Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. is an American software company first known for bringing

mainframe sort merge The Sort/Merge utility is a mainframe program to sort records in a file into a specified order, merge pre-sorted files into a sorted file, or copy selected records. Internally, these utilities use one or more of the standard sorting algorithms, of ...

functionality into open systems. IRI was the first vendor to develop a commercial replacement for the Unix sort command, and combine

data transformation In computing, data transformation is the process of converting data from one format or structure into another format or structure. It is a fundamental aspect of most data integrationCIO.com. Agile Comes to Data Integration. Retrieved from: http ...

and reporting in Unix

batch processing Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...

environments. In 2007, IRI's

coroutine Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative ...

sort ("CoSort") became the first product to collate and convert multi-gigabyte

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

and

LDIF The LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) is a standard plain text data interchange format for representing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory content and update requests. LDIF conveys directory content as a set of records, ...

files, join and

lookup In computer science, a lookup table (LUT) is an array that replaces runtime computation with a simpler array indexing operation. The process is termed as "direct addressing" and LUTs differ from hash tables in a way that, to retrieve a value v wi ...

across multiple files, and apply role-based

data privacy Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data ...

functions (including AES-256 encryption) for fields within sensitive files. IRI is headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, United States, and has resale and support offices in 25 countries, including France, Japan, South Africa, and Brazil. Primary

computing platform A computing platform or digital platform is an environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying ...

partners include HP, IBM,

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

, Red Hat,

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

. CoSort users include: AIM Healthcare, EDS, HSBC Insurance, and Thomson Reuters. The company was named a 'Most Promising Big Data Solution Provider' by CIOReview in 2015 as it launched "Voracity" to support Hadoop processing, NoSQL data sources, etc.

Products

IRI software is designed to transform, convert, report, and protect large data volumes rapidly in distributed, heterogeneous computing environments. These functions are built into the CoSort package or through spin-offs for data extraction, generation, security, and migration. Each tool uses the same graphical IDE built on Eclipse, and metadata format for defining and manipulating data. IRI's open data definition file format is also supported by AnalytiX DS and Meta Integration Technology (MITI) so that third-party ETL, BI, and data modeling tool users can convert or re-use their existing metadata in IRI product environments.

IRI CoSort

CoSort was released for CP/M in 1978,

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

in 1980,

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

in the mid-eighties, and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

in the early nineties, and received a readership award from DMReview magazine in 2000, CoSort was initially designed as a file sorting utility, and added interfaces to replace or convert the sort program parameters used in IBM Infosphere

DataStage IBM InfoSphere DataStage is an ETL tool and part of the IBM Information Platforms Solutions suite and IBM InfoSphere. It uses a graphical notation to construct data integration solutions and is available in various versions such as the Server Ed ...

Informatica Informatica is an American software development company founded in 1993. It is headquartered in Redwood City, California. Its core products include Enterprise Cloud Data Management and Data Integration. It was co-founded by Gaurav Dhillon and Di ...

Micro Focus Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...

COBOL, JCL,

NATURAL Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

, SAS, and SyncSort Unix. In 1992, CoSort added related data manipulation functions through a control language interface based on DEC

VAX/VMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

sort utility syntax, which evolved through the years to handle file-based

data integration Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...

and staging functions in

data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integra ...

ETL operations: CoSort Version 9 releases, begun in 2007, can simultaneously transform, convert, report, and/or protect data for ETL,

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical pr ...

change data capture In databases, change data capture (CDC) is a set of software design patterns used to determine and track the data that has changed so that action can be taken using the changed data. CDC is an approach to data integration that is based on the ide ...

, database load and query, application development, and

data migration Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommis ...

activities. Version 10 was released in 2018, adding support for semi-structured, streaming, and cloud data sources.

IRI Voracity

IRI Voracity is a data management platform released in 2016 for data discovery, integration, migration, governance, and analytics. It consolidates key data curation activities in the IRI Workbench GUI (built on

Eclipse (software) Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It is the second-most-popular IDE for Java development, and, un ...

™), and transforms data in the CoSort engine or optionally in

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filteri ...

, Spark, Spark Stream, Storm, or Tez. Voracity includes most standalone IRI tools, and adds data profiling, ETL, metadata management, master data management, data federation, and multiple job design and control capabilities.

Other tools

IRI CoSort, IRI FACT, IRI NextForm, and IRI RowGen are products in the ''IRI Data Manager'' suite. IRI FieldShield, IRI CellShield, and IRI DarkShield are products in the ''IRI Data Protector'' suite.

IRI FACT

FACT (FAst ExtraCT) is a high-performance unload utility for

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The wor ...

IBM Db2 Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and ...

, Sybase

ASE Ase may refer to: * Ase, Nigeria, a town in Delta State, Nigeria * -ase, a suffix used for the names of enzymes * Aṣẹ, a West African philosophical concept * American Sign Language (ISO 639-3 code: ase) See also * Åse (disambiguation) * ASE ...

and IQ, SQL Server,

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

Altibase ALTIBASE is a hybrid database, relational open source database management system manufactured by The Altibase Corporation. The software comes with a hybrid architecture which allows it to access both memory-resident and disk-resident tables usin ...

, and Tibero. It exports large tables in parallel to flat files for archive, ETL, reorg, reporting and other applications. FACT and CoSort used together "provide for rapid unloading and transformation of data in Oracle databases in support of ETL processes."

IRI NextForm

NextForm is a

spin-off from CoSort functionality designed to convert between structured

file formats A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file forma ...

such as CSV,

ISAM ISAM (an acronym for indexed sequential access method) is a method for creating, maintaining, and manipulating computer files of data so that records can be retrieved sequentially or randomly by one or more keys. Indexes of key fields are mainta ...

, and

, plus

data types In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allowed operations on it. A data type tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most progra ...

such as

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding s ...

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, and

Packed Decimal In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Sometimes, special bit patterns are used for ...

. Newer NextForm editions can structure data in unstructured sources, convert COBOL Vision files, and facilitate database migration and replication.

IRI RowGen

RowGen is designed to generate

test data Test data is data which has been specifically identified for use in tests, typically of a computer program. Background Some data may be used in a confirmatory way, typically to verify that a given set of input to a given function produces some e ...

in production table, file, and report formats for prototype database population, compliance, outsourcing, and application prototyping projects. RowGen's

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

parses data models to define table layouts and relationships so database test sets are structurally and referentially correct. RowGen can also transform and format test data during its generation.

IRI FieldShield

FieldShield is a CoSort spin-off designed to protect data privacy in structured and semi-structured data sources. The software protects

personally identifiable information Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person. The abbreviation PII is widely accepted in the United States, but the phrase it abbreviates ha ...

and other

private data Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data pr ...

at the

field Field may refer to: Expanses of open ground * Field (agriculture), an area of land used for agricultural purposes * Airfield, an aerodrome that lacks the infrastructure of an airport * Battlefield * Lawn, an area of mowed grass * Meadow, a grass ...

or record level within database tables, files and other sources subject to

data spill A data breach is a security violation, in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so. Other terms are unintentional information disclosure, data leak, info ...

. Privacy functions include

AES AES may refer to: Businesses and organizations Companies * AES Corporation, an American electricity company * AES Data, former owner of Daisy Systems Holland * AES Eletropaulo, a former Brazilian electricity company * AES Andes, formerly AES Gener ...

encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can dec ...

data masking Data masking or data obfuscation is the process of modifying sensitive data in such a way that it is of no or little value to unauthorized intruders while still being usable by software or authorized personnel. Data masking can also be referred as ...

, and

pseudonymization Pseudonymization is a data management and de-identification procedure by which personally identifiable information fields within a data record are replaced by one or more artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms. A single pseudonym for each replaced ...

. Job details can be audited from a

log file In computing, logging is the act of keeping a log of events that occur in a computer system, such as problems, errors or just information on current operations. These events may occur in the operating system or in other software. A message or ...

format.

IRI CellShield

CellShield is a data discovery and masking product designed for protecting data at the cell level in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. CellShield comes in Personal and Enterprise editions, with the latter capable of finding and remediating PII in multiple files and sheets in drives and folders accessible on a local area network.

IRI DarkShield

DarkShield is a data discovery and masking product designed for protecting data hidden in so-called dark data, or unstructured file, repositories. DarkShield shares the same data searching, classification, and masking functionality with FieldShield and the CellShield Enterprise Edition in IRI Workbench.

IRI Workbench

The Workbench is a graphical user interface (GUI) and integrated development environment (IDE) for all IRI software products, built on Eclipse™. The Workbench is a free, optional place to design, run, and manage data connections,136 Data Sources and Targets
(IRI Web Site, July, 2014) metadata, and jobs, and to use third-party plug-ins for business intelligence, data modeling, version control, etc.

References

{{reflist, 2

External links

IRI, Inc. Home Page
Companies based in Brevard County, Florida Software companies based in Florida Software companies of the United States