Stories about: Information Integration

There are just 100 days left for federal agencies to change over from IPv4 -- the version 4 of the Internet Protocol that everyone uses -- to the IPv6 version. In the fast-approaching future where everything from PCs to cars, from alarms to toasters, from phones to cereal packages has an IP address and is connected to the Web, IPv6 promises to make many more IP addresses available -- enough addresses for every conceivable use. Oh, and IPv6 will make Internet communications more secure through better identity verification.

It's been a bit more than two years since Ambuj Goyal launched IBM's Information on Demand strategy, an effort by the company to bring together a virtual menagerie of data management, access and analysis software under a single heading.

Complex event processing has a sleek, shiny, space-age allure. CEP has been blinking on the IT industry's "next big thing" radar for quite a while, promising business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams.

A new IBM product tackles the problems associated with managing and reporting on metadata, which has implications for regulatory compliance, business intelligence, service-oriented architecture and data integration projects.

Ubiquitous semantic interoperability is like world peace: It's a goal so grandiose, nebulous and contrary to the fractious realities of distributed networking that it hardly seems worth waiting for.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is offering more services supporting application vendor SAP AG's SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach to IT as part of the companies' increasingly close relationship.

Heralded by a seven-piece band and the rock-concert-like trappings of flames, smoke and strobe lights, IBM opened its first Information on Demand (IOD) conference at 8 a.m. Monday and announced a new product, the IBM Information Server, that integrates many of its data products.

IBM has provided pricing details and a new name for its data integration technology formerly code-named "Hawk," which the vendor acquired through the 2005 US$1.1 billion purchase of Ascential.

Business battles are fought in real time, and IS must keep pace. Real-time business intelligence infrastructures promise a never-ending stream of fresh information, insight and decision support to frontline knowledge workers.

Business intelligence is defined in many different ways. In most cases today, it takes the form of either basic reporting or data analysis via the use of online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. Such tools are essential in gathering a consolidated view of the business, but in some cases they serve only a backward looking role, providing the cause and effect on any given business situation or strategy.

In the evolving world of business intelligence, swift and targeted access to reports and analysis is the name of the game. But the frequent inability of employees to locate the results they need from high-end BI applications is prompting several enterprise search vendors to step in and address the challenge.