May
18

IBM Case Manager An Architectural Overview by Mike Marin at IMTC 2012

Mike Marin is an IBM distinguished Engineer and the Chief Architect for the IBM Case Manager product. He was the architect of the FileNet P8 process technology. Mike is also an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Engineer and life member.

He has more than twenty years of experience in designing and developing system software, the last fifteen years dedicated to the development of the products in the areas of workflow, BPM and Case Management. Mike has been active on the standardization of process technology in several organizations including WfMC, OMG and OASIS.

Mike Marin recently attended the IMTC 2012 event at the Leela Palace, Bangalore India on the 9th to 11th of May, 2012. There, he spoke about IBM Case Manager an architectural overview in which he covered the new advanced case management user interfaces, object model, case APIs and an overview of case management.

The slides of his session can be downloaded from this link.

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May
15

IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows by Steve Rees at IMTC 2012
Steve Rees is a Senior Performance Manager at the IBM Toronto Laboratory. He joined IBM in 1991 and was involved with the establishment of the Linux/Unix/Windows database mission in Toronto as well as in several releases of the DB2 product development since then.

Steve started out in precompile development, and then moved to the DB2 Unix porting team. He has been part of the DB2 performance area for the last thirteen years, and is currently leading the DB2 pureScale performance team.

Steve recently attended the IMTC 2012 event at the Leela Palace, Bangalore India on the 9th to 11th of May, 2012. There, he spoke about IBM DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows – 2012 and Beyond in the Data Management track.

The slides of his session can be downloaded from  this link.
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Dec
5

IBM, BigData and Business Intelligence!

There is so much of talk these days around how enterprises are moving towards a IT infrastructure where businesses run intelligently and in a socially collaborative manner. This has brought the focus on the softwares and products in the space of Business Intelligence and social collaboration. All of this cannot happen without handling large data which we call the BigData. Information Systems no longer are required to be relational, unstructured data can be as relevant and important for building the intelligence network for an enterprise.

IBM has emphasized its focus on products that are in the space of Business Intelligence with its recent valuable acquisitions, which are now IBM. There are many products which are in the space of Data analytics, data mining, text mining , predictive analytics and so on. In this article we will look at some of key products that exist in the Analytics portfolio for IBM and a briefing on them.This is intended to aprise us of some the products which might not have been a widely known product.

InfoSphere BigInsights
This is a Hadoop based solution for analytics of BigData

IBM® InfoSphere Streams
Analytics of data streaming into your organization, helps you have more real time analytics and enables you to react to events as they are happening to change business outcomes.

IBM® SPSS® Amos
SPSS Amos gives you the power to easily perform structural equation modeling to build models with more accuracy. Models are used to derive insights from huge volumes of data.

IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys
This uses NLP techniques to analyze survey text and discover valuable, hidden insights.

IBM® SPSS® Forecasting
This enables analysts to predict trends and develop forecasts quickly and easily. Reliable forecasts are very essential in today’s demanding business environment. This helps businesses to strategise appropriately to respond to changes.

IBM SPSS Data Collection
The Data Collection Family has products that can be used for Authoring, Interviewing , Reporting and Management of Survery data. Survey and market researchers worldwide use this rich suite of products to achieve deeper understanding of people’s attitudes, preferences and behavior so that this valuable insight can be included in decision-making processes.

IBM SPSS Statistics
As the name suggests this product helps in drawing up statistical information from huge data sets, which can be analysed to help in decision making,
IBM SPSS predictive analytics software and solutions. Predictive analytics gives you the knowledge to predict and anticipate change so that you can plan to carry out strategies or make decisions that can change the outcomes for the better.

IBM Unica NetInsight
NetInsight is the product that is the space of Web analytics. Web analytics is key for customers who use online means or web as a marketing channel for their products. Analysing the vistor behaviour on their website can give useful insights into customer trends.

IBM Unica Campaign
With Unica Campaign, marketers can plan, design, execute, measure and analyze multi-wave, cross-channel and highly personalized marketing campaigns.

IBM Unica Interact
With Unica Interact customers can determine, in real-time, the right message to present in inbound marketing channels. This is key because now marketing can not just be done by outbound marketing campaigns but Unica Interact can help determine what can be done to use inbound channels as effective marketing means.

IBM Unica Marketing Operations
This product helps to streamline marketing processes and improves team collaboration among marketers in an organization.This product intends to improve operational efficiency of a marketing organization.

IBM Unica Detect
Unica Detect helps to improve cross-selling and retention by detecting when customers are most receptive to offers. Unica Detect, provides a complete set of event-based marketing capabilities.

IBM Unica Leads
This product is solely intended to improve lead management by marketers and also to deliver quality leads in a timely manner to improve close rates and increase revenue.

IBM Unica CustomerInsight
With Unica CustomerInsight, marketers have an intuitive way to explore customer data without asking for help from technical specialists. Unica CustomerInsight enables marketing users to gain critical insights through a highly flexible data visualization interface making it easy to spot customer trends and opportunities, and then take immediate action to select target audiences for marketing campaigns and programs.

IBM Unica PredictiveInsight
Unica PredictiveInsight gives marketing users the power to determine the most effective customer segmentation methods, which customers are most likely to respond, customer lifetime value, and the best cross-sell opportunities for each customer.

IBM Unica Marketing Platform
IT organizations are under pressure to select a marketing solution that is both low-risk and forward thinking. With the Unica Marketing Platform as the technology foundation for Unica’s marketing solutions, IT organizations can align marketing’s needs with a proven solution that can integrate into any enterprise environment.

IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence
Helps you Monitor and measure how your company is performing with Score-carding, Dashboards, Reporting and Real-time Monitoring. It also provides a rich, interactive and visual BI experience to everyone online and off with Cognos Mobile and Cognos Active Report.

IBM Cognos TM1
IBM Cognos® TM1 is enterprise planning software that provides a complete, dynamic environment for developing timely, reliable and personalized forecasts and budgets.

IBM® Cognos® Now
This is a real-time monitoring solution for time-sensitive KPIs and operational metrics.

These are a sub-set of the various offerings IBM has in the space of data analytics, predictive analytics and business intelligence. This article was intended to give a bird’s eye view of what we have at IBM in the BI space.

This post is authored by Sreelatha Sankaranarayanan.

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Nov
18

IBM’s Big Data offerings on SmartCloud Enterprise
Today, we have a podcast featuring Rav Ahuja who is the Program Manager for Cloud Computing for Information Management. The podcast is about IBM’s Big Data offerings on SmartCloud Enterprise –  including BigInsights Basic Edition images and BigInsights built on top of Hadoop technology.
You can download the entire transcript from here.
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Oct
11

Service Orchestration Implementation using DataPower

Service orchestration is a commanding technique of blending many services sprinting within and across enterprises to obtain the required outcome. The application has the capability to control issues regarding fanning out requests from the client, the services to the call and to fan in the responses and to prepare a consolidated response to the front end.

Orchestration can be done in two ways

Serial orchestration-Executed and implemented as uncast solution, where the participating backend applications are invoked one at a time to handle the request.

Parallel orchestration-Executed and implemented as broadcast solution, where the participating backend applications are invoked simultaneously, to handle the request.

Often the service that orchestrates other services is called a composite service.

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Oct
7

Websphere data power x150

In SOA, connectivity entry point is implied using ESB pattern. The Websphere data power x150 is the hardware manifestation of the ESB pattern. A few ESB features which are applied in X150 appliance are

  • Protocol bridging-Ability to transform  the protocol used by the front  end service to the protocol  used by the back  end service
  • Transformation-Ability to convert  the message structure and format  used by front end service. To the format used by backend service
  • Content based routing-Ability to route the request  to the appropriate backend service ,by using the incoming data
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Oct
4

Achieving Cost Efficient Data Integration Solution using CDC

Authored By: Amit Kumar D, Information Platform Services, IBM Software Group, IBM India Pvt Ltd

If the world is simple, you would need to buy only one application to manage all your customers, products, supplier’s information. However this single application in real time is practically not possible. Data is typically spread across the various sources within the organization. The way to make “One view of an organization’s data” happen, is through data integration: technology & solutions to bridge the gap between disparate database information.

Since the day of databases, there have been challenges with respect to data integration. Over the few years there are two clear trends observed: Volumes of data are growing rapidly, where as data latencies are shrinking quickly as end users expect data to be accurate in near real time, where and when needed. With recent formats of data such as texts, objects, images etc., data integration solutions have struggled to meet the demands of real-time operational effectiveness, decision making and cost-effectiveness. This article focuses on how to overcome some of these challenges by using CDC.

What is the real need to Change Data Capture?

The center of the IT infrastructure of global organizations is Business Intelligence, which enables them to understand business trends, support day to day operations, help in better decision making. Traditionally, Data Integration, Data Extraction (ETL), Data propagation runs on periodic basis and follows bulk data movement approach. Moving the data in bulk has significant resource utilization and hampers the source & target systems. Most of the Data warehouse system needs continuous refreshing of data to deal with new trends and business requirements. Change Data Capture offers solution to these challenges and now becoming a strategic requirement for many Data integration solutions. The need for data integration may be because of the following

a.       Similar data sources, large number of implementations

b.      Multiple, disparate data sources

c.       Non-integrated systems – hardware & software all running independently

Use cases of CDC

ETL and Data Warehousing The most common scenario of Change data capture is to load the data into DW from multiple source systems, when processing changes can dramatically reduce load time, required resources like memory, CPU etc., and associated costs like software, licenses etc., In many cases, daily changes represent a fraction of the total volume, so CDC has a big impact on efficiency and provides solutions for the continued and accelerated growth in data volumes.

Building Operational Data Source CDC provides efficient mechanism to keep an ODS up to date , by identifying and delivering the changes on a continuous basis , rather periodically querying the entire database

Data replication for BI As reporting become more pervasive in supporting daily operations, more users, require access to timely information from their production systems.CDC enables the replication of changes made to production tables with low latency and low impact on source database and can be used with existing ETL tools to avoid the need of purchasing expensive replication software.

Key objectives of any MDM initiative are to improve and ensure the quality and consistency of master data, whether stored in a single repository or distributed across many. This requires timely responses to master data changes.CDC makes it possible to capture and process master data changes efficiently and quickly, so quality and consistency can be ensured.

Other use cases include Data Synchronization, Data propagation, application integration, Business activity monitoring

What to look for in a CDC solution

When evaluating any CDC solution one should look at the following factors, as it mainly impacts the cost of data integration.

CDC Features & Capability criteria

a.       Non-intrusive Change data capture

b.      Number of source / target platform & databases supported

c.       Filtering & Transformation capability

d.      Batch & Near time data delivery

e.       Guaranteed delivery

f.       Inter-operability with ETL / EAI tools

g.       Recoverability

h.      Performance and Throughput

i.        Ease of use

These use cases for Data Integration which can be achieved cost effectively by Change data capture based solutions, demonstrate the strategic nature of this technology. Mature solutions exist today, including independent CDC Software that is not limited to specific vendor and can support many tools. One such is IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture, which enables one time capture and propagates to multiple target systems. For such reasons & much more it is now time to Just Capture the Changed Data!!

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Sep
29

SECURITY AUTHENTICATION

Authentication is a way of identifying and recognizing a particular user by an assigned user name and password. It is based on the fact that each user has a finite set of credentials for acquiring access. The Function AAA service in data power verifies the user’s authentication credentials with the credentials stored in external authentication servers like Tivoli access manager. If the credentials are matching with each other then user is granted access to the network. If the credentials are varying then the access request is declined. Next step is the authorization of a significant process post authentication. Authorization is the process of specifying access rights to resources for identified credentials. Following authentication a user must acquire rights for invoking appropriate operations. The AAA service in data power verifies the user’s credentials and the invoked operation with the details stored in the external authorization servers like Tivoli access manager. The access to a particular service or operation is granted or denied based on the response from the server.

Data security: It is the way to protect the confidential data from unauthorized users and hackers. Encryption of data is very essential. Plain data is converted into cipher data and vice versa by encryption and decryption methods.Datapower supports both encryption and decryption of methods

Non Repudiation: It provides the receiver the proof of origin of message, with undeniable evidence that the message was sent by that particular individual or corporate. On the internet, Non repudiation can be implemented using digital certificates which contain the details and the public key of the sender.

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Sep
28

Implementing service Orchestration using websphere data power

IBM Websphere DataPower  SOA Appliances is a family of purpose oriented, easy to implement  network devices .They accelerate XML (network devices) and web service distribution. These devices were created by Datapower technology which was acquired by IBM in October 2005.The characteristic features of the appliances include

  • Low latency
  • B2B Gateway
  • Integration
  • Security
  • Acceleration

The datapower SOA appliances are categorized as-

  • XA35-Datapower XML accelerator appliance
  • XS40-Datapower XML security appliance
  • XI150-DatapowerXML  integration appliance
  • XB60-Datapower XML B2B appliance
  • XM70-Datapower low latency appliance

XS40-This IBM data power appliance is a hardware implementation of XML security. It protects the enterprise from XML threats and performs this task at a fast pace.
The Banking enterprise has applications that use XML as its primary data representation technology. The internet can produce good as well as corrupted XML data. The Banking enterprise installs software in addition to the XML threats. This will increase the time requires to process any request for the services running within the enterprise.

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Sep
15

Key Master Data Management Functionalities

Master Data Management system delivers consolidated, complete and accurate view of business critical master information to all the operational and analytical systems across the enterprise. There have been numerous blogs, articles and whitepapers about how MDM helps organizations achieve business value, different approaches companies take to implementing MDM and best practices followed.

In this blog post, I am trying to list down some of the important features the Master Data Management product (or the MDM solution in general) should have so that the organizations implementing MDM can realize maximum benefit from the initiative in a short duration of time.

Here is my list of key MDM features.

Data Model

Out of the box support for multiple domains like Customer (including partners, suppliers), Product, Location and Account.

Efficiently manage relationship between domains (Customer to Account, Customer to Product, and Customer to Location etc).

Categorization, grouping and hierarchical management of master data entities.

Easy to configure and administer reference master data.

Support for localization and internationalization.

Data Quality

Configurable & easy to implement simple and complex data validations.

Ability to integrate with data quality tools like IBM QualityStage, Trillium.

Real time support for standardization of data (Person and Organization names, Addresses, Phone numbers, Email and Identification numbers).

Duplicate Record Processing

Powerful data de-duplication algorithm to remove duplicate records (Or identify duplicate records).

MDM product should be able to collect key data elements of master record which is getting added and find duplicates in the repository. This can be achieved by having good fuzzy search algorithm built into the product (As pointed out by Henrik).

Ability to easily configure critical data elements required for matching according to organizations requirements.

Easy to setup survivorship rules to persist accurate, up to date and most recent information resulting in creation of single record.

Integration

SOA enabled services as I discussed in my earlier post – MDM and SOA: The Perfect Marriage.

Support collaborative, operational and analytical styles of implementation.

Option to load data in batch mode. (Mergers and acquisitions and initial load of data need a faster, reliable and easy load option).

Option to build intelligent rules to notify important events associated with master data.

Ability to setup easier integration with 3rd party applications and business processes that consume data. Provide connectors and adapters to propagate data to any application, database in real time.

Customization Options

Flexible data model and services layer.

Extensible business services and ability to build composite business services using existing services to meet specific client requirements.

Option to introduce new domains with minimum development effort.

High performance, scalable and standard based architecture.

Tracking Changes

Audit functionality which capture and retrieve WHO – WHEN – WHY changed the data.

Efficient framework to store and retrieve historical information about master data, support regulatory compliances.

Track changes coming from source systems and build cross references to each connected system.

Security

Ability to integrate with existing active directory products of the organization.

Easy configuration of data visibility rules (Who can see what? Who can change what?)

I know this may not be a complete list. So, I request you to provide your valuable comments about the features listed here and your inputs about any prominent characteristics which I have failed to recognize.

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