The IBM Software Group led by Steve Mills is very serious about their investments into the Information Management efforts highlighted as their annual Information on Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas. I spent two days at the conference to review and examine products, talk with customers and IBM executives about the advancements in information management.  The conference led by the leader of the Information Management division Ambuj Goyal, who has instrumented a significant evolution and consolidation of technology suppliers over the last several years to bring the IBM ‘Information Agenda’ to market.

While it might seem obvious, the need for information to operate and manage business is mostly taken for granted by most organizations. Unfortunately this assumption has made many companies significantly fall and lag behind their business needs for information. Our assessment of the organizational maturity in our information management benchmark measured the people, process, information and technology dimensions that identified significant problems and where information management has a wide gap of competency between organizations of similar size and industry.  I have also been vocal that this lack of focus and investments on information and support analytics for performance management has also been one of the underlying challenges with business today. I believe this lack of rigor and focus has contributed to the current economic environment as information has been not available in the right form and time frames for key business decisions. You do not enable business intelligence and performance management without having your information assets in order and deliver them in an accurate and timely basis has never been more important.

IBM focus on the ‘Information Agenda’ is one of the largest software group initiatives at IBM. They have focused on providing a wide range of information and data related software for IT to support business. IBM also introduced new and upgraded solutions and service offerings across vertical industries. Unfortunately at this time for those that were not at the event to see a demo or attend a session, the details are very scarce for each vertical industry and not well communicated. I am sure improvements will be made over the next year to get more clarity commonly available to anyone interested as they can seriously decrease the time to having the right information assets for your business. We have found from our research into these vertical industries that having the right business metrics and capabilities for range of business management will be critical to gain their trust with investing into dedicated solutions.

IBM is also taking advantage of their IBM Global Business Services (GBS) group to help you in this information endeavor along with the IBM Global Technology Services which can help with architecture and technology planning on the information agenda. Representing IBM GBS was executive, Michael Schroeck who provided a business update to their efforts along with new methodologies and processes to bridge information management and business intelligence together. For those of you that are not large enough or have the budget for these services will have to really closely examine IBM consulting partners competencies on these recently released products to ensure they can help you in the short term. IBM in their part is also introducing different sets of products to support small and medium sized businesses which range from Express branded products and others like IBM Cognos for BI which brings a simpler solution for rapidly integrating data and assembling dashboards for business.

At the center of the information agenda was IBM InfoSphere software that provides a server and suite of tools to help facilitate information in the right form, right quality and right time to business needs. At the core is an information server that helps with information integration, data warehousing and master data management.IBM highlighted their focus on bringing together an integrated set of capabilities for MDM to unify and support enterprise wide data initiatives. New releases help bring enterprise strength to their server and tools leveraging consolidated administration and improvements to the IT usability of the products. The focus on data integration as part of InfoSphere is critical as organizations are realizing that the integration of data is just as or more important than the storage of the data itself. IBM advancement to provide any combination of extraction, transformation and loading is critical as the staging and placement of integration must happen anywhere in the network or database. For IBM, it is critical to continue to emphasize these product and capabilities of InfoSphere and how their data quality and data profiling capabilities can be used to enhance the value of the information assets. The competition is heated as Microsoft recently upgraded SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, Oracle recent creation of their dedicated business unit on data integration and the dedicated efforts at Informatica and their view of the ‘Information Economy’ are part of what IBM has to reckon with in their efforts.

IBM has somewhat reduced their emphasis on specific line of business data needs in customer and product areas where they originally started to focus on a unified enterprise approach. This is good as supporting them from an enterprise fashion is important but the very specific line of business data types are also important as these IT and business initiatives are sprouting and IBM is not always considered for these specific needs. For example the need for improving product information across the supply chain and operate between organizations to the decision makers is still very immature as well is the customer information management that is needed to help organizations realize the value of this critical asset in a unified manner. In conjunction with this is the need for supporting data governance processes that can improve the current types of information management needs in a unified manner. We have espoused for two years on supporting the business and IT needs for data stewardship and our research shows buyers are still troubled with the level of integration across products from one or many technology suppliers. We hope to see more from IBM in this area as their technology platforms consolidate and integrate with IBM InfoSphere could be more aligned to this new generation of needs by IT and business.

IBM appears to be less concerned about the frenzy with data warehouse appliances which is surprising. Though it is widely discussed and is a very active endeavor by IT in the market today as the need to provide faster time to implementation and lower cost of technology is forcing re-evaluation of traditional data warehousing approaches like that from IBM, Oracle and Teradata. As the cost of servers and storage decrease the cost of software for data warehousing seems to be rising as license and maintenance by many providers has increased. Many IT organizations are looking to find a lower TCO as they plan for 2009 and 2010. IBM is not without having an answer as their pre-configured solutions called InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse does meet many of these issues. IBM has so many priorities that spending significant amount of dedicated marketing and sales to compete might not be possible but they also should be competing more with the likes of Teradata who is confident and competitive.

In other areas of interest from my visit in the information management areas was the IBM solidDB 6.3 Universal Cache which is an in-memory database that can dramatically improve the response and interactions with applications and underlying RDBMS like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Also from the Princeton Softech acquisition, IBM has brought forward a site of products in what is called integrated data management across applications which can help with data growth, privacy and performance working from a common server. It was also nice to see the integration of products fully demonstrated between IBM InfoSphere and IBM Cognos, showing the value of having information management and business intelligence integrated together to support performance management. One of core problems that IBM has yet to address in their information agenda is the business dilemma in rationalizing data across millions of spreadsheets and helping audit and govern data across these silos that Microsoft has finally proclaimed as 'Excel Hell'.

All in all, the frenzy on the information agenda by IBM is nothing to take lightly. They have assembled the largest team, partners and investment to help organizations. Now they must keep it practical and help make sure it is affordable and the right steps to advancing the maturity of information management are taken to meet the simple and complex needs of any sized organization.

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Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research