IBM Global Business Services’ BI practice provides the industry’s broadest and deepest BI services, by providing the right balance and combination of industry, functional/operational, technical and change management skills to deliver comprehensive, value-added BI solutions. This combination provides a basis for integrated, business-driven solutions with demonstrable business return throughout the enterprise.

“We believe Gartner’s latest research shows IBM’s strategy to deliver comprehensive BI Services that address our clients’ most important and complex information-related requirements is working,” said Mike Schroeck, Global Business Intelligence Practice leader, IBM Global Business Services. “At the same time we are increasing our BI focus and investments in areas such as: SOA, business process management, analytics, content management, governance, real-time access, and our industry solutions in order to continue to deliver the market’s leading BI solutions to our clients.”

The Business Intelligence practice is a core component of IBM’s Information on Demand initiative. This initiative combines IBM services, products and research to develop integrated solutions aimed at helping clients better compete and pursue new business opportunities by using information as a strategic weapon. Demand for IBM’s Information on Demand offerings has grown rapidly during the past 12 months with hundreds of new customer wins and 42 percent revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Building upon IBM’s enhanced version of the DB2 Warehouse and based on the DB2 9 Viper data server, the initiative includes new IBM Balanced Warehouse packages, which are pre-configured combinations of software, hardware and storage technologies optimized to meet a wide range of dynamic warehousing requirements.

“Cognos has been deeply involved in many major innovations with IBM in recent years. IBM’s latest initiative is a positive step forward to helping organizations transform their static data into competitive assets, enabling customers in all industries to make better, faster decisions by delivering increased business insight to the right people at the right time,” said Rupert Bonham-Carter, associate vice-president of global strategic alliances at Cognos. “IBM’s commitment to driving greater efficiencies on the back-end – including with ever-complex data warehousing models – ultimately translates into significant value on the front-end for our customers, which is deserving of our support and ongoing collaboration.”

“IBM is working with its key strategic partners to bring to market a Dynamic Warehousing initiative that promises to help our joint customers streamline business processes, transform customer service and generate new revenue opportunities,” said Karen Parrish, vice president of business intelligence solutions for IBM. “By continuing to work closely with Cognos, we look forward to enabling our customers to add unmatched BI capabilities on top of integrated information so they can drive innovation, increase operational efficiency, and lower IT risk.”

Cognos and IBM have a proven history over the past decade in delivering cost effective, integrated business solutions for global enterprises. Most recently, Cognos and IBM extended its global strategic alliance to help customers integrate their business processes across the enterprise and gain greater insight into business performance. The alliance agreement included joint development, marketing, and sales of SOA-based solutions to help customers optimize their analytics capabilities leveraging industry-specific best practices.

To date, the two companies have worked together on a number of successful technology and business solution initiatives, including:

• Delivering Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) as a standard framework for search and text analysis of unstructured information
• Bringing to market a number of industry-specific joint solutions for banking and public safety, including the highly-acclaimed IBM Crime Information Warehouse
• Bundling Cognos 8 Workforce Performance a s a standard analytic and reporting solution within IBM’s full-service Human Capital Management (HCM) outsourcing solutions portfolio, in order to help global customers address the impending skills gap and graying workforce

Cognos and IBM also continue to work together to deepen product and platform interoperability. Most recently, Cognos announced support for IBM Information Server, which allows customers to extend the reach of Cognos 8 BI in order to unlock strategic information across complex and heterogeneous environments.

With today’s announcement, IBM, the world’s second largest software company, is delivering capabilities that extend beyond traditional business intelligence and data warehousing techniques to allow global businesses and organizations of all sizes to streamline business processes, transform customer service, increase employee productivity, reduce business risks and generate new revenue opportunities.

IBM’s new Dynamic Warehousing strategy enables customers to use advanced analytics as part of a real-time business process and to unlock knowledge buried in both structured and unstructured information (free form text, e-mail, audio files, Web pages, etc.). This approach will also provide instant access to reliable and trusted business information in the context of activities being performed, whether it is supporting a customer, processing a claim or handling a transaction.

IBM is providing a set of integrated offerings for Dynamic Warehousing that use a combination of technologies from internal R&D and strategic Information on Demand acquisitions, including search and text analytics, information integration, process management, enterprise data modeling, master data management and industry-specific business models.

“Customers of all sizes in all industries are looking for new ways to maximize their information in order to gain a competitive advantage,” said Karen Parrish, vice president of Business Intelligence Solutions for IBM, who unveiled the initiative today at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Chicago. “Dynamic Warehousing provides a new approach to companies who want the ability to rapidly analyze and act upon the hidden benefits of their business information.”

Traditional data warehousing efforts were focused on query and reporting to understand what happened. The second wave focused on technologies such as online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining for historical analysis to understand why and recommend future action — strategic and tactical planning. IBM’s new approach is about making available and analyzing information on demand to help customers optimize each transaction, such as in the call center, in the field, when helping customers, or when taking orders.

For example Dynamic Warehousing is helping law enforcement agencies identify related incidents upon receiving an emergency call and deliver a list of potential suspects in real-time to detectives before they arrive at the crime scene. Likewise, insurance companies can identify potentially fraudulent claims prior to approval and payment. While retailers can rapidly leverage buying patterns and changes in consumer behavior to identify the most effective cross sell and up sell opportunities at the point of sale.

IBM customers such as Omnium are already discovering the benefits of Dynamic Warehousing. Omnium is an accounts receivable management and cost containment company that contracts with Medical Insurance firms to analyze monthly receipts of data for potential client overpayments.

IBM DB2 Warehouse increases our efficiency to mine data and develop predictive models which can produce exceptionally quick results for tracking mis-paid and overpaid insurance claims, said Duffy Boyle, CIO of Omnium Worldwide. “Our clients require rapid evaluation and response so the new IBM solution is ideal for our needs.”

New Offerings Enable Dynamic Warehousing from SMBs to the Enterprise

The foundation of IBM’s dynamic warehousing initiative is a new, enhanced version of the DB2 Warehouse — based on the DB2 9 “Viper” data server — which includes a unique set of features and capabilities that support growing customer demand for analytics and Information on Demand.

DB2 Warehouse provides data movement and transformation capabilities to reduce the complexity and lower the costs typically associated with loading data into the warehouse and preparing that data so that it can be leveraged more effectively. It also offers performance optimization capabilities that enable the warehouse to address broad enterprise warehousing requirements, such as advanced data partitioning and workload management to ensure that the most critical applications are serviced accordingly. Additionally, DB2 Warehouse takes advantage of Viper’s deep compression technology to increase performance and efficiency, while reducing storage costs.

A new and enhanced set of DB2 Warehouse offerings is being introduced to address the growing demand for real-time information insight in all organizations. This end-to-end approach is aimed at making warehousing solutions easier to deploy, while ensuring that customers can maintain the flexibility required by challenging business conditions and IT infrastructure demands, without sacrificing system performance. The new IBM warehousing lineup includes Starter, Intermediate and Advanced Editions of DB2 Warehouse, in addition to the existing Base and Enterprise Editions.

Introducing the IBM Balanced Warehouse

IBM is also introducing the IBM Balanced Warehouse, the next evolution of the Balanced Configuration Unit (BCU), to provide complete warehousing solutions with pre-configured software, hardware and storage, enabling faster implementation times with lower risk. IBM is now providing three classes of IBM Balanced Warehouse offerings, making it the first vendor to provide solutions optimized to meet the entire spectrum of warehousing requirements — from large enterprises to small- and medium-sized businesses to departmental data marts. These include the C-Class for application solutions, the D-Class for growth solutions, and the E-Class for enterprise solutions. The C-Class provides out-of-the-box solutions bundled with popular third-party reporting tools, such as the new IBM Balanced Warehouse C1000, which includes affordable hardware and storage that has been pre-configured with DB2 Warehouse Starter Edition and Crystal Reports Server from Business Objects for simplified creation and delivery of business reports.

“Mid-sized companies want to tap into the power of their data to stand out in their markets,” said Todd Rowe, vice president and general manager of mid-market business at Business Objects. “Both IBM and Business Objects are focused on meeting the needs of these important customers. The combination of DB2 Warehouse for data integration and Crystal Reports Server for report creation, management, and delivery makes IBM Balanced Warehouse C1000 a powerful solution for mid-sized companies that want to use their data to help drive business growth. Further, Business Objects Crystal Decisions, our new mid-market business intelligence platform, is an excellent compliment to IBM Balanced Warehouse C3000 — which is well suited for mid-sized companies that have more demanding data warehousing requirements and need the deeper insights and dashboards afforded by more traditional business intelligence tools.”

The DB2 Warehouse Starter and Intermediate Editions, along with the C-Class Balanced Warehouses, are targeted at the SMB market and will be made available through IBM business partners. More than 30 business partners have already signed up to make these simplified channel offerings available to smaller to mid-size organizations seeking to take advantage of affordable warehousing solutions.

Also newly available is the IBM Balanced Warehouse D-Class, providing an integrated growth solution designed to reduce the complexity, cost and risk of creating, implementing and maintaining large departmental data marts and mid-size data warehouses on Linux.

To provide a rich interface for extracting additional business insights from unstructured information, IBM has combined a set of search, content analytics and visualization capabilities into the new OmniFind Analytics Edition. OmniFind Analytics Edition extracts meaningful information, identifies valuable patterns, trends and issues that can be used for important business initiatives such as improving customer care, delivering quality insight reporting and enhancing research and intelligence. By dynamically consolidating and analyzing data from unstructured and structured information sources, valuable insight can be delivered from all information, regardless of its source or format. OmniFind Analytics Edition is based on more than a decade of experience in text analytics from IBM Research and client engagements by IBM Global Business Services.

In response to a growing demand for more operational intelligence from the several thousand companies using the mainframe for their warehousing needs, IBM also introduced several enhancements for the recently announced DB2 9 Viper for z/OS. The new capabilities include SQL enhancements for real-time query and reporting and new graphical analytics and reporting tools for use on System z.

In addition, IBM is offering a new set of services and new and enhanced industry data models to help organizations get started with dynamic warehousing more quickly and leverage best practices. This includes a new Health Plan data model for claims, medical management and provider and network care; an enhanced Insurance data model with added focus on compliance and risk management; strategic planning and design from IBM Global Business Services; and implementation assistance from IBM Global Technology Services.

The new DB2 Data Warehouse 9 utilizes IBM’s patented pureXML technology that allows customers to efficiently store and use data in an XML format. XML is increasingly used as the standard data interchange format between disparate applications, businesses and domains. It also incorporates DB2 9 “venom” technology that compresses row data to reduce storage requirements, improve I/O efficiency, and provide quicker data access from the disk.

DB2 9 is IBM’s new data server and includes the most significant database technology enhancements introduced to the industry in more than two decades. Today’s announcement comes just two months after the launch of DB2 9 and continues the momentum of IBM’s data server which has added record numbers of new customers and compiled thousands of competitive wins over other vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft.

Customers have embraced DB2 9 and many are moving their databases from Oracle to IBM’s new data server, including: Cardinal Health, American Electric Power, Central Michigan University, Farmers Insurance and Teleglobe. These new DB2 9 customers have cited the product’s combination of industry-first features, and superior reliability and performance, as the reasons for their migration.

“As a result of the groundbreaking features in DB2 9, we are seeing a great deal of customer interest,” said Arvind Krishna, vice president IBM data servers. “Our customers are telling us that DB2 9 has ushered in a new era of data server technology that helps them to grow their businesses. By extending these features into DB2 Data Warehouse 9 we have again raised the bar and delivered the industry’s most advanced dynamic warehousing platform.”

DB2 Data Warehouse 9 outperforms the limited offerings of competitors by excelling at enabling mixed workloads that span the largest multi-user transactional systems (trading floors and reservations systems) to the largest pure analytical workloads involving massive multi-billion row tables and the extremely complex and deeply nested transactions often created by leading OLAP tools. DB2 Data Warehouse 9 includes development and management tools for rapid and efficient delivery and administration of warehouses that provide optimal access and performance. DB2 9 provides the industry’s only 3-way partitioning - including leading multidimensional clustering; cube definitions; transformation modules; and data flow diagrams.

The DB2 9 data server marks a milestone in the five-year IBM development project that has transformed traditional, static database technology into an interactive, vibrant data server that enables clients to improve their ability to manage multiple types of information, such as documents, Web pages, and digitally signed XML transactions. IBM’s new data server provides an industry-first seamless and simultaneous information flow of both XML and relational data, regardless of format, platform or location. The DB2 Data Warehouse 9 extends this capability into additional markets.

DB2 Data Warehouse 9 will also power IBM’s industry-leading data warehouse appliance offerings based on the ‘Balanced Configuration Unit’ or BCU. The BCU is a fully integrated and scalable data warehouse solution that combines software, server, and storage resources to maximize business intelligence and information management performance for enterprises.

For more information about IBM dynamic data warehousing, visit www.software.ibm.com/bi.