Information on demand: the new enterprise goal
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(InfoWorld) - Dr. Ambuj Goyal is one of IBMâs heavy hitters. A 25-year IBM veteran who joined the company as a researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center, Goyal did early work in scalable databases that laid the technology groundwork for DB2, then led the research effort to create the Deep Blue chess computer. In 1996, Goyal was elevated to be vice president, servers and software, and director, computer sciences, where he set IBMâs long-term research direction and oversaw the work of 1,500 researchers worldwide. Now, as general manager of information management in the IBM Software Group, Goyal ensures the success of IBMâs Information On Demand initiative and its constellation of products. But in a recent interview with InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr, Goyal still sounded like a scientist, expounding on the nature of information vs. data and the unique position IBMâs new Information Server occupies in the history of computing. InfoWorld: Consolidating, reconciling, and delivering information strikes me as one of the most difficult problems in IT.                                                     AmbujGoyal: This problem has existed for 20 years. When I was doing the announcement for Information Server last October, I talked about an inflection point that has come in information management. This is similar to an inflection point that occurred in 1996 when there were many techniques to create Web sites or do Web-based business: Java Virtual Machines, HTTP servers, commerce engines. There were many different techniques. A few companies created a concept called a Web application server, IBMâs being WebSphere. So if you wanted to leverage Web technologies to improve your business or do Web programming, you just get started with a Web application server. We are at a similar inflection point in 2006. We have myriads of techniques â metadata management, ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools, data creation tools, Federation tools, cleansing tools, profiling tools. People use these tools to solve the information challenge. The application server had a foundation, which was JVM. Information Server now has a foundation, which is a metadata repository, or metadata bus. And we have restructured all the tools to come up with an information server, so companies donât need to decide whether they need this piece of technology or that piece of technology. They have an information challenge â they just start with an information server. IW: What about the skills to work with an information server? It seems a little difficult to find people who understand this area. Is that a problem in the market now? AG: It actually simplifies the problem because people were doing manual stuff around metadata. So what we have done is helped the business user say, âThis is how I define my customer and attributes of that customer.â They can talk business language. And then an information architect, who typically used to do ETL or SQL, can take the same business language and convert it into an appropriate information infrastructure programming tool. In the past they could never do that, and governance became a huge problem. The businessperson really meant X, and the information architect implemented Y. IW: But in all of these solutions, somebody is still sitting down in a meeting room, going through the incredibly tedious task of saying, âOK, weâre going to use this field and not that field, weâll express this value this way and not that way.â AG: Right, but our view is, over decades, this is how software and middleware have evolved. There was tedious work going on connecting system A to system B. You repeated it over and over again. Then out came a product that is an outgrowth of a repeated piece of work captured into a software product. In the late â90s, people used to use the WebSphere application server and would build customer portals. Many customers built and said, âLook, this is a waste of time. I would just like to have the base infrastructure to be able to do that.â So portals as a category evolved. We believe that people are still doing tedious work when dealing with information. Information Server and its tools are converting that tedious work into an information server category. Even analysts are starting to talk about this as a category because it is solving that tedious work, and tedious work has always resulted in a new category of software.
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Radar Networks is unveiling a new tool that provides a smarter way to find information and increase productivity.
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(Source: 3PAR) Here's an information-packed white paper from TheInfoPro (TIP) that delivers findings from one-on-one interviews with Fortune 1000 storage professionals. The paper explains how the deployment of tiered storage has driven the need for data migration in Fortune 1000 companies, and why those enterprises are now looking for more mature storage solutions that minimize complexity while harnessing the full value of tiered storage. It's must-read research for IT strategists who are looking to meet their business drivers for low-cost storage and high availability.
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Faced with an explosion of communications tools such as wikis, blogs and instant messaging, companies continue to wrestle with the logistics of compliance and control. Some enterprises, however, are finding a positive path.
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Increasing revenue and decreasing expenses -- who could ask for more?
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SAN DIEGO --(Business Wire)-- Oct. 11, 2004 -- Breakthrough PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne 8.11 Applications Enable Manufacturers to Become Demand-Driven.
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I got an interesting teaser in the e-mail this week: âStudy Suggests Nearly Half of All Leaders See a Disconnect Between Strategy and Execution.â I wonât say who sent it because they blew the execution: The so-called study wasnât posted anywhere online, and when I called the number, theyâd already left for the weekend.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Six months afterÂ new federal e-discovery rulesÂ took effect in the U.S., some businesses are still unclear on what they have to do to comply.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Many organizations allocate large resources to implement and deploy packaged ERP, CRM and SCM applications. Now these organizations need to move away from operational efficiency gains achieved and into leveraging their data for performance management and business intelligence.
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IBM&#39;s planned purchase of Venetica provides Big Blue with one more piece in its on-demand computing strategy. The challenge will be to seamlessly meld Venetica&#39;s unstructured-data expertise with structured-data management.
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Computerworld recently conducted a survey of more than 100 IT executives to understand how IT leaders are balancing the supply of IT services with business-driven demands to maximize business value. Learn what your peers had to day about the effectiveness of the approaches they use. Their answers may surprise you.
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NOVEMBER 15, 2004 (SNW ONLINE) - Since the late 1990s, leading data storage technology vendors have adopted a myopic and largely self-serving approach for addressing the two central challenges of enterprise storage: resource provisioning and data
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Nutrition, obsession, global business:  an exploration of our second most basic desire.
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com November 23, 2004, 10:44 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been enterprise directories for several months, but for many IT managers, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and open source initiatives are on the horizon.
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Taking a page from OSS for improving interagency collaboration.
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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Can the browser meet the demands of on-demand? On-demand apps are by definition Web apps. That wonât come as a shock to enterprises because most of the latest internally deployed enterprise apps â besides a few client/server holdouts â already rely on the browser to deliver user experience.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.