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  5. IBM's IOD 2011: A Cornucopia of Solutions: Page 2 of 4
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IBM's IOD 2011: A Cornucopia of Solutions: Page 2 of 4

IBM titled its Information on Demand (IOD) 2011 conference in Las Vegas "The Premier Forum for Information and Analytics." IOD featured innovation and a cornucopia of products and services that act a litmus test and checkpoint as to where the IT industry is and where it is going.
DAVID HILL
November 04, 2011

  • Note also that IBM's ECM efforts assimilate company acquisitions (of which FileNet was the anchor, and also includes more recent deals such as Datacap and PSS Systems) and leverage organically developed IBM technologies into selected aspects of ECM (the ubiquitous Watson as a prime example).

    Now, the not-so-hidden downsides of ECM are its expense and the fact that it requires an internal discipline not only on the part of IT but also on the part of everyone (more or less) within an enterprise. Therefore, IBM (as well as its ECM competitors) has to emphasize that the benefits make the cost and discipline required worth the effort.

    IBM stresses efficiencies that lead to cost reduction. Doing things right is always a popular theme, as well as effectiveness (doing the right things) that lead to revenue growth. But IBM also emphasizes outcomes, which means that an organization can better do the jobs for which it is responsible. For example, one police department uses content analytics to solve cases. That should make the community (except for those taken off the street for legal infractions) happy.

    Data Management Software and Data Warehousing Systems
    IBM has three long-standing database systems that seem to get better with age.

  • IMS: Although floppy disks have gone the way of the Edsel, older IT software technologies do not necessarily fade away. In fact, some get better with time. For those customers who have acquired the taste for the IMS database system, IBM claims that the new IMS 12 is the fastest database system ever. IMS must be the Energizer Bunny of databases--although it has a very targeted market, it keeps going and going.
  • DB2: This is the workhorse of IBM's database systems and, as with IMS, seems to keep improving with age--not only in speeds and feeds, but also in OS support (Linux; Unix, including IBM’s AIX, HP-UX and Solaris; and Windows) on top of the traditional mainframe z/OS. IBM has even announced a DB2 analytics accelerator that integrates DB2 for z/OS and the Netezza analytics appliances.
  • Informix: If any of IBM's database systems were in line for retirement, this would seem to be the one. But that is not the case. Each database has unique characteristics, and no one size fits all. IBM is emphasizing what it claims are Inforfmix’s large advantages over Oracle Database for loading smart meter data and for time series queries.

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