developerWorks: Ambuj, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. We’ve been hearing a lot about "Information On Demand." What does "Information On Demand" mean to the average database developer or DBA?

Ambuj Goyal: Simply put, an On Demand Business is about end-to-end integration of business processes -- in an organization and with its partners and customers. More often than not, this translates into a need for a free flow of information across those processes. Information of all forms needs to be freed from the application silos where it resides today. Information must be delivered as a service, easily accessible to the people and processes that need it.

So, to meet the business need, DBAs and developers need information services, based on open standards, to help them do just that. And this is what "Information On Demand" is all about. It’s about making information easily available as a service through open standards. Services to help access, integrate, transform, analyze, and deliver information rapidly.

The upside of doing this is tremendous: with a free flow of information new business processes can be enabled to better serve customers, compliance with regulations can be made easier, better business decisions can be made. And at the same time, if done right, the IT infrastructure can be made more cost efficient.

dW: How does "Information On Demand" solve developers' problems in a new way?

AG: There are two parts to the answer here:

• First, it’s about providing a new level of services that helps add value to the information. Services that integrate information -- both data and content, regardless of location -- to provide a unified and accurate view. Services that add business context to the raw information. Services that expose insightful relationships in the information. So what’s new with "Information On Demand" is an open framework to provide these services.
• The other key part of what’s new is that these services are exposed via open standards. Many systems today are cobbled together with a huge investment in proprietary programming that yields very brittle connections. The resulting systems are the antithesis of flexible.

Change is hard. Extending use of the information assets is either impossible or untimely. By embracing open standards, like Web services, like XML, and flexible architectures like SOA, problems can be solved more rapidly and with less effort. Further, as a result of open standards, more developers have access to the information they need more easily.

Our approach is geared to embrace and extend the value of what strategic investments clients and partners have already made. This means not working only with IBM technologies, but truly extending the value that is already in place.

But remember, the traditional services of storing and securing data or content in a highly available fashion is still an important aspect of information management and will continue to evolve and receive considerable investment by vendors, but significant progress has been made by the industry technology-wise, and at the same time, best practices have emerged.

dW: What does the term "Master Data Management" (MDM) mean?

AG: All businesses have a core of data that is used again and again across multiple applications and business processes -- data about products, data about customers, data about suppliers, and so forth. Data about critical entities in a particular business. Traditionally, this information has been distributed across numerous siloed applications, resulting in redundancy
and inconsistency. With no single view of these key business entities, there are negative bottom line repercussions and increased risk for a business -- increased inventory costs, inefficient marketing, poor customer service, extended processing cycles, regulatory fines, and so on. Or, just poor business decisions. Master Data Management is about providing this single reconciled view of reference data. This leads to better and more timely business decisions and improved operations.

dW: How is MDM implemented within the IBM Information Management products?

AG: Our products help to do three things:

• Integrate master data
• Provide specialized services to manage and expose master data as a service
• And finally, deliver accelerators that speed the use of master data in business processes, such as new product introduction or customer introduction accelerators.

IBM helps manage master data with several products from our Information Management portfolio. For instance, WebSphere Product Center and WebSphere Customer Center provide clients with a unified view of their product and customers. In turn, these products can leverage the integration, transformation, and data quality capabilities of WebSphere Information Integration. These products are tailored for specific industries and common processes within those industries (for example, New Product Introduction for Retail or New Client Introduction for Insurance).

dW: How do the IBM Information Management products integrate with SOA?

AG: First, what we at IBM mean by SOA is an architecture that deploys information as a service on the network, open to any person, process, or application in an open and timely manner. SOA provides a flexible, robust approach to model, assemble, deploy, and manage business process for today’s environments. Doing this correctly requires a view across the people, process, and information needs of the client.

Specific to information management, we take advantage of this in a number of ways -- from modeling to assembly to the runtime deployment of systems and processes built on the SOA model.

All of our SOA capabilities center around supporting the open standards that are the fundamental enablers of a services-oriented architecture. Our databases can service requests for data via open standards calls such as SOAP. Our content repositories can service requests for content via open standards like JSR170. We have deep integration of XML throughout our portfolio to help with the interchange of information. Our integration, cleansing, and transformation services are all available through Web service calls.

dW: How does this strategy reduce complexity?

AG: By providing information as a service, through open standards, we separate the underlying information from the business process. Our model abstracts, or virtualizes, the lower levels of the technology stack. This allows the business process to change rapidly without having to rebuild or duplicate the underlying information structures. In many instances, this lets a company avoid costly business process and application integration efforts that eat up 30-50% of today’s IT budgets.

It also enables the re-use information more easily and more rapidly. We can help automate the synchronization of information across an enterprise through several approaches and can eliminate a whole layer of complexity.

The services themselves -- integration, transformation, cleansing, analysis, and so on -- provide capabilities that customers would otherwise have to develop themselves. By using tools to compose information services, one avoids the complexity introduced by user-written programs.

dW: How do our products integrate with XML, and how does it fit into the strategy?

AG: XML is absolutely central to our strategy, and our products embrace XML in several ways. First, our existing relational database products can store XML. Our databases have services that help shred and compose XML documents to and from relational table structures. To ease development, there are also features that help ensure XML integrity, such as schema and XSLT support. The databases can also service XML-based Web services requests for information such as SOAP. Our content repository also has deep support for XML.

The next step in this area is very exciting. With our Viper beta release of DB2 -- our next generation of DB2 -- we have introduced a native XML storage manager and support for XQuery. So, XML documents can be stored in their native structure, avoiding shred/compose and thus optimize performance. And since the XML isn’t shredded and recomposed, the integrity of the document is ensured -- an absolute requirement in some application spaces such as security trading. Further, for the XML side of things, the mature database services of DB2 are extended to the XML documents -- back-up and recovery services, high availability configurations, and so on. With Viper’s hybrid model, what we’re seeing is an inflection point every bit as significant as when relational databases appeared. We will see new classes of applications and business value based on this that we cannot even imagine today.

Beyond this, we also embrace numerous XML interchange formats. For example, formats for exchanging metadata between tools or industry-specific formats for exchanging instance data.

dW: Thank you so much for helping us understand these concepts.

Resources

Learn

• Information On Demand Web page: Learn more about IBM Information On Demand. You'll find whitepapers, brochures, press announcements, information services, capabilities, and more.
  
  
• "Information as a Service" Internet radio broadcast: Listen to this broadcast for more information about Information On Demand.
  
  
• "Master Data Management: Providing a Single View of Your Company's Critical Information": Listen to this webcast for more information about Master Data Management.
  
  
• Learn more about Information Management: The Role of Information as a Service Oriented Architecture.
  
  
• "Unleashing Information On Demand using XML and DB2 Viper": Learn more about the Viper release of DB2. Listen to the webcast.
  
  
• Stay current with developerWorks technical events and webcasts.
  
  
• developerWorks Information Management zone: Learn more about DB2. Find technical documentation, how-to articles, education, downloads, product information, and more.
  
  
• Learn about DB2 Express-C, the no-charge version of DB2 Express Edition for the community.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Build your next development project with IBM trial software, available for download directly from developerWorks.
  
  
• Now you can use DB2 for free. Download DB2 Express-C, a no-charge version of DB2 Express Edition for the community that offers the same core data features as DB2 Express Edtion and provides a solid base to build and deploy applications.
  
  

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Table of contents

• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

Next steps from IBM

• Try: DB2 Enterprise
• Demo: DB2 serving ATOM feed
• Webcast: A smarter way to successful SOA - Information as a trusted strategic asset
• Briefing: Information on Demand
• Buy: DB2 Enterprise

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