Most of today's critical business initiatives cannot succeed without
effective integration of information. Initiatives such as single view of the
customer, business intelligence, supply chain management, and Basel II and
Sarbanes-Oxley compliance require consistent, complete, and trustworthy information.
IBM® Information
Server is the industry’s first comprehensive, unified foundation for enterprise
information architectures, capable of scaling to meet any information volume
requirement so that companies can deliver business results within these initiatives
faster and with higher quality results.
IBM Information
Server combines the technologies within the IBM Information Integration Solutions portfolio
(WebSphere® DataStage™, WebSphere QualityStage, WebSphere Information
Analyzer, and WebSphere Information
Integrator) into a single unified platform that enables companies to understand,
cleanse, transform, and deliver trustworthy and context-rich information.
Over the last two decades, companies have made significant investments
in enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply
chain management packages. Companies also are leveraging innovations such
as service-oriented architectures (SOA), Web services, XML, grid computing,
and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
These investments have increased the amount of data that companies are
capturing about their businesses. But companies encounter significant integration
hurdles when they try to turn that data into consistent, timely, and accurate
information for decision-making.
IBM Information
Server helps you derive more value from complex, heterogeneous information.
It helps business and IT personnel collaborate to understand the meaning,
structure, and content of information across a wide variety of sources. IBM Information
Server helps you access and use information in new ways to drive innovation,
increase operational efficiency, and lower risk.
IBM Information
Server supports all of these initiatives:
- Business intelligence
- IBM Information
Server makes it easier develop a unified view of the business for better decisions.
It helps you understand existing data sources, cleanse, correct, and standardize
information, and load analytical views that can be reused throughout the enterprise.
- Master data management
- IBM Information
Server simplifies the development of authoritative master data by showing
where and how information is stored across source systems. It also consolidates
disparate data into a single, reliable record, cleanses and standardizes information,
removes duplicates, and links records together across systems. This master
record can be loaded into operational data stores, data warehouses, or master
data applications such as WebSphere Customer Center. The record can also
be assembled, completely or partially, on demand.
- Infrastructure rationalization
- IBM Information
Server aids in reducing operating costs by showing relationships between systems
and by defining migration rules to consolidate instances or move data from
obsolete systems. Data cleansing and matching ensure high-quality data in
the new system.
- Business transformation
- IBM Information
Server can speed development and increase business agility by providing reusable
information services that can be plugged into applications, business processes,
and portals. These standards-based information services are maintained centrally
by information specialists but are widely accessible throughout the enterprise.
- Risk and compliance
- IBM Information
Server helps improve visibility and data governance by enabling complete,
authoritative views of information with proof of lineage and quality. These
views can be made widely available and reusable as shared services, while
the rules inherent in them are maintained centrally.
Capabilities
IBM Information Server features a unified
set of separately orderable product modules, or suite components, that solve
multiple types of business problems. Information validation, access and processing
rules can be reused across projects, leading to a higher degree of consistency,
stronger control over data, and improved efficiency in IT projects.
Figure 1. IBM Information Server
As Figure 1 shows, IBM Information
Server enables businesses to perform four key integration functions:
- Understand your data
- IBM Information
Server can help you automatically discover, define, and model information
content and structure and understand and analyze the meaning, relationships,
and lineage of information. By automating data profiling and data-quality
auditing within systems, organizations can achieve these goals:
- Understand data sources and relationships
- Eliminate the risk of using or proliferating bad data
- Improve productivity through automation
- Leverage existing IT investments
IBM Information Server makes it easier for businesses to collaborate
across roles. Data analysts can use analysis and reporting functionality,
generating integration specifications and business rules that they can monitor
over time. Subject matter experts can use Web-based tools to define, annotate,
and report on fields of business data. A common metadata foundation makes
it easier for different types of users to create and manage metadata by using
tools that are optimized for their roles.
- Cleanse your information
- IBM Information
Server supports information quality and consistency by standardizing, validating,
matching, and merging data. It can certify and enrich common data elements,
use trusted data such as postal records for name and address information,
and match records across or within data sources. IBM Information Server allows a single record
to survive from the best information across sources for each unique entity,
helping you to create a single, comprehensive, and accurate view of information
across source systems.
- Transform your data into information
- IBM Information
Server transforms and enriches information to ensure that it is in the proper
context for new uses. Hundreds of prebuilt transformation functions combine,
restructure, and aggregate information.
Transformation functionality is
broad and flexible, to meet the requirements of varied integration scenarios.
For example, IBM Information
Server provides inline validation and transformation of complex data types
such as U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),
and high-speed joins and sorts of heterogeneous data. IBM Information Server also provides high-volume,
complex data transformation and movement functionality that can be used for
standalone extract-transform-load (ETL) scenarios, or as a real-time data
processing engine for applications or processes.
- Deliver your information
- IBM Information
Server provides the ability to virtualize, synchronize, or move information
to the people, processes, or applications that need it. Information can be
delivered by using federation or time-based or event-based processing, moved
in large bulk volumes from location to location, or accessed in place when
it cannot be consolidated.
IBM Information Server provides direct, native access
to a wide variety of information sources, both mainframe and distributed.
It provides access to databases, files, services and packaged applications,
and to content repositories and collaboration systems. Companion products
allow high-speed replication, synchronization and distribution across databases,
change data capture, and event-based publishing of information.
IBM Information Server, Version 8.1
This topic is also in the 