IBM updates InfoSphere for data integration

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By David Worthington

August 21, 2008 — At the TDWI World Conference in San Diego on Monday, IBM introduced updates to its InfoSphere product portfolio for product information management and data integration.

Big Blue rechristened and re-launched WebSphere Product Center as InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Product Information Management (MDM Server for PIM). MDM Server for PIM is a workflow-oriented product data hub, and it has been updated with several new features.

The new version introduces a "task flow" interface that presents users with a customized role-based homepage and a list of tasks that they have to perform against products, said Michael Curry, director of product strategy and management for InfoSphere. Users can drill down from the task to the part of the PIM application to perform that action, he added.

IBM incorporated the Java API to make integration with other applications easier for Java developers.

The company introduced its InfoSphere middleware earlier this year to consolidate its products for creating, governing and managing information across the enterprise. To that end, it created hooks for MDM Server for PIM to call out to InfoSphere Information Server, a data integration product, for data cleansing and validation operations.

IBM is working to “create synergies across InfoSphere components to help customers deliver projects faster,” said Curry. At the same time, he noted, IBM will maintain a heterogeneous approach and continue to work with third-party vendors.

Some of the biggest challenges occur when projects cut across borders and cultures. IBM has released a new edition of InfoSphere Information Server to accommodate large enterprises with projects that operate on a global scale.

Information Server 8.0 is available in simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Aside from localization, it is designed to handle global names and addresses better, said Curry. IBM added InfoSphere Global Name Recognition as a module of the InfoSphere Information Server platform.

It provides name recognition capabilities that supply users with the likely cultural background and gender of an individual, as well as checking that data for consistency and better record matching.

IBM uses a database of addresses from the postal records of 244 countries registered in the DNS, automatically standardizing the format of addresses according to local rules.

Just as people and projects may span continents, data for projects can span server farms. IBM has added new grid management features to Information Server to help administrators optimize available resources and comply with service level agreements, said Curry.

Information Server now implements the WS-Security (Web Services Security), a communications protocol, to secure Web services created by Information Server.

IBM is staying true to its mainframe heritage by expanding Information Server’s mainframe support with metadata management for IBM mainframe data sources, broadening change capture capabilities for Information Management System, and introducing Virtual Storage Access Method to VSAM replication capabilities to help companies host the same data on two different mainframe environments, Curry said.

Related Search Term(s): data integration, IBM

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