IBM Corp. has completed its acquisition of analytics software provider Varicent Software Inc. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Varicent’s software automates and analyzes data across sales, finance, human resources and IT departments to uncover trends and improve sales performance and operations.

The Toronto company’s approximately 200 workers will join IBM’s software group.

“Varicent advances IBM’s efforts to deliver analytics directly into the hands of front line employees, helping them uncover new ways to remain competitive and stay ahead of increasing demand,” Les Rechan, IBM’s general manager of business analytics, said Wednesday in a statement.

IBM said that the buyout is part of its long-term strategy to broaden its business analytics and software and services capabilities. The company announced the deal last month.

Shares of IBM, which is based in Armonk, N.Y., fell $1.13 to $195.69 in morning trading Wednesday. They are near the high end of their 52-week range of $157.13 to $210.69.

Source:http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-05/D9UUEQP81.htm

Integrated e-commerce software in the cloud that spans marketing, selling and fulfillment

IBM has debuted a new enterprise e-Commerce software version, Commerce on Cloud designed for data sharing and marketing and supply chain processes in the cloud.

Commerce on Cloud, is an integrated platform for offering, selling, transacting and fulfilling orders in the cloud, the company noted.

IBM stated the new offering enables chief marketing officers (CMOs) and e-commerce executives establish and maintain an on-line storefront, and automate and synchronise supply and demand engines in a bid to improve the flow of business-to-consumer transactions.

IBM Industry Solutions general manager Craig Hayman said accelerating commerce on the Cloud is a dramatic step forward in enabling companies to transform their business operations.

“Companies of all sizes can now deliver a better client experience by providing personalized marketing, selling the way customers want to buy, and delivering products through a supply chain that’s prepared for the unpredictable,” Hayman added.

IBM announced it has also has upgraded its other on-cloud collaboration networks for collaboration and digital information sharing across demand and supply processes.

The company has added new pricing and trade promotion collaboration capabilities for DemandTec that will enable a network of more than 15,000 members such as ConAgra Foods and PETCO to share information, for retailer-consumer packaged goods collaboration and execution.

A new certified Digital Data Exchange Partner program, retailers and third party digital marketing providers can relay on behavioral data to analyse specific processes and manage their marketing, promotions and customer behavioral analytics.

Source:http://ecommerce.cbronline.com/news/ibm-rolls-out-new-enterprise-e-commerce-software-version-230512

SOFTWARE has saved short-term insurer Santam $2,4m in fraudulent claims, according to the technology’s supplier IBM.

IBM said yesterday its business analytics software had enhanced Santam’s fraud detection capabilities and had also enabled faster payouts for legitimate claims. In developing markets including SA, about R3bn is siphoned off by criminals every year, according to IBM.

Industry experts said that last year fraudulent claims in SA had totalled more than R100m, and this amount only includes claims identified as fraudulent.

Short-term insurers have dealt with policyholders who continue to beat the system by making false reports of car thefts to claim insurance. Business owners have been known to burn down their premises to claim insurance benefits.

Anesh Govender, the head of finance, reporting and salvage at Santam, said IBM’s solution “has delivered a full return on investment and also helped uncover a motor insurance fraud syndicate in less than 30 days after the system went live”.

According to IBM, Santam’s claims division developed a new operating model for processing claims, depending on varying risk levels.

“IBM’s predictive analytics software has enabled Santam to automatically assess if there is any fraud risk associated with incoming claims and allows the insurer to distribute claims to the appropriate processing channel for immediate settlement or further investigation, which optimises operational efficiency.”

Rich Holada, vice-president of predictive analytics at IBM, said Santam “provides an excellent example of how insurers can put analytics into action in order to reduce risk, while improving the customer experience by settling claims faster”.

Source:http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=171479

IBM revealed new versions of its business process manager (BPM) and operational decision management (ODM) software at the IBM Impact conference last week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Announcing and demonstrating the changes, Phil Gilbert, IBM Software Group’s vice president for business process management(BPM), said that the growth of emphasis on BPM forms the beginning of a new business architecture that, over the next 30-40 years, will define the next big battle in software.

“When an enterprise system that can represent process can interact this natively with disparate information sources,” said gilbert, “I think you will see that the agility that can be gained by moving into a BPM-centric enterprise architecture – as opposed to an application-centric enterprise architecture – is going to be a very interesting conversation. It opens up pockets of innovation and agility inside your organisations that today are stymied because of the roadblocks that big application systems put in your way.”

As it is today, IBM’s Business Process Manager 7.5 only saw the light of day last year at Impact 2011 when around 20 products were integrated into BPM 7.0. Similarly, later last year, Websphere Business Events and Ilog Business Rules Management products were melded into Operational Decision Management.

At the Impact 2012 announcement these marriages were effectively consummated with more-flexible user interfaces that hint at the degree of integration that has been worked on since last year’s announcements.

Under the covers, IBM has continued with its integration work by adding linkages into the Rational application development environment. Starting with Tivoli Identity Manager, IBM is also pulling Tivoli security workflows into BPM version 8 so that enterprise-scale processes can be developed and secured.
The company has also been working with its Master Data Management(MDM) team to embed BPM into the product so information maintenance workflows can be constructed according to business rules.
The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) division has also improved the existing interface between BPM with its Case Management product so that end-users can now see across these systems seamlessly. Content management interoperability services (CMIS) capability has also been added to allow access to unstructured data stored in other CMIS-compliant databases, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Alfresco, and EMC Documentum.

A key development is that BPM 8.0 processes now work seamlessly with SAP. “We are delivering the ability for the process designer to introspect SAP to represent those processes directly in our IBM Business Process Manager platform – and interoperate with SAP at a level that no other business process management system can do,” Gilbert claimed.

Alongside BPM, IBM’s ODM product is also seeing changes. These are mainly in the way that the business rules governing decision-making structures within a company are presented to the users. IBM has incorporated a social-media-style interface which not only simplifies the user experience but also offers the kind of environment that users are coming to expect of interpersonal communications.
Searching, viewing and making changes are much more intuitive, Gilbert said. When a permission is required to make a change to protected files or sensitive information, ODM will connect with the supervising officer with the correct level of access and permissions can be granted in real time, online using an instant-messaging dialogue format.

Source:http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/ibm-launches-new-business-process-software-76835

IBM’s WebSphere application server serves as the cornerstone for the new applications

IBM has introduced a series of new business-integration software applications to help enterprises leverage the collaborative capabilities of social media, mobile and cloud computing into their enterprise apps.

The company said its WebSphere Application Server will be the cornerstone to adopt these new applications.

WebSphere Application Server will provide clients with lexibility for embedded deployments and make it cloud ready with built in virtualisation.

The new integration software applications include IBM Business Process Manager, Operational Decision Management and WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web Application Programming Interface (API) Services.

IBM Business Process Manager combines new capabilities of social collaboration, governance and mobile to improve the way enterprises work, allowing organisations to gain visibility in the ways they change, manage measure and improve the processes that run their business.

The Operational Decision Management acclerates and simplifies the way that enterprises manage the business rules that control decisions across business processes and applications.

The new “social media” style user interface provides an environment for collaboration and simplifies searching, viewing and making rule changes.

WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web API Services will allow enterprises to extend their services to support the community of developers building new social, mobile and cloud applications and it also provides an application to deliver, socialise and manage business API assets.

Source:http://enterpriseapplications.cbronline.com/news/ibm-introduces-new-business-integration-software-applications-020512

At the ongoing Impact 2012 conference holding in Las Vegas, United States of Aamerica, the International Business Machine, (IBM) has introduced a range of new business integration software capabilities called WebSphere Application Server.

The solution, according to IBM was designed to help organizations quickly begin incorporating the collaborative and intelligent capabilities of social media, mobile computing and cloud computing into their enterprise applications.

The WebSphere Application Server said to be growing rapidily in the markest, acoording to IBM now provides clients with new flexibility for embedded deployments and is ready for cloud with built in virtualization.

This new offering provides the software platform that today powers more than 100,000 clients worldwide.

Complementing WebSphere Application Server is a range of new integration software offerings including:

IBM Business Process Manager: Combines new capabilities around social, collaboration, governance and mobile to dramatically improve the way work is done. This allows organizations to gain visibility in the ways they change, manage measure and improve the processes that run their business.

IBM Operational Decision Management: Speeds and simplifies the way that organizations manage the business rules that control a wide range of decisions across business processes and applications. The new “social media” style user interface provides an intuitive environment for collaboration and simplifies searching, viewing and making rule changes.

IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web Application Programming Interface (API) Services: The solution allows companies to extend their services to support the emerging community of developers who are building new social, mobile and cloud applications. This new purpose-built offering provides a comprehensive solution to deliver, socialize and manage business API assets.

According to IBM, their client , Ottawa Hospital has already begun testing how these new software and services from IBM can dramatically change their business model.

Just recently, acording to IBM in a statement, the hospital had seen a tremendous increase in patients, resulting in higher occupancy rates and ultimately, overcrowding.

Additionally, the patients being admitted had complicated and acute symptoms, placing a greater strain on the need for coordinated healthcare delivery.

The IBM system provides extensive patient information and hospital resource availability to the clinical staff, via mobile device, at the point of care – speeding both admission and treatment.

“Physicians should be focused on patient care, not be tied up doing lower value activity, like calling for consults or trying to negotiate admission for a patient,” Dale Potter, Senior Vice President & CIO at

The Ottawa Hospital, said, adding that , “The concept behind our new system from IBM is that we are able to help our staff have one consolidated view on important data and processes, getting the right information to physicians at the right time.”

With the application, he said that the attending physician can send an electronic request to the patient’s physician for clarification on past diagnosis.

The patient’s doctor receives the consultation request immediately on their most accessible device – a tablet, smart phone or a computer. They respond directly to the specific consult questions electronically, so the attending physician can correctly diagnose the patient, he explained.

Source:http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/05/ibm-unveils-software-with-capabilities-on-social-media-cloud-computing/

SOA Software has partnered with IBM to optimize a ready-to-use SOA governance solution for IBM’s market-leading WebSphere DataPower appliance. SOA Software’s Policy Manager for DataPower takes hassle and expense out of applying SOA governance by automating critical set-up and operations tasks.

SOA Software’s Policy Manager for DataPower take the company’s best practices from SOA governance implementations and packaged them into a “ready-to-use” appliance-specific solution, Simon Barere, SOA Software’s senior systems architect, told IDN. It also delivers new pre-defined templates and support for federating governance across multiple appliances, he added.

By tightly integrating Policy Manager with IBM’s DataPower appliance, customers can more quickly design and deploy a governance SOA solution, end-to-end across their enterprises, Barere added. Specific features let users control the appliance directly from the Policy Manager console, and use and manage DataPower as the runtime engine. In turn, Policy Manager becomes the source for service and policy information for reporting and monitoring.

There are two key components to delivering an appliance-ready SOA governance solution, Barere told IDN. “One, we needed to make it simpler for how customers accomplish SLA, security and monitoring goals,” he said. “Two, once ready, we also needed to provide ways to implement governance more quickly by automating the [required] under-the-covers integration tasks.”

Architecture, Features of SOA Software’s
SOA Software Policy Manager for IBM DataPower Appliance
Architecturally, Policy Manager for DataPower provides deep integration with IBM WebSphere DataPower appliances, which provides IT “one click” management enabling users to control multiple appliances directly from the Policy Manager console.

This approach avoids the need to duplicate configuration manually. It also allows IT to use Policy Manager as the source of service, policy information and monitoring via a consolidated reporting console. It manages the full catalog of services, drives policy definition and distribution, and collects and displays monitoring data for the DataPower devices, providing end-to-end policy enforcement and transaction monitoring. It allows customers to implement and enforce consistent, uniform policies throughout their infrastructures, and provides visibility into enterprise service usage, performance, and availability from network edge to application.
“We provide [DataPower users] ways to implement governance more quickly by automating under-the-covers integration tasks.”

Simon Barere
senior systems architect

Barere described the complementary match-up between IBM DataPower and SOA Software’s SOA governance capabilities. Despite DataPower’s abilities to scale and speed message traffic, imposing SOA governance has been laborious for users, he said. “Governance was just not the focus of the DataPower appliance,” he added. “So, it can take two to three hours per service so it’s difficult to scale. And, even after you do your first couple of services, it doesn’t get easier.”

This situation led IBM and SOA Software to explore ways to extend Policy Manager so it could provide the DataPower appliance a more fully-automated, optimized SOA governance solution for DataPower, he added.

The features, driven by customer requests, include: automation to reduce admin set-up and overhead; a zero-coding approach to manage SOA services and conduct ongoing monitoring of services and policies; techniques and patterns to ensure consistent policy and service definition; real-time dashboards; and other features to simplify SOA lifecycle tasks for deployment, contracts, policy management, security, and PKI management.

In detail, notable features of Policy Manager for DataPower include:

Preset service deployment and metadata configuration – reduces administrative overhead and ensures consistency in proxy (virtual) service and configuration metadata across DataPower appliances.

Automated policy management – standardizes installation processes and ensures consistent application of approved enterprise security and management policies across all service instances over a cluster of appliances.

Cluster management patterns – manages groups of DataPower appliances as clusters, ensuring that they all share the same configuration with a single centralized management and monitoring console.

Guidelines for SLA monitoring and management – helps with definition, contracts, management and monitoring of service level agreement policies for services deployed in a single appliance or clusters of appliances.

Centralized cryptographic key and certificate management – eliminates costly and risky manual processes by automating the generation and management of the keys and certificates DataPower uses for message and transport signature and encryption.

SOA Software’s Policy manager for DataPower aims to bring users the same level of simplicity and rapid deployment they get with DataPower to their SOA governance tasks.

One early adopter in the financial services sector used SOA Software Policy Manager for DataPower to improve efficiency and alignment of multiple DataPower appliances deployed worldwide across their enterprise. “Use cases like this show that we can let IT control DataPower appliances directly from Policy Manager, which lets them leverage a full lifecycle suite of features,” Barere said.

Source:http://www.idevnews.com/stories/5213/SOA-Software-Delivers-Ready-To-Govern-Capabilities-for-IBM-DataPower-Appliance

IBM is introducing new offerings to make it easier for business partners and clients to create “patterns of expertise”, a new software capability first introduced as part of IBM’s PureSystems family of expert integrated systems. These patterns are designed to radically streamline the set-up and management of hardware and software resources. (#IBMPureSystems)

PureSystems, introduced in April, is the result of $2 billion in research, development and acquisitions over four years, and has been designed to help change the economics of IT so that organizations can reduce their IT costs and complexity and put more resources towards innovation and growth.

Central to enabling and streamlining IT operations through PureSystems are these patterns of expertise. IBM announced today a new Virtual Pattern Kit to enable clients and business partners to convert technology expertise into reusable, downloadable packages of their own. This complements the patterns that are already being created by both IBM and more than 125 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Once designed, these patterns are embedded directly into the PureSystems machines to automate a wide range of manual and administrative IT tasks.

As part of this announcement, IBM will also offer clients and business partners access to the PureSystems family to create and test their patterns through the IBM SmartCloud. This will help organizations to radically simplify data center operations, and capitalize on the massive cost savings and efficiency gains PureSystems delivers.

“With almost two-thirds of global IT budget being spent on just maintaining their current infrastructure, it’s imperative that companies find ways to reduce the complexity in their data centers,” said Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware. “The introduction of patterns will revolutionize how applications are being developed and managed, simplifying tasks that organizations once spent months on and allowing them to refocus on innovation.”

New Resources Help Ecosystem of Business Partners and Clients to Create Applications and Patterns

By offering clients and business partners the ability to create applications and patterns of expertise of their own for PureSystems, businesses will be able to significantly lower development costs, rapidly create new solutions for clients, and fill regional or topic skill gaps. These resources are based on the expertise and experience of IBM’s technical community and the developers and researchers that created PureSystems. They include:

IBM Virtual Pattern Kit for Developers: This no-charge software development tool kit provides in-depth technical resources for developers interested in creating their own pattern of expertise for IBM PureSystems. The tool kit provides practical tools for developers to test out patterns of expertise by creating applications that run on PureSystems and the ability to begin the development work to create patterns of expertise. The tool kit will help companies move their applications from creation to testing and availability in the IBM PureSystems Centre. For patterns of expertise, the tool kit will help companies begin the development work and prepare to collaborate with IBM to finalize the project. Once partners develop their own optimized patterns of expertise with IBM, their applications can seamlessly be deployed on either the IBM SmartCloud or IBM PureSystems in minutes, enabling their clients to choose their preferred deployment model.

PureSystems Cloud Trial: A PureSystems development environment is available to developers for 90 days at no charge. The trial can help developers create applications through IBM’s SmartCloud that are ready to run on IBM’s new expert integrated systems. This cloud sandbox removes the hassle of server provisioning, operating system and middleware set up and the complicated cycles of permissions and procurement associated with software development. Now, if a developer has an idea for a PureSystems application, they can be creating and testing their application in a PureSystems-ready environment in minutes. The cloud trial also includes Collaborative Lifecycle Management software from IBM enabling business partners to work together on a project, or to work directly with a client’s developers. This collaborative approach can significantly increase the speed of software development, encourage innovation and empower developers with the tools they need to track the project through its completion.

By removing some of the biggest challenges of software development, IBM is helping businesses empower their technical experts to rapidly create a proof of concept for clients, and test new ideas.

For example, a software developer, working for a bank, has an idea for a mobile application and would like to build a prototype to demonstrate its potential business benefits. Without the PureSystems cloud trial, the developer needs to obtain the necessary financing and permissions for the project. Then they need to secure and provision the hardware, download a base operating system, set up a middleware stack and enlist the expertise of skilled programmers to tune the middleware stack to ensure optimal performance. This can take days to achieve.

With the PureSystems cloud trial, the developer can log into the IBM SmartCloud and immediately begin working on the application in an environment that is already set up. They have 90 days to build a proof of concept without any risk that the hardware will be re-allocated to another priority effort, and without needing the expertise of additional software developers to tune the middleware.

IBM Makes it Easy for Business Partner Ecosystem to Embrace PureSystems

More than 150 solutions have been developed for IBM PureSystems by more than 125 of the world’s leading ISVs. With technical and validation resources from IBM, these companies have the flexibility to optimize their industry-leading applications to run on either the IBM PureFlex or IBM PureApplication systems.

To continue the rapid adoption of PureSystems among leading technology companies, clients can now nominate ISV patterns they would like to see in the PureSystems Centre. Additionally, special enablement events are being hosted at IBM Innovation Centers in 25 cities around the globe. These events are designed for all types of Business Partners and will offer resources and advice on how companies can grow their business with PureSystems. Additionally, developers have access to a wide variety of PureSystems technical resources on IBM developerWorks. There, developers can learn about PureSystems, watch technical demos and hear from others working on the technology.

New Patterns for Business Intelligence and Business Process Management and Social Collaboration

In addition to offering resources to business partners and clients to create their own patterns, IBM is also introducing several new patterns that organizations can leverage based on their needs. These patterns are based off of proven best practices and expertise for complex tasks that IBM has learned from decades of client and partner engagements. Now, they have been captured, lab-tested and built into PureSystems. With the push of a button, an organization can easily pull up a workload-specific pattern, dramatically reducing the time and effort associated with installing, configuring, tuning and managing software on an ongoing basis.

Business Process Management (BPM): Patterns for deploying business process applications within a private cloud. IBM Business Process Manager provides clients with visibility, management and insight into their business processes. Through PureSystems, IBM intends to provide Business Process Manager Advanced and Business Process Manager Standard patterns, enabling customers to scale the use of BPM throughout their company faster and focus their resources on activities that add value to the business such as improving key processes, instead of installation and configuration.

Business Intelligence: A pattern that drives deployment of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence applications in 20-minutes. IBM Cognos Business Intelligence equips business users with reporting, analysis, dashboard, and scorecards to help them easily analyze all information to drive better business decisions. Now with PureSystems, clients will be able to focus their efforts getting faster answers to their key business questions, rather than spending time and resources on installing, configuring, tuning and maintaining complex Business Intelligence environments.

Social Collaboration: A pattern that gives clients the ability to quickly foster collaboration, expertise location and sharing among their employees. A social business recognizes that people do business with people and optimizes how people interact to accomplish organizational goals. The Social Collaboration pattern will provide clients with an integrated set of capabilities that can be rapidly deployed and easily maintained to deliver new levels of social business in a private cloud, empowering people to easily connect with employees, partners, and customers to optimize collaboration.

Pricing and Availability

The first two models of the PureSystems family – PureFlex System and PureApplication System — start shipping to customers this quarter. PureSystems support POWER processors and Intel processors. Fifty clients are already engaged in the IBM PureExperience program to learn how they are able to put the PureApplication System to work for them.

This year’s IMPACT conference features more than 8,500 attendees and hundreds of client testimonials, presentations, workshops and product demos. For more information, visit: http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/37590.wss

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, WebSphere, SmartSOA, Smarter Planet and the planet icon are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. For a current list of IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml .

All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM’s future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Reseller prices may vary.

Source:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ibm-enables-clients-and-business-partners-to-quickly-embrace-puresystems-2012-04-30

IBM +1.78% agreed to acquire Vivisimo Inc., a privately held provider of enterprise search and navigation software, as it continues to expand its big data platform.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo has more than 140 customers—including Airbus, the U.S. Air Force and Social Security Administration—and its software helps organizations access and analyze massive amounts of information, also known as Big Data.

Earlier this month, IBM agreed to acquire Varicent Software Inc., a provider of software that analyzes compensation and sales performance.

The deals come amid IBM’s push to expand into complex, high-margin areas such as the business-analytics business, which mines unstructured data for insight.

IBM said the Vivisimo deal will accelerate its big-data analytics initiatives by adding federated capabilities.

Source:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304811304577365731224134056.html

Corporate data centres are the slowpoke laggards of information technology. But major suppliers of hardware systems are working on new ways to speed things up. It can take up to six months, research shows, to get a new business application up and running, from buying the hardware to fine-tuning the software.

An estimated 70% of corporate technology budgets is spent on installing, updating and maintaining current tech.

Although the problem has been developing for a long time, technology managers and analysts agree it is growing worse. That’s because the pace of technological change is accelerating and business users expect more services, faster. The difficulties, by all accounts, are worldwide.

“The current model is broken, it doesn’t scale,” said Sunil Bajpai, group general manager for the Center for Railway Information Systems, the technology arm of India’s state-owned railway system.

“The demand for new applications and the demand for data are endless. We have to simplify.” IBM is bringing its answer to the marketplace – an effort that industry executives and analysts say is the most ambitious step yet to simplify and streamline data center technology.

With this initiative, IBM will sell bundles of server hardware and software packaged in simplified systems, with setup and maintenance automated by intelligent software. Tasks that now take days or weeks can be reduced to hours, IBM claims.

The so-called expert integrated systems, known as PureSystems, are the product of a $2 billion investment in R&D and acquisitions, IBM says. Other major suppliers – including Oracle, HP, EMC, Cisco and Dell – are moving along the same path.

Without real progress in making data centres nimble and efficient, more corporate computing chores, analysts say, will be farmed out to the cloud – remote data centers managed by others, with programs delivered over the Internet.

The major technology companies all have cloud offerings, but their mainstay business remains selling hardware and software to corporate customers. Hardware suppliers like HP, EMC and Cisco, analysts say, are getting together to sell server computers and storage and networking equipment in packages.

But these companies, they say, lack the extensive software assets and expertise of Oraclewhich acquired Sun Microsystems, a maker of both hardware and software.

Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/ibm-to-simplify-and-streamline-data-centre-technology/articleshow/12630458.cms

IBM has announced new software to provide clients with a better way to handle the data deluge and speed up business processes, making it easier for decision makers to gain insights from data.

The new software is based on innovations from IBM labs that continuously access, compress and analyze data, freeing up IT staff to work on higher-value tasks such as big data and business analytics, IBM said. Indeed, over the past four years, more than 100 clients, 200 business partners, and hundreds of experts from IBM Research and Software Development Labs around the world collaborated to develop the new software.

To help clients meet the increasing challenges of big data, IBM announced DB2 10 and InfoSphere Warehouse 10 software, which integrates with big data systems, automatically compresses data into tighter spaces to prevent storage sprawl, and slices information from the past, present and future to eliminate expensive application code.

The software addresses business opportunities made possible by the rise of mobile, social and cloud computing by automating the flow of data between new applications for big data and business analytics with minimal human intervention. These applications require new kinds of data to be instantly available on a scale and pace not previously experienced.

During testing, clients performed data warehouse queries up to 10 times faster to speed up decision making, freed up storage space up to 90 percent to dramatically reduce storage sprawl, and easily migrated data from expensive Oracle Database to IBM DB2 software with 98 percent code compatibility that didn’t require changing the data itself or retraining staff.

Using the new software, IBM customers can access big data for deeper insights. Big data integration and real-time data analysis provides faster insights from unstructured data, such as social networking information or text from mobile devices. Insights from Hadoop-based systems are now easily integrated with real-time analysis of structured data in the warehouse to enable better and faster business decisions, IBM said.

The new software speeds up business processes and lowers data management costs. Adaptive Compression and Multi-Temperature Data Management instantly compresses data to make it easier for business applications to use it and place it into the most effective storage, IBM said. Compression speeds up the flow and better manages big data for use by analytics applications. IBM s new software automatically assesses how frequently data is needed and moves it to cost-effective storage based on how “hot” or “cold” it is.

Moreover, the new software enables users to look into the past and future to improve decision making. Time Travel Query enables easier access to data at any point in time. For example, an online travel agency can automatically detect inconsistencies in itineraries such as a hotel booked in Rome for eight days while a car is reserved in New York City for three of those days, IBM said. Previously, database administrators and application developers had to write complex code to uncover this relationship.

“Today’s growing data volumes make it tougher for clients to access the right data when they need it to stay competitive,” said Arvind Krishna, general manager of IBM Information Management, in a statement. “IBM has advanced database and data warehouse technology to the point where data management can be automated and insights shared more broadly than ever before, freeing up decision makers and IT staff to focus on business growth.”

IBM said Coca-Cola Bottling Company has been using DB2 10 to drive increased performance and lower software and hardware costs.

“Coca-Cola Bottling Company has saved more than $1 million over the past four years in licensing, maintenance, and storage costs by migrating from Oracle to IBM database software,” said Tom DeJuneas, IT team manager at Coca-Cola, in a statement. “We’ve reinvested these savings into other business projects, while keeping our operating expenses flat. As a result, we don’t have to pass rising costs on to consumers, which allows us to maintain our sales volumes and market share.”

The upgrade to DB2 10 further enhances performance and boosts business processes, IBM said. Coca-Cola has seen the time-to-process queries decrease dramatically. This improves supply chain management processes with increased average response of SAP workloads from 30 to 60 percent, which helps bring products to market faster, IBM officials said.

Source:http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Business-Intelligence/IBM-launches-DB2-10-InfoSphere-Warehouse-10-for-Big-Data-437392/

Sensing a change in the way customers store and analyze data, IBM has updated its flagship DB2 relational database management software to handle a wider range of data processing duties. The company has also updated its InfoSphere data warehouse software, IBM announced Tuesday.

“We believe we’re in a new era of data management. The answer to every data challenge today is not to use a relational database management system,” said Bernie Spang, IBM’s director of strategy and marketing for database systems. “It’s about using the right tool for the right job.”

Version 10 of both products will be available April 30.

Both products are faster and work more efficiently, IBM claims. DB2 can cut storage space requirements by up to 90 percent, and InfoSphere can execute queries up to 10 times faster than before, according to IBM.

Both products have new capabilities as well. DB2 can now work with the World Wide Web Consortium’s RDF (Resource Description Framework) data format. InfoSphere can now communicate with Apache Hadoop deployments.

DB2 version 10 is the first major update for the database system software in four years. IBM released DB2 version 10 for z/OS in 2010. This release is for Linux, Unix and Windows systems, and has a different codebase and is maintained by different set of developers from the z/OS version.

This is the first version of DB2 to support RDF. RDF stores data in three parts, a subject, a predicate and an object. The predicate describes the relationship between the two other pieces of data. Structuring data this way allows software programs to understand how disparate pieces of information may fit together. IBM uses the technology in its Rational Jazz collaboration software to identify dependencies in a software development process.

Other enhancements to DB2 include that backups can be done more quickly and basic I/O has been accelerated, IBM said.

Another feature is designed to make the database more flexible. It now features multi-temperature data management, where administrators can designate the specific storage devices for certain classes of data. Data that needs to be accessed quickly, for instance, can be stored on speedy solid-state drives, whereas less valuable data can be stored on more inexpensive, though slower, tape drives.

The software offers a new way to query temporal data, through a feature called time travel. This feature has been popular with users of the z/OS version of DB2, Spang said. A user or a program can examine data as it existed in the database during any given period of time. This can be useful in analyzing emerging trends. While programmers can already write code to extract such data, the software provides hooks to make queries easier to execute.

The Coca-Cola Bottling Co. has been testing DB2 through an early access beta program. The company switched its SAP databases in 2008 from Oracle to IBM, and has since saved US$1 million in licensing, maintenance and storage costs since then, according to Tom DeJuneas, Coca-Cola IT team manager.

Its tests with the new DB2 have shown it could increase data compression by 20 percent, on top of the already-substantial improvements in the previous version. The tests revealed “some really nice performance increases,” DeJuneas said.

The update to InfoSphere is the first version of the software to support the Hadoop data processing framework, meaning users can commission Hadoop jobs and access the results directly from within InfoSphere. This is also the first version to allow for continually updated data sets, which can help organizations get closer to real-time data analysis.

DB2 version 10 can be downloaded at no cost for production environments that require no more than two processor cores and 2GB of memory. The price for larger implementations starts at US$6,180 including a year of support. InfoSphere pricing is based on number of processors or, for the first processor, the amount of data being stored. The basic version starts around $40,000 per terabyte.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/253067/ibm_releases_db2_version_10_the_first_big_upgrade_in_four_years.html

International Business Machines(IBM.N) launched on Tuesday three services to help companies sift and understand so-called “big data,” hoping to get some of the $120 billion or more that businesses are expected to invest in data analytics by 2015.

IBM, which has spent $16 billion itself on acquisitions to grow its analytics business since 2005, said it aimed to target top executive levels with its new offers of software and services to reduce fraud, manage financial performance and predict customer behavior.

It sees strong growth opportunities as companies, governments and organizations struggle to make sense of the large amount of data available.

IBM offers the broadest portfolio in the data analytics market and competes with Teradata (TDC.N), SAP (SAPG.DE), EMC (EMC.N), NetApp (NTAP.O) and Oracle (ORCL.O) among others.

The idea behind big data is to converge structured data found inside databases and unstructured data found in social networks, mobile devices, meters or sensors to identify patterns or predict behavior.

The market for such services is growing at an annual rate of 60 percent, IBM said, and according to IDC research, companies will invest more than $120 billion by 2015 on analytics, hardware, software, and services.

IBM, which has a long history of analyzing data, began growing the segment almost a decade ago when the costs of computing started to drop. It now anticipates $16 billion in business analytics revenue in 2015.

“It’s not just that we discovered more data could be good, it’s become more economical,” said Steve Mills, who heads IBM’s software and systems unit.

Mills, who has a degree in psychology, joined IBM in 1973 at a time when IBM was picking students from all areas for its data processing aptitude test or DPAT.

“There was really no computer science at that time … all you had to do is show up in a suit, not say anything stupid and pass the DPAT,” Mills said.

Today, IBM’s analytics can be found across various industries, from water and waste management to traffic and retail predictions.

Its new services could be used to protect against insurance fraud, for example, IBM said.

Infinity Insurance, which specializes in covering high-risk drivers, was applying IBM analytics to detect patterns in historic data to identify fraudulent claims more quickly, IBM said.

In the healthcare sector, where Mills said fraud runs up to $650 million in costs per day, IBM systems use advanced algorithms to help spot fraud before claims are paid.

Source:http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/03/21/ibm-data-idINDEE82K00V20120321

IBM has unveiled three packages of services and software to help organizations analyze their data for profit and improved efficiency.

The signature solutions, as IBM calls these offerings, go beyond generic analysis software to address three different specific tasks: detecting financial fraud, predicting consumer behavior and estimating financial risk.

“Having software is important but having industry expertise and domain knowledge is also pretty essential,” said Deepak Advani, IBM vice president of predictive analytics. IBM’s intent behind these packages is to combine its analytic software with the lessons it has learned installing such software for clients, Advani said.

In its work of deploying systems, the IBM services arm sees a lot of the same challenges, or patterns, across different clients, Advani explained. These packages will utilize what IBM has learned deploying such systems. It also draws from the company’s considerable research expertise and IBM software, such as SPSS, Cognos, Clarity and WebSphere.

Potential customers will start with a workshop to help identify which datasets they have that can be better utilized. IBM will then work with each customer to develop an analysis system, using as much of the customer’s existing systems as possible. The cost for each customer will vary depending on implementation.

IBM developed the fraud detection package to help insurance agencies, health care companies and government agencies detect phony claims before they are paid out. Typically such organizations have practices in place to identify cases of fraud, but they identify the misbehavior only after the claims are paid. An IBM system could be built that recognize the subtle hints of fraud, based on analysis of historical data, Advani said.

Another package analyzes consumer actions in order to predict buying habits and other behaviors. Such a system could provide what Advani calls “next best actions” or the next behavior a consumer might take, based on prior actions. Telecommunication companies, for instance, could use such a system to predict when a customer might drop a service, which would allow the company to make a counter-offer to keep the customer.

The third package addresses financial risk. This system is suited to chief financial officers and other financial executives. Such a system would use past performance and key metrics to predict future performance. A chief financial officer, for instance, could use the system to predict how a 10 percent dip in sales would affect the organization’s finances as a whole.

Beyond these three packages, IBM is also developing a number of other customized analysis offerings, though Advani did not divulge what they might be. Overall, however, the company’s work is addressing a potentially huge market. IDC estimates enterprises will spend over US$120 billion by 2015 on analysis systems. IBM estimates that it will reap $16 billion in business analytics revenue by 2015.

IBM will reveal more about the three new packages at the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summits Tuesday in New York and London.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/252187/ibm_unveils_new_analysis_packages.html

IBM is currently working with the Louvre Museum, Paris on the innovative project that is aimed to preserve and protect the museum’s artwork. One of the greatest and largest museums of the world has more than 650,000 square feet and features thousands of artifacts ranging from prehistory to 1848.

The museum staff makes more than 65,000 repairs and maintenance visits per year to protect the facilities and masterpieces. IBM offers Louvre its Maximo Asset Management software for the museum’s staff to streamline their maintenance processes. It will be done to help improve customer service as well as the management of the museum.

With a record breaking 8.8 million visitors in 2011, Louvre is Europe’s most visited museum. For many years, the museum has been managing the museum maintenance work by paper but now, with help of IBM, Louvre will computerize the maintenance process.

IBM’s Business Partner SQLI will upgrade IBM Maximo software to create a single information database and shared repository for the museum staff. The processes of cleaning, maintenance and disposal of the rooms will be visualized. The software will also enable staff to manage both planned and unplanned maintenance activities.

“Managing thousands of repairs, cleaning and maintenance visits per year to preserve the facilities and artwork while keeping the galleries available and accessible to visitors is a daunting undertaking,” said Metin Pelit, department manager of computerized maintenance management system, The Louvre Museum. “Thanks to IBM software, we’re able to visualize our entire infrastructure and make better, more informed decisions about when and how to respond to problems — and about when to proactively address a potential problem that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen coming.”

In the end of 2011, IBM unveiled five innovations that would change our lives within the next five years.

Source:http://popsop.com/54315

IBM and Toshiba announced that Toshiba’s new line of enterprise laptop PCs will be integrated with IBM software, providing energy management and advanced endpoint security protection.

Toshiba plans to sell the new lines of enterprise PCs and its integrated solution globally in mid-2012, the company said at the IBM Pulse 2012 conference here.

“All of the business PCs we are planning will have this,” said Norimasa Nakamura, senior manager of the Products Management Division at Toshiba, who spoke at a press conference on the news.

“This new partnership is taking a new generation of PCs and infusing them with endpoint-management capabilities right down to the BIOS,” said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing for IBM’s Tivoli brand.

IBM officials said with the growing use of laptops by organizations, there are several important factors to consider, including the emerging 24/7 work environment that requires many users to keep laptops running around the clock—not always in power-saving modes. Stolen laptops are also one of the biggest causes of data breaches to organizations in 2011, the company said. This directly relates to laptops that contain confidential data requiring higher security measures to protect them if stolen or misplaced. Multiply these behaviors across all employees in an organization, and the security risks, energy costs and environmental impacts rise.

To address this, Toshiba and IBM jointly developed a better way to manage energy use and secure data in laptops. Toshiba’s new line of enterprise laptop PCs will combine IBM software based on its Tivoli Endpoint Manager and Toshiba’s enhanced BIOS feature to allow IT managers to apply a company’s specific policies for energy controls and security across PCs within an organization.

With this solution, energy usage data is measured by the PC hardware, which allows more accurate readings of power consumption. This design allows the IT staff to remotely apply each group of PCs into specific power-saving modes or make peak-shift management changes as needed to deliver better energy-efficiency gains.

Nakamura said the new PCs can use up to 47 percent less energy than other PCs.

To provide better security, the Toshiba laptop PC with the IBM software provides a patch-management capability that automatically adapts necessary patches with minimum impact for network bandwidth and IT staff’s workload. A single patch-management server can support up to 250,000 PCs, shortening patch times and updates without losing PC functionality, even over low-bandwidth or globally distributed networks.

In addition, the new PCs equipped with the endpoint-management solution provide access control to data, which prevents PCs from starting up, being logged on and being screen-unlocked unless the PCs are authenticated by the management server. When a PC has no connection to the server, the USB portable memory with the signature file can be used to authenticate the PC instead of the server. And IT staff can protect the stored data by preventing a third party from operating a laptop when it is lost or stolen. In addition, IT staff can define the policy to prohibit writing to external storage and printing when the PC is not authenticated against the management server.

“IBM’s endpoint-management capabilities combined with Toshiba’s BIOS and power-saving technologies allow for superior energy and security controls,” Taro Hiyama, chief marketing executive for the Digital Products & Services Company at Toshiba, said in a statement. “Starting with these controls, Toshiba’s goal is to continually integrate value-added device-management functions in its enterprise laptop PCs used in the IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager solution. IBM software helps us accomplish this goal.”

IBM combines endpoint and security management into a single solution with the Tivoli Endpoint Manager to allow IT managers to visualize and manage physical and virtual endpoints. Organizations can better secure and manage their IT assets and gain visibility, control and automation into their most time-intensive IT tasks, such as patch management and asset inventory, IBM said.

“As endpoint devices, such as laptops, proliferate inside and outside an organization, it’s important that the right security and management policies are in place, no matter where the device is located,” Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM Tivoli Software, said in a statement. “IBM software embedded into Toshiba laptops allows organizations to easily oversee these devices to help manage energy efficiency and security of the data that resides on them.”

Source:http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Toshiba-Taps-IBM-software-to-Deliver-Secure-EnergyEfficient-Laptops-672180/

IBM (NYSE:IBM) will allow solution providers to resell a new edition of its IBM Cognos business analytics and reporting software, designed for individuals and workgroups, under an open distribution model, the company will announce Wednesday.

The new IBM Cognos Insight offers “data discovery” exploration and visualization capabilities for business users without help from report developers, said Dan Potter, product executive for personal and workgroup solutions, IBM business analytics, in an interview.

Business analytics software vendors have long sought ways to make their products more accessible to a wider range of users beyond “power users” with deep analytical skills and programmers who can build queries and reports. This week, for example, Microsoft is debuting a new release of its SQL Server database with new PowerPivot and Power View tools the company is touting as “self-service” business intelligence for information workers.

IBM acquired Cognos in January 2008 and made it the core of its business analytics product line. IBM Cognos is the enterprise edition of the business analytics software, offering a range of business analytics and performance management applications. IBM Cognos Express, which debuted in 2009, is a midmarket product.

IBM Cognos Insight can be used as a standalone tool or can work with the Cognos server, IBM’s SPSS predictive analysis application, and the Cognos TM1 financial planning, budgeting and forecasting software. It can work with data in spreadsheets and data files, existing Cognos reports, and corporate data sources via the ODBC interface.

IBM Cognos Insight is designed to be a low-cost, high-volume product, Potter said, with a list price of $500 per user.

Under the open distribution policy, as many as 100,000 IBM registered partners worldwide will be able to resell IBM Cognos Insight without the same kind of certification required to sell other Cognos products, according to Potter. Many partners want to be able to sell a mainstream business analytics application without having to go through the certification process, he said.

“The channel’s going to have a huge role here,” he said.

IBM also will sell the product online, through telesales operations, and through its direct sales representatives, Potter said.

Source:http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/232602127/ibm-takes-open-distribution-approach-with-new-cognos-software.htm;jsessionid=dY6qpbPiZEo9jsD6rqVzKA**.ecappj01

IBM and Toshiba Corporation today announced that Toshiba’s new line of enterprise laptop PCs will be integrated with IBM software, providing energy management and advanced endpoint security protection. Toshiba plans to sell the new lines of enterprise PCs and its integrated solution globally in mid-2012.

With the growing use of laptops by organizations, there are several important factors to consider, including today’s 24/7 work environment that requires many users to keep laptops running around the clock–not always in power-saving modes. Stolen laptops are also one of the biggest causes of data breaches to organizations in 2011(1). This directly relates to laptops that contain confidential data requiring higher security measures to protect them if stolen or misplaced. Multiply these behaviors across all employees in an organization, and the security risks, energy costs and environmental impacts rise.

To address this, Toshiba and IBM jointly developed a better way to manage energy use and secure data in laptops. Toshiba’s new line of enterprise laptop PCs will combine IBM software based on its Tivoli Endpoint Manager and Toshiba’s enhanced BIOS feature to allow IT managers to apply company’s specific policies for energy controls and security across PCs within an organization.

With this solution, energy usage data is measured by the PC hardware, which allows more accurate readings of power consumption. This design allows the IT staff to remotely apply each group of PCs into specific power saving modes or make peak-shift management changes as needed to deliver better energy efficiency gains.

To provide better security, the Toshiba laptop PC with the IBM software provides:

Patch management capability that automatically adapts necessary patches with minimum impact for network bandwidth and IT staff’s workload. A single patch management server can support up to 250,000 PCs, shortening patch times and updates without losing PC functionality, even over low-bandwidth or globally distributed networks.

Access Control to data, which prevents PCs from starting up, being logged on and being screen-unlocked unless the PCs are authenticated by the management server. When a PC has no connection to the server, the USB portable memory with the signature file can be used to authenticate the PC instead of the server. And IT staff can protect the stored data by preventing a third party from operating a laptop when the laptop is lost or stolen. In addition, IT staff can define the policy to prohibit writing to external storage and printing when the PC is not authenticated against the management server.

“IBM’s endpoint management capabilities combined with Toshiba’s BIOS and power-saving technologies allow for superior energy and security controls,” said Taro Hiyama, Chief Marketing Executive, Digital Products & Services Company of Toshiba Corporation. “Starting with these controls, Toshiba’s goal is to continually integrate value-added device management functions in its enterprise laptop PCs used in the IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager solution. IBM software helps us accomplish this goal.”

IBM combines endpoint and security management into a single solution with the Tivoli Endpoint Manager to allow IT managers to visualize and manage physical and virtual endpoints. Organizations can better secure and manage their IT assets and gain visibility, control and automation into their most time-intensive IT tasks, such as patch management and asset inventory.

“As endpoint devices such as laptops proliferate inside and outside an organization, it’s important that the right security and management policies are in place no matter where the device is located,” said Daniel Sabbah, General Manager, IBM Tivoli Software. “IBM software embedded into Toshiba laptops allows organizations to easily oversee these devices to help manage energy efficiency and security of the data that resides on them.”

Moving forward, Toshiba and IBM aim to extend the technical vision to broader endpoint devices and to develop advanced device management functions and controls, over and above the power and security management for them.

Source:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/toshiba-taps-ibm-software-to-create-more-secure-and-energy-efficient-laptops-2012-03-06

IBM today announced that IMImobile, a global mobile data technology infrastructure and solutions provider to telecom operators, media companies and enterprises has deployed IBM software to enhance its existing service and cloud infrastructure management processes.

IMImobile is a leading provider of cloud-based mobile data services for revenue generation and customer lifecycle management across Asia, Europe, Americas, Africa and the Middle East, With its services reaching over 900 million people in 64 countries and with operator customers like Vodafone, O2,Telefonica, France Telecom, Centrica, Barclays Bank, BBC, Aircel, Airtel, BSNL, MTN, Reliance, Tata and Virgin Mobile, the company required a cloud solution that would help answer its growing business requirements.

The recently completed deployment of IBM SmartCloud Foundation software will help IMImobile further streamline management of its cloud services infrastructure, strengthen compliance with stringent service level agreements (SLAs), improve infrastructure utilization and evolve process maturity with compliance. Further, IBM software will help IMImobile implement a follow-the-sun model for service management across IMI’s Virtual Network Operations Centre (VNOC) teams spread in Europe and India.
Vishwanath Alluri, Founder and CEO of IMImobile said, “We have adopted a cloud-based delivery model since our inception. All our products and platform are architected for the cloud. Today our infrastructure comprises 1,000 high-end servers and 300+ network equipment nodes deployed both within our data centres and operator networks worldwide. With the adoption of IBM software, our customers stand to benefit from the improved operational efficiencies and service levels. We will also be able to leverage IBM’s global expertise to offer enhanced service levels for the mission critical services we deliver to blue-chip customers, which include mobile operators, media companies and enterprises..”

“IBM has been providing clients with a holistic approach to delivering and managing infrastructure services aligned to evolving business priorities,” said Pradeep Nair, Director, Software Group, IBM ISA. “IMImobile’s cloud-based delivery and the scale of infrastructure demonstrate the impressive power of cloud computing.”

IBM SmartCloud Foundation software solutions are helping clients effectively build and manage dynamic infrastructure and remain competitive in today’s digitally-connected environment. The software offers integrated service management solutions to help companies manage traditional IT assets, physical assets and emerging “smart” assets.

Source:http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/imimobile-deploys-ibm-software-to-enhance-its-cloud-services-management/466979/

IMImobile, a mobile data services provider, will ride on IBM software to enhance its existing services and manage its cloud infrastructure.

The Hyderabad-based company today announced that it has deployed IBM SmartCloud Foundation software. The company is a leading provider of cloud-based mobile data services across Asia, Europe, Americas, Africa and West Asia.

In a press release, IMImobile said its services reach over 900 million people in 64 countries and with operator customers such as Vodafone, O2,Telefonica, France Telecom, Centrica, Barclays Bank, BBC, Aircel, Airtel, BSNL, MTN, Reliance, Tata and Virgin Mobile, the company required a cloud solution that would help answer its growing business requirements.

The deployment of IBM software will help the company further streamline management of its cloud services infrastructure, strengthen compliance with stringent service level agreements etc.

Mr Vishwanath Alluri, founder and CEO of IMImobile said all our products and platform are architected for the cloud. Today, our infrastructure comprises 1,000 high-end servers and 300+ network equipment nodes deployed both within our data centres and operator networks worldwide. With the adoption of IBM software, our customers stand to benefit from the improved operational efficiencies and service levels.

Source:http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/article2966493.ece