IBM DB2 Balanced Warehouse Extends Real-Time Business Intelligence

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced a new release of DB2 Warehouse featuring significant dynamic warehousing advancements that will help organizations broaden the use of their data warehouses. These enhancements will provide people with instant access to reliable and trusted business information in the context of their daily activities, such as supporting a customer, processing a claim or handling a transaction.
DB2 Warehouse 9.5, built upon the new DB2 Viper 2 data server, breaks new ground in business intelligence, delivering an industry-first combination of advanced, embedded analytics and high performance that enables organizations to gain greater value from their information previously unavailable from conventional data warehouse products.

This release of DB2 Warehouse features new capabilities for extreme workload management, embedded online analytic processing (OLAP) and embedded analytics for unstructured information, enabling customers to address the increasing demand for real-time analysis of strategic business information.

“Customers of all sizes in all industries are looking for new ways to maximize the value of their information in order to gain a competitive advantage,” said Karen Parrish, vice president of Business Intelligence Solutions for IBM. “The new DB2 Warehouse removes traditional technological barriers and allows customers to deliver real-time insights to every person across an organization for every transaction. For the first time, customers can analyze the virtual gold mines of information that have until now been hidden in their unstructured data.”

Customers such as Convergence CT, a global company that links patient data at healthcare institutions with pharmaceutical and biotech companies’ data needs for clinical trial planning, recruitment processes and marketplace research, have already assessed and evaluated the positive impact that the newly enhanced DB2 Warehouse 9.5 can have on their businesses.

"We’ve found DB2 Warehouse to be perfect for consolidating information about how cancer and diabetes patients respond to different treatments in healthcare facilities around the world,” said Lambert Onuma, CEO, Convergence CT. “The IBM Balanced Warehouse provides us with a simplified, yet flexible and optimized solution for delivering analyses of that data to help save lives.

Today’s announcement extends IBM’s ability to deliver on its dynamic warehousing strategy, which is aimed at providing capabilities that extend beyond traditional business intelligence and data warehousing solutions to allow global organizations of all sizes to streamline business processes, transform customer service, increase employee productivity, reduce risk and generate new revenue opportunities.

DB2 Warehouse 9.5 provides new features for handling the increasingly varied types of applications and processes requiring access to trusted information and analytics. These extreme workload management capabilities will provide customers with the most reliable prioritized performance available in the market, as required to deliver real-time insights for operational intelligence, while continuing to support traditional strategic and tactical planning applications.

Featuring support for embedded analytics for unstructured information, DB2 Warehouse 9.5 is the industry’s first data warehouse offering able to integrate and analyze structured and unstructured data at the same time. Traditionally, data warehouse solutions have only provided the ability to leverage structured data, such as spreadsheets and database files, ignoring other critical sources of information, including call center notes, customer feedback, technician comments and other free form text description fields. By analyzing unstructured information directly within the warehouse, organizations will be able to extract knowledge and insights from previously untapped information sources, as well as broaden the scope of information used to make critical business decisions and better serve customers.

DB2 Warehouse 9.5 also is the first data warehouse with OLAP capabilities embedded directly within the warehouse. Previously, organizations have been required to extract data from their warehouses into specialized OLAP engines to enable more complex analysis of multiple business variables and dimensions. With embedded OLAP capabilities, DB2 Warehouse customers will be able to perform deeper, multi-dimensional analysis and generate increased insight without having to copy or replicate data.

Other new features available in DB2 Warehouse 9.5 include:

* DB2 Database Management Enhancements – Delivers better performance and increased compliance capabilities, while lowering the cost of database administration through increased autonomics.
* Enhanced and Simplified Data Movement and Transformation – New graphical tools, with advanced scheduling and automation for ease of use, along with increased compliance features and tighter integration with IBM Information Server.
* Easier to Build Analytical Applications – A graphical interface for quicker assembly of analytical applications without programming.

This announcement marks another important milestone in IBM’s cross-company pursuit of the global Information on Demand growth opportunity, which is helping customers transform their businesses by using information as a strategic asset.

Expanding the IBM Balanced Warehouse Portfolio
IBM today also introduced enhanced platform support and new models of the IBM Balanced Warehouse, which provides complete warehousing solutions with pre-configured, pre-tested, optimized combinations of software, hardware and storage, enabling faster implementation times with lower risk. This end-to-end approach is aimed at making data warehousing solutions easier to deploy, while ensuring that customers can maintain the flexibility required by challenging business conditions and IT infrastructure demands, without sacrificing system performance.

IBM – the first vendor to provide solutions optimized to meet the entire spectrum of warehousing requirements – is providing additional platform support for its C-Class Balanced Warehouse offerings, while adding new offerings to its D-Class, which is designed for growth solutions, and to the E-Class, which is optimized for large scale enterprise data warehouses.

* The existing C1000 and C3000 Balanced Warehouses will now support Windows to make lower cost infrastructure available to small businesses who have not adopted Linux.
* The new D5100 Balanced Warehouse offering extends high availability features with automated failover to support mission critical applications at a modest price point and provides enhanced reliability and serviceability with its new call home feature.
* The new E7100 Balanced Warehouse offering leverages IBM’s industry leading POWER6 technology in System p on the UNIX platform to accommodate higher levels of concurrency as well as significant fluctuations in workload, providing ultimate scalability and performance for the most demanding enterprise data warehouses.

For more information on IBM’s DB2 Warehouse, the IBM Balanced