IBM has pledged to offer the first products based on its Xperanto
technology for integrating multiple data points within the next six
months, as part of its OnDemand initiative for exploiting existing
technology assets.
Xperanto represents a significant extension of IBM's DB2 database
technology, allowing for federated access to data, regardless of
whether the data resides in DB2 or in data management systems from
vendors such as Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft.
"Xperanto has the means to access all the data in real time in an
efficient way, without requiring the customers to move the data,"
said IBM distinguished engineer and director of information
integration Nelson Mattos.
"We believe this is very significant because for companies to
become more efficient and be able to better respond to changes in
the marketplace, they need to embrace a technology strategy that
reflects the way [businesses] actually work."
IBM believes data management was moving away from the notion of a
data system that only managed information that is physically
stored, towards an infrastructure that manages, integrates,
accesses, and analyses all the information in the enterprise.
Mattos said rival Oracle favours a centralised approach to data
management. "That does not allow customers to obtain information on
demand because if I'm going to centralise, I need to know what
information I need to move into the Oracle system."
Oracle officials, however, said IBM's Xperanto is not offering
anything new as far as data federation because both IBM and Oracle
already have federated data management capabilities.
"There's not much new there," said Oracle vice-president of
distributed database development Benny Souder.
He rejected notions that Oracle requires centralisation. "You can
centralise and save money, but sometimes you can't centralise.
"In those cases, we deal with that just fine; we have a complete
distributed capability inside the Oracle database."