New IBM unit targets data management

IBM's $15 billion software division last week unveiled a newly formed business unit, made an acquisition and gave a sneak peek at an upcoming database product.

The new business unit is devoted to master data management (MDM), a term IBM uses to describe its platform of information integration wares. The products have a common purpose: to help companies gain control of the scads of data sources scattered across their systems. Combined, they can move data among systems, clean and synchronize data sources, and compile contextual snapshots of customers and products.

"The vision is to provide a single view of information about customers, products, suppliers, locations, employees - every core piece of information that companies have - and to make sure that all the stakeholders in a business are using this information in the same way," says Dan Druker, director of enterprise data solutions at IBM.

The MDM lineup features newly revised product information-management and customer data-integration software products - WebSphere Product Center and WebSphere Customer Center. They are designed to give companies a single view of customers, products and related data. Another product, WebSphere Metadata Server, due to ship in the spring of 2006, is designed to allow metadata to be more easily managed, accessed and shared across heterogeneous systems.

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IBM's $15 billion software division last week unveiled a newly formed business unit, made an acquisition and gave a sneak peek at an upcoming database product.

The new business unit is devoted to master data management (MDM), a term IBM uses to describe its platform of information integration wares. The products have a common purpose: to help companies gain control of the scads of data sources scattered across their systems. Combined, they can move data among systems, clean and synchronize data sources, and compile contextual snapshots of customers and products.

"The vision is to provide a single view of information about customers, products, suppliers, locations, employees - every core piece of information that companies have - and to make sure that all the stakeholders in a business are using this information in the same way," says Dan Druker, director of enterprise data solutions at IBM.

The MDM lineup features newly revised product information-management and customer data-integration software products - WebSphere Product Center and WebSphere Customer Center. They are designed to give companies a single view of customers, products and related data. Another product, WebSphere Metadata Server, due to ship in the spring of 2006, is designed to allow metadata to be more easily managed, accessed and shared across heterogeneous systems.

IBM doesn't expect its customers to buy the entire stack at once. Rather, implementations typically will focus on solving a particular business problem, Drucker says. In product-centric industries such as retail and manufacturing, companies tend to try to organize product-related master data, while services-oriented industries such as banking and insurance tend to look to first resolve customer data-integration issues.

As companies build out their master data-management systems, data becomes available for a host of uses. "It can feed your e-commerce site, or a series of composite applications that you've built, or your print requirements, or a self-service customer portal on the Internet," Drucker says. "It's about reuseability and making sure that all the different systems in a company understand data in the same way."