InfoSphere Information Server

InfoSphere Information Server is IBM’s data integration platform. It supports the whole spectrum of use cases for data integration including application to application integration, B2B integration, ETL (extract, transform and load) and ELT for moving data from one environment to another (from operational systems to a data warehouse is the classic case, nowadays including moving data into Hadoop), data migration and SaaS (software as a service) implementations. In this latter case IBM offers specific capabilities with regard to some third party applications, notably Salesforce.com.

There are also specific editions of InfoSphere Information Server, including; InfoSphere Information Server Enterprise Edition, InfoSphere Information Server Enterprise Hypervisor Edition, InfoSphere Information Server for Data Integration, InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, and InfoSphere Information Server for Data Quality (which provides data profiling and data cleansing capabilities). There are also editions for data warehousing and for SAP implementations. We are slightly surprised that there is no particular edition for data migration and/or archiving, where you would probably require IBM InfoSphere Discovery as opposed to IBM Information Analyzer, which you get in the Information Server for Data Quality Edition. However, we understand that InfoSphere Discovery and Information Analyzer will be merged during the course of 2015, which will make this unnecessary.

IBM delivers InfoSphere Information Server through its global direct sales force.

As a product that is around 20 years old (InfoSphere DataStage, as it was then, was originally developed by Ardent, which was acquired by Ascential, which in turn was acquired by IBM) there are thousands of users of InfoSphere Information Server and there are a number of case studies published by IBM on its web site, including the company’s own implementation in the office of the CIO, as well as banking customers, universities and others.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of InfoSphere Information Server, outside its role of physically moving and transforming data at scale (including big data integration and grid deployments), is the extent to which it plays a part in information governance. Thus the product includes the ability to define governance policies and rules, a data governance dashboard, integration with InfoSphere Master Data Management, Blueprint Director (used to model and view the integration and governance architecture) and the Information Governance Catalog (previously Business Information Exchange), which provides a business glossary and metadata workbench. There is also a new lineage viewer.

In addition to the normal sorts of training and support services you would expect from any vendor (which includes extensive online resources), IBM offers business services (application innovation, business analytics, business strategy, functional expertise, mid-market expertise), IT services (application management, business continuity and resiliency, data centres, integrated communications, IT strategy and architecture, security), outsourcing services (business process out-sourcing and IT outsourcing and hosting), asset recovery, hardware and software financing, IT lifecycle financing and commercial financing.

In addition to the normal sorts of training and support services you would expect from any vendor (which includes extensive online resources), IBM offers business services (application innovation, business analytics, business strategy, functional expertise, mid-market expertise), IT services (application management, business continuity and resiliency, data centres, integrated communications, IT strategy and architecture, security), outsourcing services (business process out-sourcing and IT outsourcing and hosting), asset recovery, hardware and software financing, IT lifecycle financing and commercial financing.