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IBM (Quote) Monday unveiled a new piece of software designed to
help customers integrate applications. The all-in-one Information Server that
will come with the company’s WebSphere application server and DB2 database.
Tom Inman, vice president of information management at IBM, announced the
software at the company’s first Information on Demand Global Conference in
Anaheim today.
Combining technologies from IBM’s Ascential, Venetica, Unicorn
and CrossAccess acquisitions, Information Server profiles data, cleanses data to ensure quality, and transforms
that data to meet a particular service request, Inman said on a conference call.
The software is meant to help companies extract more value from the
different data sources housed in corporate datacenters, a salve for
organizations that can’t tap into accurate and complete information about
their business they can really trust.
“One of the challenges with delivering information-on-demand is where this
information sits,” Inman said.
“If you’re a retail bank, you want to know who your
customers are, but that’s difficult because customer information is
scattered throughout.”
For example, a manufacturer might use Information Server to pair sales
figures from subsidiaries, retail outlets and trading partners along
with real-time inventory data and merge customer data from those entities
for better business results.
IBM Information Server will be available worldwide through IBM and its
partners this November, with professional services support.
IBM said it also plans to offer a blade server option based on
Information Server next year to help companies build a scalable information
grid.
The software forms the foundation of IBM’s Information on Demand plan, a
strategy IBM Executive Vice President of Software Steve Mills said
last February that Big Blue would pump $1 billion over the next five years
in a market IBM expects to top $69 billion by 2009.
Data integration is an old battleground, where companies used to dangle
solutions extraction transformation and loading technologies in front of
large customers in the hopes of further infiltrating their datacenters for
new revenue sources.
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