Data Management Strategies for the CIOData integration
Silver Award:
IBM--IBM Information Server v.8.0
The runner-up in data integration category is also a combination of products, many gleaned from IBM's acquisition spree supporting its Information On Demand initiative. First shipped in December of 2006, IBM's Information on Demand conference, Information Server brings together many of the functions required to integrate, enrich and deliver information across an organization. While noting that it's hard to award IBM points for innovation, since many of the products that make up the Information Server were initially developed by other companies, judges gave IBM high scores as smart shoppers and savvy product integrators.
Following a key industry trends Information Server incorporates data quality functions and integration services on a single platform, an increasingly popular approach for organizations, according to Gartner analysts. IBM Information Server is a unified information integration platform with a common metadata repository, parallel processing capabilities, unified administration, connectivity and SOA deployment features that help organizations manage the entire information integration lifecycle.
IBM Information Server (IIS) includes platform services and multiple product modules:
- Platform services and WebSphere Metadata Server: Regardless of whether only one product module is purchased or if the entire platform is purchased, the platform services of parallel processing, common administration, the Metadata Server and common connectivity are considered core platform elements of IBM Information Server and always included.
- WebSphere Information Analyzer, for data profiling, starts at $100,000 (2 CPU)
- WebSphere DataStage, ETL between multiple sources and targets, starts at $250,000 (4 CPU)
- WebSphere QualityStage standardizes and matches information across heterogeneous sources and starts at $200,000 (4 CPU)
- WebSphere Federation Server defines integrated views across diverse and distributed information sources, including cost-based query optimization and integrated caching, starts at $125,000 (2 CPU)
- WebSphere Information Services Director enables information access and integration processes to be published as reusable services in a service oriented architecture and starts at $75,000 (2 CPU)
- WebSphere Business Glossary creates, manages, and searches metadata definitions and starts at $62,500 (includes 1 CPU Business Glossary, 1 authoring user, unlimited read-only users)
Learn more about IBM Information Server here on IBM's website.