IBM said it plans to involve the Cognos team in the ongoing research taking place within IBM's mathematics department, an area historically focused on improving supercomputing but now examining aspects of data and information on demand.

"What I see happening is computing is becoming much more valuable as a tool to be used by many more people," said IBM Fellow Brenda Dietrich. "If we are able to capture the mathematics that are well-posed, then it opens the world of mathematics to everyone, not just the geeks among us, and people can make better decisions."

On a broader scale, IBM plans to couple its technology with that of Cognos to offer an architectural approach to Information On Demand and its corollary, performance management.

"Information On Demand is about unlocking the business value from information. It's all there, it's about making things better. It might be about doing human resources automation or work force automation, but they fit hand in glove with an architecture that starts from the top," said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM Information Management Software. "When we ask clients, 'Do you have an application agenda?' and we get inconsistent answers, that's where the growth is."

Goyal said there are any number of approaches to the starting point of an architecture—customers might purchase ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tools, BI software or reporting tools—but ultimately clients are looking for a solution. "So you will see us do a solution—master data management, or information warehouse," Goyal said. "You will see us talk about individual products, but each one of them [is a way] to implement an architecture. So if you start with MDM and tomorrow you want to add BI, it's the same metadata shared across it."