DB2 UDB's High-Function Business Intelligence in e-business

Chapter 1. Business Intelligence overview 9

򐂰 Placing significant scalability requirements on a BI system because of

e-business’ characteristics of unpredictable workloads and voluminous data.

In the following section we provide an overview of IBM’s BI strategy and product

offerings, and focuses on key BI scalability characteristics in the DB2 Universal

Database server product.

1.2 IBM’s BI strategy and offerings

IBM has been a leader in BI, beginning with the landmark paper:

“An Architecture for a Business and Information System”,

by Paul Murphy and Barry Devlin, 1988 IBM System Journal

Since then, IBM has invested significant development and marketing resources

into the delivery of a set of technologies, products and partnerships for an

integrated end-to-end enterprise analytics

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solution.

IBM’s enterprise analytics strategy has four main objectives:

򐂰 Support on-demand enterprise analytics and real-time decision making.

򐂰 Integrate BI and enterprise analytical processing into DB2 UDB.

򐂰 Simplify the building of an integrated system for delivering enterprise

analytics.

򐂰 Form partnerships with leading BI and enterprise analytic vendors such as

Ascential Software, Brio Technology, Business Objects, Evoke Software,

Evolutionary Technology International (ETI), Hyperion Solutions, Trillium

Software and Vality Technology.

Figure 1-4 describes the framework of an intelligent e-business and lists IBM’s BI

and enterprise analytics products. Also listed therein are the database

requirements for BI which we will elaborate on in a following section.

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Enterprise Analytics is the collection of all critical business information metrics derived from a BI

system, that is needed by executives, managers and business analysts to react rapidly to trends and

changes in the marketplace

10 High-Function Business Intelligence in e-business

Figure 1-4 Intelligent e-business DataBase Associates International copyright

With reference to the above framework, IBM’s products are as follows:

򐂰 Portal:

– Federated data access products include DB2 Connect, DB2 Life Sciences

Data Connect, DB2 Relational Connect, DB2 DataJoiner, DataJoiner

Classic Connect, Data Links Manager, Net.Data, Data Warehouse

development, DB2 Data Warehouse Manager, DB2 DataPropagator, IMS

DataPropagator, Data Refresher and WebSphere MQ.

– Portal development products include WebSphere Portal Server, Enterprise

Information Portal and Lotus K-station and Discovery Server.