IBM today announced the launch of its Content Manager software solution, aimed at helping companies to manage the vast amount of information available in digital format today, and its Enterprise Information Portal version 7.
The company will spend $100 million worldwide on marketing the new offerings, which will offer a data management solution that will operate on multiple platforms.
“85% of any corporate organisation’s data is just paper somewhere, only 15% is managed electronically and only 10% of that is ever analysed,” said Tarek Niazi, software manager for IBM Middle East.
“Plus any organization doubles the amount of data it has every six months – this makes the decision making process very tough. IBM is at the forefront in helping customers turn information, in any format, into a business advantage. No other vendor in the industry can match IBM’s end-to-end e-business data management capabilities.”
Single Interface
The IBM Content Manager collects, manages and distributes data in all forms, including documents, email, multimedia formats and XML and HTML.
The software can run on top of a wide range of databases, running on a full range of hardware platforms. Through one single interface, the user can access any content that they have permission for.
Security is provided by Tivoli layered security running through IBM’s Websphere.
Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) 7 provides the infrastructure to integrate information from a broad range of business sources across the enterprise.
It allows developers to quickly deploy portal applications with a write once programming interface. The portal is based on the DB2 Universal Database, a multi-media, web-ready relational database management system with more than 40 million users worldwide.
Retrievable Data
“Regardless of where the data is, regardless of the format, all this data is retrievable,” said Mohammed Mehrez, solution architect for Gulf Business Machines. “This solution gives you one interface to group everything together.”
IBM said the system is already partially in use in the Middle East, including the Egypt Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Saudi British Bank in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, although no entity had a full deployment yet.
The solution was also capable of multi-language functionality, with deployments in the region running Arabic, English and French language services.
