IBM tailors BI systems for specific industries

IBM to use $1bn fund to develop tools and services for specific industries and tasks

IBM is to spend much of its recently announced $1bn information management fund on the development of tools and services to support specific industries and tasks, according to a top executive involved in the initiative.

Much of the money will fund initiatives to accelerate the use of IBM’s information management tools in specific business contexts, said Tom Inman, vice-president of marketing at IBM’s Information Management Solutions Group.

IBM is expected to develop more industry-specific versions of its current tools for risk and compliance management, business analysis and discovery, business performance and process management, master data management, process innovation and workforce productivity.

“We have infrastructure technology [for better managing information as an asset] and while we’ll continue to make opportunistic investments around new tools, we are aiming to tailor [systems for] specific scenarios, such as improving customer service or trying to prevent fraud in the banking sector, or helping police gain real-time information on criminals,” Inman said.

Inman also revealed further details of IBM’s WebSphere Information Server, which was announced last month and is due to ship in July. The new product, which incorporates information integration capabilities acq- uired from Ascential last year, is designed to help support firms’ service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects by making it easier to plug data into various applications.

“WebSphere Information Server will let you bring together data from different sources, such as a SAP system, an email and a document management system, and plug it into the service bus so the data can be made available to the appropriate application or process,” Inman said.