 Innovative
Routines International (IRI), Inc. is The CoSort Company. Headquartered
in Melbourne, Florida, IRI celebrated 30 years in business in 2008. Click
here to listen to the Business Intelligence Network's Solution
Spotlight on IRI. This executive interview marks the occasion and reviews
the company's core technologies.
A Pioneer in Open Systems
IRI was founded as Information Resources, Inc. of New York in May, 1978.
Its mainframe sort specialists recreated coroutine sort (CoSort) technology first for the personal computer -- CP/M 80 and 86 in 1980 and MS-DOS in 1982. Unix CoSort was first developed on an AT&T 3B2 in 1985 and released in 1986, long before wide adoption of this multi-user O/S in commerce. Thanks to Unix CoSort, IRI began to grow more rapidly in 1990, amid the mainframe downsizing trend that continues today. IRI's satisfied installed base also grows with world's largest data warehouses on Windows and Unix, and from CoSort's popular job syntax that is shared and supported by multiple applications.
Many mainframe sort users are familiar with CoSort's high-level sort control language (SortCL) and COBOL invocation choices. They prefer the unique join capabilities, rich reporting features, SQL logic, and centralized metadata of SortCL to the less functional and more cryptic syntax of legacy tools and procedures. In addition, CoSort is the only product providing multiple standalone utility programs, third-party sort replacements, customized user exits, and API choices for all levels of enterprise use -- from sort novices through seasoned developers.
All major Unix hardware manufacturers, including: HP, IBM, Intel, Siemens, Sun, and Unisys, continue to seek CoSort benchmarks and cross-certifications as they recommend CoSort to their customers. In addition, many leading DBMS, data warehousing, and vertical-industry ISVs -- as well as consultants in these spaces -- embed or recommend the use of CoSort technology within applications to improve performance in high data volume environments.
Growth through Innovation
In a key expansion move in 1995, IRI moved to Melbourne, on Florida's high technology "Space Coast," and became Innovative Routines International, Inc. The Company moved to larger space again in 1996, and announced the release of CoSort for Windows NT, Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp. In the autumns of 1998 and 2003, IRI's HQ offices underwent further expansion in the Melbourne area.
In 1997, CoSort became the first Unix sort package to run across SMP CPUs and set industry performance standards. CoSort version 6.2 sorted a gigabyte in under a minute. Later that year, PC Week declared CoSort the fastest sort for Windows NT. In 1999, CoSort 7 was introduced, and featured the only single-pass join technology in the sort market, in addition to extensive drill-down aggregation and cross-calculation functionality. Multi-threaded for SMP servers, CoSort 7 also introduced a unique Java GUI to allow users to read and write SortCL specifications and then execute them locally or remotely on any networked platform.
1998 through 2002 saw increased integration into third-party database, data
warehouse extract-transform-load (ETL), automation, and e-commerce analytic
(webhouse) software. CoSort Version 7.5 was an interim release in 2001 that enhanced
internet and international data type support, made the original API thread-safe,
and improved aggregation and reporting features in SortCL. In 2001, IRI
also lead the sort world by porting CoSort to Intel's 64-bit Itanium platform
and IBM eServer iSeries (AS/400) for Linux and OS/400 PASE.
2003 marked IRI's 25th year and a new "V8 Engine" for CoSort. Using just 6 Sun 12K CPUs, CoSort sorted 2.4GB in 39 seconds, and with just 4 CPUs on an IBM p690, CoSort sorted 1GB in 12 seconds! To serve its rapidly growing base of data warehouse architects, CoSort 8 features a third API call to the "sortcl_routine", unique support for clickstream data types and web log metadata, plus markup language formatting SortCL-based web reports. In addition to supporting Linux on Intel x86 and Itanium platforms, CoSort V8 also runs on IBM's zSeries mainframe eServers and HP-UX on Itanium 2.
Vertical Product Integration
In 2004, IRI enhanced both CoSort's transformation performance along with "point
solutions" for its cross-platform users. The Fast Extract (FACT) product
was introduced to rapidly unload Oracle tables and build metadata for
instant ETL flows through CoSort's SortCL (transformation and reporting
engine) and SQL*Loader. Additional products made or represented by IRI,
show that the company is interested in expanding its data center solution
offerings worldwide. In 2004, IRI also YES! Certified CoSort for SUSE
Linux (SLES) 9 through Novell, and certified on IBM's 64-bit Power5 processor
running AIX 5.3.
In 2005, IRI released CoSort v8.2.2 and 8.2.3 and put its exciting new
test data generator and custom file synthesizer, RowGen, into beta sites.
CoSort became Red Hat Ready (again) with ports to RHEL 4, and is now also
up to date on Solaris 10 on x86 and FreeBSD 5.3 (along with all other
Linux and generally-available Unix and Windows platforms).
In 2006, IRI updated its exclusive sort plug-ins for IBM's DataStage and
Informatica's PowerCenter ETL suites, and partnered with Meta Integration
Technology to automatically convert file layouts in ETL and BI tool repositories
to SortCL and RowGen data definition files. IRI continued to expands its
base of resellers and expert consultants around the world, and worked
hard to enhance the CoSort, FACT, and RowGen tool sets.
2007 marked the start of the CoSort Version 9 era and a major expansion
of functionality and services for solution architects, IT managers, compliance
officers, and application developers. In addition to its already-combinable
file data transformation and reporting functionality, CoSort's SortCL
tool uniquely integrates field-level protections (including anonymization,
de-identification, encryption and pseudonymization) for sensitive files
and file-format conversions -- all in that same job script and I/O pass.
In 2008, RowGen v2 went into general release for the creation of massive,
safe, and intelligent table and flat-file test sets. Featuring powerful
data model processing technology from RapidACE, RowGen can automatically
generate referentially correct test data for multiple databases. IRI
is also a business partner for RapidACE technologies that power through
data model visualization, integration and standardization processes.
Building for Today, and Tomorrow
Indicative of the vision and growth you should expect from a company
called Innovative Routines International are improvements to
two new tools in 2009: NextForm and FieldShield. These uniquely powerful and affordable products for data migration and privay (respectively) leverage
the same metadata as CoSort, FACT, and RowGen. That means that you can
use your existing data layouts, and work with third-party application
metadata supported by the Meta Integration Model Bridge.
Make sure that
you and your system integrator, consulting firm, or application service
provider stay up to date on IRI software developments like these so that
you can continue to benefit from the performance and value these offerings
promise. As always, feel free to contact us if you have any questions, comments or ideas to enhance our products or partnerships. |