IBM FROM PAGE 18 tecture (SOA), which demands AG. IBM’s approach has been companies deploy composite magnifies the need for applica-that a full range of applications to acquire niche vendors that, application environments and tion management. “Application
to manage and access customer distributed across the enterprise together, will provide a broad virtualized infrastructures, managers cannot know with any
data, IBM said. The com- have access to a consolidated set data management suite, Lafayette according to Jasmine Noel, a certainty what the runtime ap-pany added the products have of services. said, and are based on standards- principal analyst at research firm plication composition looks like
a common purpose: to help Vendors competing in the based technology. Ptak, Noel & Associates. unless it is actually discovered
organizations gain control of the master data management space Application management is The combination creates from the production environ-disparate data sources strewn include Oracle Corp. and SAP particularly important as more a dynamic environment that ment,” Noel said. 051298
across their IT infrastructures.
Combined, they can move
data among systems, clean and
synchronize data sources, and
compile contextual snapshots of
customers and products.
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 said.
“The software
is designed to
accelerate adoption
of service oriented
architectures. ”
— LaFayette
“MDM addresses the issue of
how companies manage their
master data, particularly very
diverse, heterogeneous type
companies that have lots of different systems,” Lafayette said. “The
problem that companies are dealing with is that they look across
their operations, and they want to
be acting more holistically…but
there are traditional channels
and silos that have been built up,
getting in the way of that.”
IBM doesn’t expect its customers to buy the entire stack at once.
Rather, implementations typically
will focus on solving a particular
business problem, according
to the firm. In product-centric
industries such as retail and
manufacturing, companies tend
to try to organize product-related
master data, while services-ori-ented industries such as banking
and insurance tend to look to first
resolve customer data-integration
issues.
Data quality is a huge driver,
Lafayette said. “So if you’re always cleaning your data after the
fact, your co-operational data
never gets cleaned.” The tools
are designed to “clean” this data
on an ongoing basis, resulting in
more accurate information, he
added.
IBM’s master data suite fits in
nicely with today’s overarching IT
trend, service oriented archi-
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