AlphaBlox deal anchors IBM's BI strategy

After decades of being a technology used exclusively by IT administrators and professional researchers, IBM is trying to push business intelligence-based technologies out to the great gray mass of desktop users in a range of different commercial environments.

IBM hopes to accomplish this through a collection of existing and upcoming products and technologies that will marry the massive amounts of historical data corporations have with real-time analytics. This combination will enable companies to more quickly and accurately monitor day-to-day data from, say, financial transactions, thereby allowing them to compare and contrast that data with the data stored in mammoth databases.

This should help corporate users where the rubber meets the road to make faster, better-informed decisions in the coming world of on demand computing, IBM officials believe.

"What we are finding is that BI in the past is all about capturing historical data, but we need to apply real-time analytics to it. This idea of pushing BI out to the masses is where we really have to get to as an industry," said Karen Parrish, IBM's vice president in charge of BI.

On Wednesday of this week, IBM added another technology piece to this ongoing effort with its acquisition of AlphaBlox, a company in Mountain View, Calif., specializing in analytics software.

The software from AlphaBlox lets users embed analytics into their existing business processes, thereby making information available to a much wider range of users and applications. It is also designed to enable larger IT shops to deepen their business acumen by being able to access and manipulate data from across the enterprise and then offer it up to users in a customized way.

IBM plans to weave AlphaBlox's operations into its Information Management software business and will sell the company's products through its network of resellers and business partners, according to IBM officials. They added that they will integrate AlphaBlox's technology into its middleware portfolio in a number of ways, including its Data Warehouse Edition, the WebSphere Business Integration Monitor, the Rational collection of tools, and the WebSphere Portal and IBM Workplace.

The AlphaBlox software allows users to more effectively embed analytics into their existing business processes, thereby making information available to a wider spectrum of users and applications, company officials explained. The goal of the software is to help corporate IT shops deepen their business insight by being able to access data from across the enterprise and then present that information in a customized way.

The AlphaBlox acquisition is the sixteenth by IBM's $14 billion software group, just since 2001, and the fifth for the company's DB2 data management division.

Recent market numbers indicate IBM's financial investments in this part of the market may be justified. According to IDC, the overall opportunity for BI is more than $7 billion worldwide for 2004, with the market researcher predicting it will be double that by the end of 2006.

Most corporate users would love to see IBM deliver on any technology that helps them put together mission-critical data in multiple data stores with new Web-based data arriving every day. But some fret over the cost of buying new software as well as costs associated with services and support.