IBM Positioned in Magic Quadrant for Product Information Management Software

Market Wire, February, 2006

IBM today announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned IBM in the visionary quadrant in its Magic Quadrant for Product Information Management, 2005.*

According to Gartner, this market is attracting end-user organizations that are trying to achieve a single view of product data. Gartner expects to see strong growth across a wide range of industries, including retail, consumer goods, industrial, automotive, life sciences and distribution/wholesale. By 2009, the product information management market is expected to reach revenue of more than $500 million.

IBM's product information management middleware, IBM WebSphere Product Center, helps companies develop, manage and share a central, accurate and comprehensive repository of product information, making it available on demand through a flexible service oriented architecture. For example, a consumer electronics company would use WebSphere Product Center to manage thousands of attributes for its complete set of products and categories and share them with their distributors, dealers and retailers.

The world's largest global companies are using WebSphere Product Center to turn disparate silos of product information into strategic business assets, powering enterprise-wide sales, marketing and supply chain initiatives including new product introduction, ecommerce, global data synchronization and RFID. IBM WebSphere Product Center's extensive customer base includes companies in retail, consumer products, electronics, automotive, industrial manufacturing, healthcare and distribution industries.

"Product information management is at the forefront of strategic planning as companies realize the necessity of having a single source for all product information that is complete, accurate, consistent and scalable," said Paraic Sweeney, vice president, Product Information Management Solutions, IBM. "With WebSphere Product Center, our customers can automate otherwise manual business processes, reduce bottlenecks and ease the process of introducing new products to market. This also complements the migration to a services oriented architecture, providing an accurate source of master information for business processes."

WebSphere Product Center is one of IBM's master data management systems that help companies deal with the challenge of maintaining a single view of information about their products, customers, suppliers and employees. IBM recently announced its latest version of WebSphere Product Center to enable companies to seamlessly manage product information using enterprise portals such as IBM WebSphere Portal and provides enhanced functionality for synchronizing large volume of product and trading partner information via the global data synchronization network.

Beginning in March a webcast featuring Andrew White of Gartner discussing the Product Information Management Magic Quadrant and the future of the marketplace will be available at www.gartner.com .

About Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2005 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About IBM

The desire by businesses to access, manage and deliver information more efficiently is driving rapid change in the IT marketplace. Companies that are grappling with new government mandates and business demands are striving to capture and integrate information in a more seamless, real-time fashion across the enterprise. IBM's information on demand approach combines deep business insight with open standards, advanced storage systems, and sophisticated software to manage and secure information as a service to create efficient, cost effective and flexible information infrastructures. Regardless of industry, IBM helps companies transform data into insight to enable information on demand. Please visit http://www.ibm.com for more information.

IBM, IBM WebSphere and the IBM e-business logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. For a list of additional IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

* Magic Quadrant for Product Information Management, 2005, December 30, 2005. Andrew White.

CONTACT: Holli Haswell 512-286-3265 hhaswell@us.ibm.com