IBM, Tibco tackle data management

Knocking down silos is harder than you think. That’s a realization that countless enterprise IT administrators are coming to as they try to figure out a way to pull together data scattered throughout an enterprise into a coherent set of services.

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But two announcements in the emerging data integration and data management space last week show that application and infrastructure companies have finally taken notice of the yawning data integration and data management gap.

First off, IBM made good on its Hawk data integration project, introducing Information Server, a follow-up to the $1.1 billion purchase of Ascential in 2005.

IBM said it plans to make Information Server available next month. It will ship with a copy of IBM’s DB2 database and Application Server but  can be used with third-party offerings as well, according to Pete Fiore, an IBM vice president.

IBM is bullish about Information Server, which the company is positioning as a building block for SOA developers who want to create reusable Web applications and services, the IBM executives said.

“A whole new category and industry will develop around it,” said Tom Inman, vice president of marketing at IBM’s information management unit. Much in the same way that application server and portal server industry segments have emerged during the past few years, IBM expects an information server market to develop, he added.

“This is a starting point,” said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM’s information management business. “We’ll keep adding to Information Server.”

But IBM isn’t the only company stepping up to solve the siloed data problem. Tibco Software last week released Tibco Collaborative Information Manager Version 6.0, which works by exposing application functions and data through a Web services layer. Those reusable services can then be combined into new applications, the company said.

Data management and integration is at least as vital to successful SOA deployments as service creation, said Neeraj Gokhale, general manager of enterprise information management at Tibco.

“If data is inconsistent across applications, it will be increasingly difficult  to build ... SOA services that cut across multiple systems and departments,” Gokhale said.