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IBM Likens Information Center to WebSphere

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 October 2006, 06:00 CDT

Characterizing it as the data equivalent of WebSphere, IBM Corp has officially taken off the wraps on its long-awaited "Hawk" product offering. IBM WebSphere Information Server, the official name of the product first described after the Ascential acquisition just over a year ago, will be released in December.

The news is that this product is finally reaching general availability, after having been previewed and discussed for well over a year. The product, to be available in December, has been beta tested for the past three to four months at 75 customers.

IBM is positioning Information Server on par with the WebSphere application platform. Whereas WebSphere covers access to and integration of back end applications and processes, Information Server is supposed to do the same thing with structured, and eventually, unstructured data.

The content of the product is little mystery. Most of the core technology came from Ascential, consisting of a common metadata back end, and a common front-end shell, to a series of products that transformed, manipulated, and integrated data. IBM claims that Hawk represents a compete re-architecting of what were previously a series of point products.

To recap, IBM Information Server includes the DataStage extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) product that has been used for bulk to trickle loading of data warehouses. And it also covers former Ascential products that profile data, cleanse it, audit what's happened, and various extensions such as links with third party metadata sources from business intelligence, data modeling, and other tools.

It also includes IBM's pre-exiting data federation and replication capabilities, plus content federation that came via the 2004 Venetica acquisition. By the middle of next year, Information Server will add another bell and whistle: the metadata semantic and interrelationship tracking that came from the Unicorn acquisition earlier this year.

IBM also announced a new Linux blade appliance that embeds Information Server and grid computing capabilities.

While all the offerings will be available as a suite, IBM said customers could still buy various pieces, such as DataStage ETL, a la carte.

During the call, IBM made numerous references with the early days of WebSphere. When initially announced a decade ago, WebSphere was intended to unify all the plumbing you needed for supporting n-tier web apps. The implication was that the Information Server line would play the same role with data, and would reside on the same tier as WebSphere.

Of course, WebSphere took roughly five years to get to a point where it became a singular offering rather than a marketing grab bag. The folks making yesterday's announcement implied that Information Server would undergo a similar, but faster evolution.

IBM also announced several related products that leverage Information Server. They included version 7.0 of IBM WebSphere Customer Center, the portion of its master data management product for providing a single view of the customer, which will now run atop Information Server. And it announced some vertical templates and applications for healthcare insurance and financial services sectors, plus customer identity recognition applications for fraud prevention.

For now, IBM's Information Server offerings primarily cover structured data. Having just closed the FileNet acquisition last week, IBM said that it would have a product roadmap for integrating the content management offerings early next year. But according to Ambuj Goyal, who heads IBM's information management business, IBM already has at least a couple integration points between FileNet and the Information Server offerings that are ready now.

These announcements, made at IBM's Information On Demand conference in Anaheim this week, come in the wake of pronouncements last February that IBM would revitalize its Information Management products and services with at least a billion dollars of investment over the next three years. The message was that IBM intended to up the profile of what used to be the DB2 group so that it would step out of WebSphere's shadows.

Source: Datamonitor

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