30 Minute Interview

Cognos acquisition: towards complete BI

With the amount of digital information expected to double every 11 hours by 2010, customers face information-centric challenges each day–including globalization, mergers and acquisitions and regulatory compliance. Kaushik Bagchi, Country Manager, Information Management Software, IBM India Private Limited talked to Abhinav Singh about how IBM’s Information on Demand strategy is aimed at solving these challenges.

Kaushik Bagchi

Challenges faced while managing information

In the global economy, information is crucial for competitive success. Businesses are struggling to free information from departmental silos and deliver the same to the right person, at the right time, in the required context. An organization today has a large number of data sources that may be in a discrete format spread across different departments within the organization. The nature of information generated in the world started changing when businesses started evolving and the sources of information became more diverse. Nowadays, data sources can be in the form of relational data, analytical information, and personalized information or can be in the form of unstructured data.

IBM’s Information on Demand strategy

IBM’s Information on Demand strategy was announced in February 2006. The objective of this strategy is to help companies derive new business value from information by making it freely available to any customer, employee, partner, or process that needs it. Businesses today, especially Indian enterprises that are emerging to be globally integrated in the true sense, must manage their information as a strategic asset in order to cope with regulatory compliance, competitive, and customer pressures. Our customers know that the key to their growth is competitive differentiation. They are focusing on business automation and are increasingly investing in ways to optimize business, to put their strengths and knowledge to work toward their success. IBM’s Information on Demand strategy helps organizations in getting information from any source in the organization at using any device. Our strategy is also based on managing different islands of information generated from different sources.

Under the Information on Demand umbrella, we have a bouquet of services. The Enterprise Service Bus is a tool that helps pick up data from different sources, transforms that information and makes it contextual. Then there is the IBM Information Server, which transforms and standardizes the information emanating from different sources within an organization. The server is a data integration software platform that helps an organization derives value from the complex, heterogeneous information spread across its systems. IBM’s Enterprise Content Management helps customers in managing complex and diverse information sources. As far as the Indian market is concerned the levels of maturity towards managing information are quite high and it is an exciting market to be in for IBM. We have customers such as ING Vysya, HDFC Bank and Bharti AXA Life Insurance Company Limited who are leveraging some sections of IBM’s Information on Demand strategy.

24 acquisitions

IBM has embarked on an acquisition strategy centered on the Information on Demand strategy, which aims at making the product portfolio around the strategy richer. We have made around 24 acquisitions and Cognos is one such acquisition that has given us the functionality for a complete BI and performance management platform, fully integrated on an open standards-based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model and also helps customers to turn data into actionable insight for coordinated, information-driven decision-making to improve overall performance.

Then there was the acquisition of FileNet that provided us with a range of content management solutions that proactively capture and deliver content as part of a business process. This technology can be integrated into IBM’s SOA-based capabilities, including business process management and information lifecycle management and allows both customers and partners to ensure that content is delivered and utilized in context of their business processes and achieve effective compliance, archiving and document retention. There is also the acquisition of Trigo Technologies whose solutions help customers to integrate and centrally manage product information that are scattered across their enterprise and their supply chain. This acquisition has strengthened IBM’s WebSphere portfolio and information management solutions, a key part of the Information on Demand initiative.

Future trends in Information on Demand

I feel that the trend of master data management is that it will become multi-form oriented allowing existing information to be presented in multiple views so that it can be viewed from multiple angles—giving analytical insights on corporate performance. Also data warehousing will be powered by real-time warehouses, which means that there will be an increase in real-time access to aggregated, cleansed information for a broader set of users for multiple purposes, including operational usage. There is also this concept of dynamic warehousing becoming popular as customers will use advanced analytics as part of a real-time business process and to unlock knowledge buried in both structured and unstructured information. This approach is expected to provide instant access to reliable and trusted business information in the context of activities being performed, whether it is supporting a customer, processing a claim or handling a transaction. I am also of the viewpoint that the advent of SOA will empower IT managers to develop a new approach to turn data into a more powerful corporate asset and hence the implementation of information as a service will become increasingly important.