© 2002 International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved.
DB2DD: Janet, thanks very much for talking with us. By the time people read this, you will have completed your keynote address at developerWorks Live! in San Francisco. For those of us who were unable to attend, can you give us some of the highlights of that keynote?
Janet: The message that I am stressing to the developer community is that data management strategies must meet the challenges of rapid application development and management of information for an integrated e-business. e-business demands a closed loop among customers, operations, and partners. This demands a seamless flow of information to support integrated transactions and to add value. The purpose of my keynote was to show how IBM's Data Management solutions help ease application development in such an environment as well as to demonstrate how innovative new technologies like XML, federation and Web services can help companies leverage information to stay competitive.
DB2DD: Why is IBM taking such a strong leadership position in these technologies? What do they offer that helps solve application development and information management issues?
Janet: First of all, everyone is facing the reality of a world in which two things are true:
- Data is more than rows and columns.
- Data grows and grows, but it lives where it lives.
What does this mean? This means your application has to handle all kinds of data, including unstructured content such as document and images, and semi-structured content like XML. And it's likely that there's going to be data "out there" -- from your business partners, suppliers, research services, and so on -- that you are going to need. You need to be able to find and process that data wherever it lives. A single database or application doesn't "have it all" anymore and never will again.
DB2DD: So, in the context of development tasks, this situation means ....?
Janet : This means that theoretically developers would have to understand the nuances of all the backend data sources. Nobody has time for that. Through federation, DB2 ® insulates developers from the heterogeneity, giving them the information they need through a familiar and common language. And DB2 is the only federated system that provides optimized and transparent access to any form of heterogeneous information.
DB2DD: What language will developers use to access backend data sources?
Janet: Well, developers should be able to use the language that works best for them. SQL will continue to evolve to handle a world in which XML is the way the Internet does e-business. And XQuery is becoming more of a reality as a language that is designed to work particularly well in the semi-structured world of XML. The key here is to provide choices.
DB2DD: What is DB2 providing in support of XML?
Janet: DB2 was first major relational database on the market with XML support through its XML Extender. We're taking that experience and integrating XML support more deeply into the engine to provide transparent, optimized support for XML. DB2 XML support is already available in WebSphere ® Studio tools. And we are working to ensure that the tools used by XML programmers (stylesheet processor and parsers) are included with DB2.
DB2DD: You also mentioned Web services. Can you clarify how Web services are important for database developers?
Janet: I'm sure that your readers are aware that Web services is the emerging architecture for making it easier to integrate Web applications. DB2 was the first database to deliver support for industry web services by allowing DB2-managed objects like tables or stored procedures to be called by SOAP requests. And we are working on even more interesting applications of Web services by providing integrated information obtained through real-time Web service access, what we call federated Web services . Web service data can be integrated in real time in DB2, aggregated, joined, and so on. And it's all managed by the database, not your application.
And of course tooling will play in important role in making this even easier.
DB2DD: With all this focus on advanced technology, how is IBM's technical leadership stacking up against the competition?
Janet: DB2 is the most modern database architecture in the world, developed from the ground up and delivered in 1995 with technology that was on the horizon when it was undergoing design and development. It started with the cost-based optimizer, and we haven't looked back since. DB2 and Informix ® products are constantly in the forefront of new technology and IBM works hard on driving that technology through the appropriate standards bodies. As I mentioned before, DB2 was the first database to support standards-based Web services including XML, UDDI and SOAP and we are the first to show support for federated Web services.
In addition, DB2 is taking the leadership role in terms of self-managing and tuning technology. As I mentioned before, our first "smart" technology was the cost-based. We are continuing to enhance DB2 in ways to continue to reduce the total cost of ownership, and you will see significant enhancements in this area later this year.
There are many other examples I could cite of technology leadership and open standards. But the point I am trying to get across is that this is an area that I feel strongly about and the whole data management team feels strongly about. You won't see us resting on our laurels.
DB2DD: Let's move on to the area of developer relations. IBM has traditionally been seen as not as developer-focused as some of our competition. What is IBM doing to change that perception? And how successful have those efforts been?
Janet: We are making significant investments in the area of developer relations--it makes good business sense to do so because 70% of database decisions are made in relationship to solutions. Therefore, DB2 must be the database of choice for those solutions developed by the developer community. Therefore, we are making DB2 easier for developers to use, developing applications takes less time, and the resulting application is scalable, high-performing, and reliable.
In addition, we are there to help developers with our enhanced support capabilities. We help them educate their customers, we help them solve technical problems. And we are providing a constant stream of technical information, samples, and tutorials through such venues as the DB2 Developer Domain.
Also, because application development productivity is related to tools that make it easy to write and deploy applications, we are working hard and investing money to ensure that DB2 works well with the tools that developers use. If developers use Microsoft Visual Studio, we want to be sure that DB2 works well and integrates well with that toolset. We want to support whatever programming model a developer wants to use, whether it be .NET or J2EE, so we are working with Microsoft to provide that .NET support. We want DB2 to be targeted as easily from either model.
DB2DD: We know that IBM's stronghold is on the mainframe and Enterprise customer. What is IBM doing to attract the small and medium business customer who doesn't even have a mainframe installed?
Janet: OK, let's not forget that DB2 runs on 22 platforms. DB2 runs and runs well on platforms that are used by small and medium-sized businesses throughout the world. And it's impossible not to notice how IBM and its customers are embracing Linux because of its openness and certainly because it can be a much less expensive option for many customers. DB2 was the first database in the industry to be certified and shipped on Linux, which enables our customers to run DB2 as a departmental system up to those who want to consolidate their Intel servers onto a mainframe.
Solutions and support are also key issues for SMB customers. When IBM partners with solution providers, we work together on everything from product development to co-marketing, co-sales, and co-customer support. Customers know that if there are problems they want to know that the solution provider and IBM will work together to ensure the solutions is supported - they won't get pinged around.
We also know that smaller and medium-sized businesses tend to do business with local application solutions vendors. We work with local ISVs and solution providers around the world. I'm not talking just about the largest ISVs, I'm talking about a very, very important segment of ISVs, which are the hundreds of thousands of local ISVs and solution providers.
DB2DD: Do you have any specific programs targeted for solution providers?
Janet: The Start Now program is a perfect example. The Start Now program is a combination of IBM middleware, suggested IBM e-Servers and consulting services provided by IBM Business Partners (solution providers) that enables small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) to implement e-business solutions in a way that maximizes benefits and minimizes risk. These solutions address such business activities as e-commerce, CRM, business intelligence, collaboration, content management, host integration and Web site management.
DB2DD: It's been a year since IBM acquired Informix. What has been the result of that so far, in terms of market acceptance and technology sharing, of that effort? Are you still glad you did it?
Janet: We are very pleased with the results. It's been a year since we announced our intent to acquire Informix. Since then, we have fully integrated their business into IBM data management. And customers have remained committed, far exceeding the industry predictions that 75% of customers would stay. In just the past two quarters, more than 20,000 customers have renewed their licenses or purchased additional products from IBM. We have shipped 10 updates to products since acquisition. And we are very busy leveraging Informix skills and technologies into our product mix.
DB2DD: Like what?
Janet: For example, we have support for DB2 from Informix 4GL. Now developers can use the same tool for DB2. We've certified the Informix database with WebSphere so that Informix can now be used with the world's best application server. And of course there are sophisticated features like DataBlades, which are being incorporated into DB2.
DB2DD: What do you see rolling out in DB2 in the next 2 years of particular interest to developers?
Janet: Well, I've already mentioned some of the interesting things on the horizon such as increased self-management and tuning, Web services and XML integration, and broader tooling support. All this work is coming together as DB2 evolves to be a server of enterprise content such as documents and images. DB2 is evolving to be an XML data store, enabling DB2 to store all forms of information.
DB2 is evolving to play a role in the whole software stack from the highest level of business process integration, through application integration (with our integration with WebSphere MQ [see related article ] to our sweet spot, information integration, which is the ability to aggregate data from across the enterprise, as is already being demonstrated with Information Integration technology, while continuing to focus on reducing the total cost of ownership and ease of development and deployment across the enterprise.
Janet Perna first joined IBM in San Jose, California where she held a number of system programming and management positions. She moved into product development at the Santa Teresa Laboratory (now Silicon Valley Lab) in 1981. When she became director of database technology at the IBM Toronto Laboratory in 1991, she began building IBM's database business on distributed platforms, including UNIX
®
, Windows NT
®
and OS/2
®
.
In 1996 she was promoted to general manager, assuming worldwide responsibilities for IBM's data management business, including strategy, product development, marketing, sales and customer support. She is IBM Software Group's highest ranking female executive.
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