracle, Sybase or another vendor, to talk bidirectionally to any other database. That means an enterprise customer doesn't need to have a single corporate database but can deploy hundreds of replicated, synchronized databases, Johnson said. All of those repositories can be managed from a central location, he added.

A customer, for example, could deploy one Oracle database in the corporate data center, multiple open-source databases in remote offices and Microsoft databases on mobile computers, then synchronize the same application across all databases. "To be offline or disconnected and still able to update and interact with multiple databases is something unique in the vendor world," Campbell said.