IBM explains its 'information on demand' strategy with Cognos

Last November's buyout by IBM of SOA software provider Cognos is already having a major impact on businesses that use vertical market software. That impact is being felt in the way these businesses warehouse and access their data.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - What do some police departments, retail chains, big banks, and hospitals have in common in the software department, that doesn't have to do with Microsoft or standards or open source? It's that they're using service-oriented software to help them warehouse their data, using some methods that were originally created for publishing houses to manage articles.

It's also that more of them are using SOA software from IBM, which is putting Big Blue right back in the driver's seat in the business methods department.

IBM's large-scale announcement this week of 16 new "Information on Demand" (IoD) products for "business optimization" centered around technical integration between technologies from IBM and its recently acquired property, Cognos.

Meanwhile, end users at the New York Police Department, Papa Gino's Pizza, financial institutions, and other organizations have already started implementing these IoD products on a daily basis to access information from a lot of different places under a single user interface -- with some business intelligence (BI) analysis and reporting often included in the mix.

From a clickable front end, NYPD crime investigators are using IBM's new Crime Management and Insight system to quickly carry out complex searches or database queries -- for example, how many weapons of a particular type were involved in crimes committed in Manhattan and each of the other New York City boroughs.

The results are presented to the crime fighters in a color-coded comparison chart, said IBM officials, during a demo for BetaNews at a press event in New York City this week.

Fiskars, a maker of outdoor equipment such as shovels and rakes, is using IBM's Retail Operations System (ROS), another IOD product, to quickly pull in point of sale (POS) sales data from cash register systems at stores where its products are sold. Fiskars now knows that sales of snow shovels are really going strong at the moment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, pointed out Carl Try, Fiskars' manager of eCommerce and Advanced Technologies, in a presentation at the event.

For the future, said Try, Fiskars is looking at integrating the POS sales data with weather information, apparently to help the company's wholesalers put together sales and promotional campaigns.

Similarly, Papa Gino's and D'Angelos Pizza are implementing IBM's Retail Operations System to gather and combine POS data from 300 different restaurants, for immediate analysis and review each morning by managers at corporate headquarters and regional offices.

Paul Valle, Papa Gino's senior VP of information technology and CIO, said that his chain is now working on implementing "exception handling" -- a term coined by IBM so long ago with regard to error recovery in software. Now, when something unusual and unexpected occurs at any outlet -- such as a really slow sales day -- management will be able to quickly look into and deal with the situation.

Down the road, Papa Gino's wants to integrate it POS data with information from a company that performs in-store customer surveys for the restaurant chain, in order to be able to take action immediately if a customer is unhappy about an individual transaction.

Valle and Try both told reporters that their companies were Cognos customers before that company combined with IBM.

Michael Nelson, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, noted during the event that users are having a tougher time managing and making sense of the growing amount of Internet-based information. Although much of this data does consist of "MySpace videos," somewhere in all of that is e-mail and other business information, he said.

For these reasons, the new Information on Demand systems have become a massive, company-wide initiative at IBM, involving 35,000 employees working in areas such as research, product management, and consulting, said Steve Mills, who heads up the IBM Software Group.

While some customers want IoD to solve a specific business problem, according to Ambuj Goyal, IBM's general manager of Information Management Software, others discover IoD while they're in the market for a specific type of product such as a data warehouse.

Of course, most customers don't need to know about the technical underpinnings in order to use these systems. But some people might be curious about how IBM's single underlying IoD architecture is able to handle such a wide range of scenarios.

Essentially, it's because of flexibility, Marc Andrews, IBM's manager director for IoD and Cognos Marketing, told BetaNews. The Cognos BI tools on the front end of the architecture work in conjunction with a bottom layer that can consist of any of a wide number of back end databases and content management systems, he said.

Depending on the specific database or content managment system, the information might include relational database tables, POS data, or "flat file" information such as e-mails and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, for instance.

In the middle of this architecture is a software layer that is essentially used for extracting information from the various databases and content management systems and "transforming" or converting it to formats that can be easily presented to end users through a GUI.

But among the ROS, Criminal Management and Insight, and other vertical solutions that IBM introduced this week, IBM and Cognos technologies are not necessarily deployed in the same ways.

For instance, on its back end, the Crime Management and Insight system demo'd at the press event uses IBM's Universal Database (UDB) for integrating information from relational crime databases as well as flat file content.

In contrast, the Compliance Warehouse for Regulatory Control, a new specialized repository from IBM, uses IBM Information Server, a product based on technology from Ascential, a previous acquisition, said Craig R. Rhinehart, IBM's director for markets and products, compliance and discovery.

Geared chiefly to banks, the new compliance system also uses technology such as scanning and a new "category management" system to peer inside of e-mails and other content, helping to rapidly determine whether a document contains the kind of information that needs to be archived for regulatory compliance.

Many of the new vertical market products, including the Crime Management and Insight system, also use IBM's WebSphere Portal Server together with a new portal-based "dashboard."

Also this week, IBM introduced several new products that IT (integration technology) pros can use for quickly integrating Cognos' tools with IBM Portal Server and a variety of back-end databases and content management systems, such as Information Server, IBM's InfoSphere Warehouse, and IBM FileNet Business Process Management (BPM) software, derived from IBM's FileNet acquisition.

One of these new integration products, an IBM Dashboard Accelerator "starter kit," uses a "tab-based user interface" to make it easier to build dashboards for WebSphere Portal Server, according to Rebecca Buisan, product line manager for IBM's WebSphere Portal Accelerators.

"You do need to have programming skills to create the dashboards. But you don't need to be a highly expensive programmer," Buisan told BetaNews.