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Note: IBM titled its Information on Demand (IOD) 2011 in Las Vegas as "The Premier Forum for Information and Analytics." IOD featured innovation and a cornucopia of products and services that act a litmus test and checkpoint as to where the IT industry is and where it is going.
IBM titled its Information on Demand (IOD) 2011 in Las Vegas as "The Premier Forum for Information and Analytics." IOD featured innovation and a cornucopia of products and services that act a litmus test and checkpoint as to where the IT industry is and where it is going.
One of the problems that any large vendor has at a meeting like IOD is how to intelligibly classify and categorize its potpourri of products and services so attendees "get it." Now, this is not as important for people who are very familiar with and focused on particular products, and ignore everything else. However, for someone, say an IT architect with a broader perspective, trying to fit all the pieces of the categorization puzzle into a coherent whole is important.
At this year's IOD, IBM focused on three distinct categories which, while they reflect what the company has done historically, also serve as mental reference points: enterprise content management, data management software and data warehousing systems, and InfoSphere. Let's briefly examine selected highlights from each:
Enterprise Content Management Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has been defined most recently by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM, the worldwide association for ECM) as "the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organization processes. ECM covers the management of information within the entire scope of an enterprise whether it is in the form of paper documents, electronic files, database print streams or even emails."
That overarching umbrella means that ECM covers record management, document management, digital asset management (DAM), workflow management, and capture and scanning (and that is just for starters). Now, no one company today covers every single aspect of ECM, but one would be hard pressed to identify too many aspects where IBM does not have skin in the ECM game (for example, by partnering with companies that do cover a specific aspect of ECM that IBM...