IBM Dynamic Warehousing Initiative - Delivering Business Insight

Recently IBM has announced its Dynamic Warehousing Initiative.  Given our strategic positioning with IBM, Cognos is committed to supporting this platform, and we do so from many different angles. To give some background, here is a brief overview of what the Dynamic Warehousing platform entails.  IBM’s Dynamic Warehousing is not a product, tool or simple one-off solution.  It is an approach that enables customers to deliver business insights by integrating, transforming, harvesting and analyzing insights from structured and unstructured information.

There are many components from IBM that make up the Dynamic Warehousing platform:

• Search and text analytics capabilities to enable usable knowledge to be extracted from unstructured information. (IBM OmniFind Analytics Edition)
• Information integration capabilities to aggregate, cleanse and transform information from disparate sources across the enterprise and make that information available as a service.  (IBM Information Server)
• Process management capabilities that can leverage analytics for improved decision making and process optimization by delivering business insights within the context of the activities being performed. (IBM FileNet and IBM WebSphere)
• Enterprise data modeling to provide common metadata for working with all relevant information. (IBM Rational Data Architect )
• Master data management to ensure a common view of customers, partners and products across different applications, provide clean and authoritative dimensional data to the warehouse, and enable a single version of the truth. (IBM Master Data Management)
• Industry perspective, to more effectively apply analytics to a particular domain. (IBM Industry Data Models i.e. Banking Data Model, Insurance Data Model)

As per our announcement earlier this year, Cognos is committed to supporting this initiative, and as a result, help customers use advanced analytics as part of a real-time business process, and unlock knowledge buried in both structured and unstructured information.

For each of the products listed above, Cognos has specific support and integration:

• IBM OmniFind Analytics Edition - Cognos 8 Go! Search supports IBM OmniFind enterprise search software from IBM.  Cognos 8 Go! Search enables users to discover and analyze information on demand by searching business intelligence managed by Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and other content stored across the enterprise.
• IBM Information Server including IBM Rational Data Architect, IBM Master Data Management – Last year at IBM’s Information On Demand conference, Cognos announced its support for IBM’s Information Server.  Cognos ensured that joint customers will be able to use Cognos 8 BI and the IBM Information Server to access strategic information across complex and heterogeneous environments to make more informed and effective business decisions.
• IBM FileNet – Prior to IBM’s acquisition of FileNet, Cognos had an existing relationship with FileNet, and delivered demonstrable process-enabling business performance management, geared to helping organizations make faster and more effective decisions at the most relevant points in a business process.  This integration still exists today, and will become even stronger, given the tight partnership with IBM.
• IBM Industry Data Models – IBM’s Industry Data Warehouse solutions are specific data models developed by IBM which provide a metadata framework for Cognos to attach to.  All of these models are developed using the same methodology, but with unique industry differentiators, to develop disparate Data Warehouses, depending on the industry.  Similar to Cognos’ open data strategy, IBM’s Industry Data Models are technology independent and can be hosted on Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL etc. making Cognos an ideal platform to showcase these solutions.  Using Cognos 8 with these solutions exposes all the rich information in IBM’s Data Models within a browser window for users or analysts to drag and drop and create their own view of information pertinent to them.

Another facet of the Dynamic Warehousing Initiative is the IBM Balanced Warehouse.  The Balanced Warehouse component is a "soft bundle" including pre-configured and tested Linux based x86 hardware, IBM storage hardware, IBM DB2 Data Warehouse Edition including a SQL DW tool, and third party reporting or analytics BI packaged software.  We are in the process of gathering input from our customers and evaluating our participation in the large enterprise centric version of the Balanced Warehouse.