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IBM Launches Next Generation of Business Intelligence with Dynamic Warehousing

IBM unveiled a strategy to enable dynamic warehousing, a new generation of business intelligence capabilities that enable organizations to gain real-time insight and value from their business information. IBM's new dynamic warehousing strategy enables customers to use advanced analytics as part of a real-time business process and to unlock knowledge buried in both structured and unstructured information (free form text, email, audio files, Web pages, etc.). This approach will also provide instant access to reliable and trusted business information in the context of activities being performed, whether it is supporting a customer, processing a claim or handling a transaction.

IBM is providing a set of integrated offerings for dynamic warehousing that use a combination of technologies from internal R&D and strategic information on demand acquisitions, including search and text analytics, information integration, process management, enterprise data modeling, master data management and industry-specific business models.

Traditional data warehousing efforts were focused on query and reporting to understand what happened. The second wave focused on technologies such as online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining for historical analysis to understand why and recommend future action - strategic and tactical planning. IBM's new approach is about making available and analyzing information on demand to help customers optimize each transaction, such as in the call center, in the field, when helping customers or when taking orders.

The foundation of IBM's dynamic warehousing initiative is a new, enhanced version of the DB2 warehouse - based on the DB2 9 "Viper" data server. - which includes a unique set of features and capabilities that support growing customer demand for analytics and information on demand.

DB2 warehouse provides data movement and transformation capabilities to reduce the complexity and lower the costs typically associated with loading data into the warehouse and preparing that data so that it can be leveraged more effectively. It also offers performance optimization capabilities that enable the warehouse to address broad enterprise warehousing requirements, such as advanced data partitioning and workload management to ensure that the most critical applications are serviced accordingly. Additionally, DB2 warehouse takes advantage of Viper's deep compression technology to increase performance and efficiency, while reducing storage costs.

The new IBM warehousing lineup includes starter, intermediate and advanced editions of DB2 warehouse, in addition to the existing base and enterprise editions.

IBM is also introducing the IBM balanced warehouse, the next evolution of the balanced configuration unit (BCU), to provide complete warehousing solutions with pre-configured software, hardware and storage. IBM is now providing three classes of IBM balanced warehouse offerings to provide solutions optimized to meet the entire spectrum of warehousing requirements - from large enterprises to small- and medium-sized businesses to departmental data marts. The C-Class provides out-of-the-box solutions bundled with popular third-party reporting tools, such as the new IBM Balanced Warehouse C1000, which includes affordable hardware and storage that has been pre-configured with DB2 Warehouse Starter Edition and Business Objects Crystal Reports for simplified creation and delivery of business reports.

The DB2 Warehouse Starter and Intermediate Editions, along with the C-Class Balanced Warehouses, are targeted at the SMB market and will be made available through IBM business partners.

Also newly available is the IBM Balanced Warehouse D-Class, providing an integrated growth solution designed to reduce the complexity, cost and risk of creating, implementing and maintaining large departmental data marts and mid-size data warehouses on Linux.

To provide customers with an interface for extracting additional business insights from unstructured information, IBM has combined a set of search, text analytics and visualization capabilities into the new OmniFind Analytics Edition for customer care. OmniFind Analytics Edition helps extract and mine customer information from various systems and applications to help find valuable patterns that indicate trends and issues such as the top reasons customers call to complain, or common questions about contracts or service agreements.

IBM also introduced several enhancements for the recently announced DB2 9 Viper for z/OS. The new capabilities include SQL enhancements for real-time query and reporting and new graphical analytics and reporting tools for use on System z.

For more information on IBM's dynamic warehousing initiative and offerings visit: http://www.ibm.com/software/data.

This piece is brought to you by the DM Review editorial staff.

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