Management of heterogeneous and autonomous database systems

As organizations have become more sophisticated, pressure to provide information sharing across dissimilar platforms has mounted. In addition, advances in distributed computing and networking combined with the affordable high level of connectivity, are making information sharing across databases closer to being accomplished...With the advent of the internet, intranets, and affordable network connectivity, business reengineering has become a necessity for modern corporations to stay competitive in the global market...An end-user in a heterogeneous computing environment should be able to not only invoke multiple exiting software systems and hardware devices, but also coordinate their interactions.