Today’s data centers and business applications are radically different and more complex than a decade ago. More servers, complex software, and middleware components support hundreds and thousands of critical enterprise applications.

Business users want fast, reliable, and real-time information to make better business decisions, while IT wants to minimize complexity, improve efficiency, and lower cost. Managing data from disparate sources often increases issues around data integration, security, performance, availability, and quality. Today, enterprise applications are more tightly integrated, so that any change to one application often has a ripple effect on others.

The increased complexity and cost of maintaining applications and databases are motivating enterprises to search for more simplified data management architectures. Enterprises want to focus on business issues rather than deal with technology-related challenges.