| Abstract: | The company says its newly integrated offerings improve usability and provide access to data cleansing capabilities. |
| Keywords: | IBM data management, master data management |
IBM this week announced a bevy of upgrades of software products in its InfoSphere master data management portfolio, driven largely by customer requests for improved usability.
At The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) World Conference yesterday, the company introduced IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Product Information Management (MDM Server for PIM), a new version of the software formerly known as IBM WebSphere Product Center. The upgrade includes a new user interface and navigation tools that let various functions across an organization tailor their views of product information and drill down into related workflows.
The software is integrated with the IBM InfoSphere Information Server — which itself has been upgraded — so that users can use the Information Server’s data cleansing capabilities to improve the quality of the information that is managed by InfoSphere MDM Server for PIM. Underlying technology improvements also enable swifter rollout, according to IBM.
The MDM Server for PIM manages a company’s core product data for new product introductions as well as the workflows involved in those processes, from design work to publishing product data in catalogs, on websites, and in spec sheets for business partners. With connections to CAD, ERP, and MES systems — “anything involved in the product lifecycle,” as IBM Director of Product Marketing Michael Curry put it in an interview today — companies can consolidate product versions across multiple systems, for example, into one consistent set of product data.
The upgraded InfoSphere Information Server allows reusable services for data access and data processing to be easily published so that clients can share information across services-oriented projects, the company said. Other enhancements include improved security features supporting Web services standards, support for Web 2.0 services using REST and RSS standards, as well as support for direct service publishing from Oracle databases, InfoSphere MDM Server, and mainframe data sources. The server automates integration tasks, helping business and IT teams to collaborate more easily and speeding product development, IBM said.
Part of the impetus for IBM’s introductions was to integrate its MDM offerings and rebrand them under the InfoSphere moniker, according to Bill Swanton, VP of research at AMR Research. “What IBM is doing is creating a brand and setting a position with products it has acquired over the years,” he said, noting there has been confusion in the market over the WebSphere label because people thought it referred to web applications.
IBM has been in the MDM market for four years, having acquired Trigo Technologies in 2004 for its PIM technology and DWL in 2005 for its customer data integration applications.
IBM’s Curry described master data management as “a high-growth market for us.” He said that many companies are now pursuing strategies of investing in services-oriented and information architectures. “The next phase is to centralize their data.” Manufacturers might start with one domain — product data, for instance — but often spread beyond that to other information domains. What they need are the connections among their various systems, which is what IBM provides, he added.
A spokeswoman for IBM said that the company’s information management business, of which MDM is a part, grew 30% in the second quarter of 2008.
“People have finally realized that master data accuracy is the biggest problem they have in getting value out of their enterprise application investments,” Swanton said of the growth in this market sector. “It’s not just a data cleansing problem; it’s keeping the data clean on an ongoing basis.”
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