IBM Information Server Software Extends Reach and Impact of Trusted Business Data

IBM Information on Demand Conference -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced enhancements to the IBM Information Server software platform that will increase the availability of trusted information and insight customers need to quickly make critical business decisions.

The IBM Information Server improvements include IBM System z support, new desktop metadata search capabilities, federation support for additional data types, new SAP R/3 support, and an extended user community that will foster collaboration among customers, partners and academia.

IBM also announced that technology from its recent acquisition of DataMirror Corporation has been tapped to provide tightly integrated change data capture and replication tools to IBM Information Server. The DataMirror software identifies and captures data that has been added, updated or deleted, and allows the changed data to be delivered in real time to processes, applications and databases, ensuring that accurate and trusted information is available for decision making.

IBM Information Server is the industry's first comprehensive data integration platform to make it easier for customers to understand all their information assets and integrate silos of information to deliver consistent, complete and trustworthy data for key business and IT projects. Today's announcements extend the IBM Information Server platform's ability to speed the deployment of information integration capabilities, which support most strategic IT initiatives, such as business intelligence, real-time reporting, data migration, data warehousing, customer relationship management and service oriented architecture (SOA) environments.

Trusted information for SAP customers

IBM Information Server provides a unified data integration platform to help build and run SAP applications using trusted data. With more than 600 joint SAP and IBM Information Integration customers worldwide, IBM's expertise in heterogeneous data integration, combined with its long-standing partnership with SAP, creates a unique opportunity to help substantially simplify the migration process for SAP customers. The latest release of IBM Information Server pack for SAP R/3 is now SAP certified to provide enhanced performance, scalability and security making existing integration scenarios better and enabling new integration scenarios around process centric integration with SAP XI and messaging based scenarios. Additionally, IBM Information Server Data Quality Module for SAP 2.5 extends the prebuilt, certified solution for SAP to include real-time Postal Validation of customer and business partner address information.

An information integration platform for the mainframe

With the introduction of IBM Information Server for Linux on System z, IBM's information integration platform has been extended to the mainframe. The new software profiles, cleanses, transforms and delivers information from both mainframe and distributed data sources, enabling customers to add mainframe information integration workloads without added z/OS operational costs. In addition, IBM Information Server for System z provides the flexibility to take advantage of the scalability, security, manageability and reliability of the mainframe and allows customers to maximize their existing mainframe resource investments. As IBM System z continues to drive business growth and attract new customers, the combination of Linux for System z with IBM Information Server provides a comprehensive foundation for a mainframe-based enterprise information architecture.

Metadata-driven business glossary and expanded federation support

With its new desktop metadata search capabilities, IBM Information Server enables users to look up and search key business terms and taxonomies from within any desktop application, such as Microsoft Excel, modeling tools or reporting software, to understand how those terms are used within their information integration environment. Expanded federation support has been added to address a broader range of data integration problems through improved handling of XML and Web Services via access to, and manipulation of, remote XML data using IBM's pureXML technology. The software can also invoke the use of Web services through new support for SOAP headers. Additionally, improved security for federation services improves the ability to audit data access for data governance purposes.

Information Server user community

IBM also is establishing a user community designed to deliver training, education, collaboration and best practices for IBM Information Server users worldwide. The new organization, called LeverageInformation, will encourage collaboration and sharing of best practices through a community of local user groups and virtual special interest groups organized by integration technology area. New content-on-demand capabilities built into the new version of IBM Information Server keep users informed and speed important information to the desktop. This includes a Web 2.0-based utility to dynamically receive and organize all IBM Information Server and related content in one place. Membership in LeverageInformation is free and open to customer organizations, partners and academia. The community can be accessed from www.leverageinformation.info .