eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
IBM will announce general availability of its much-heralded DB2 Information Integrator software on Tuesday, at the same time that Striva Corp. announces that it will extend Information Integrator by enabling it to access mainframe data sources.
The news will be delivered at two forums: the IBM Software Symposium in Munich, Germany, and at the International DB2 Users Groups IDUG 2003 conference, in Las Vegas. The news at IDUG 2003 will be delivered during the opening keynote by Janet Perna, general manager for data management solutions at IBM.
Information Integrator is a central part of the Somers, N.Y., companys master plan for what it calls on-demand computing—the ability to instantly access, integrate, manage and analyze all forms of information, stored on any platform, both within and beyond the enterprise.
That vision requires three things: technology automation, which IBM has been focusing on with its Autonomic Computing initiatives; virtualization, or the ability to plug in or out components to achieve better use of assets; and integration, or the ability to integrate people, processes and information so an IT environment can react to business needs in real-time.
The integration piece of the puzzle is where Information Integrator fits in. The software provides replication, transformation, caching, XML, Web Services and Java capabilities. It incorporates IBMs federated data management capabilities to do things such as pull a customers name and address from a data warehouse, access and extract all e-mail or other correspondence from that customer, and present all such relevant data in a unified view to a call-center operator, for example.
Nelson Mattos, IBMs director of information integration, said that in customer tests, Information Integrator has reduced integration coding requirements by some 40 to 60 percent when using a Java development environment to integrate across DB2, Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Excel databases. The most significant portion of that reduction can be accounted for by the fact that the level of skills necessary to perform integration was significantly reduced, said Mattos, in San Jose, Calif. “[Beta users] found they dont have to compose queries, manage different connections to those systems, and worry about different interfaces to those systems,” he said.
Page 2
A necessary piece of the on-demand puzzle will come from Striva, of Scotts Valley, Calif., when it rolls out its Detail data integration platform. The software will enable businesses to access, integrate and manage data in real-time as if it were coming from a single source, regardless of where it resides. Detail will extend Information Integrators reach into data sources including IBM IMS, VSAM, IDMS, Datacom and Adabas. It will capture and deliver the data either in bulk form, via change capture or through real-time.
Bulk data capture involves capturing data from a database source, moving it to another database, receiving an SQL request, reading metadata for a given database and converting the request to native calls.
Change capture involves moving only data thats been changed since the last request, or from some specified time. That enables movement of a smaller amount of data, which is still kept synchronized, officials said.
Finally, real-time data capture involves real-time data change and propagation to another database.
IBM DB2 Information Integrator will be available on Tuesday from IBM and authorized resellers, priced at $20,000 per processor and $15,000 per data-source connector.
Detail will also be available on Tuesday. The cost for a bulk adapter license is about $75,000. If change capture is involved, the adapter license costs about $150,000. Real-time integration costs are mips-based, with a starting cost of about $300,000. One adapter can be used to translate and make native calls to all environments.
Latest IBM News:
Search for more stories by Lisa Vaas.