Masala open beta readied IBM and Blue Titan plan to bolster data management wares this week, with IBM retooling DB2 Information Integrator and Blue Titan focusing on SOAs (service-oriented architectures).IBM will release to open beta the Masala iteration of DB2 Information Integrator, IBM’s tool for accessing corporate data across multiple data stores. IBM has increased the search and automation capabilities of the Masala release, claiming that Masala yields query results 10 times faster than the current DB2 Information Integrator. Masala will also include prepackaged applications from PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel as data sources.A publish-and-subscribe capability will notify users of events such as a stock reaching a certain price. Masala’s event-publishing capability can be a proactive element in an SOA, said Nelson Mattos, an IBM distinguished engineer. Also, integration capabilities in Masala can be used in the context of an SOA, he said. Data replication between databases has been significantly improved in the Masala release, according to IBM. Autonomic features enable Masala to recognize and adapt quickly to changes in an environment such as an outage in a back-end system or a customer’s migration to a new Oracle database, Mattos said.“There is a lot of intelligence in terms of different algorithms, different intelligence about what you are asking and understanding the different repositories,” Mattos said.“With the inclusion of enterprise search capabilities, IBM makes good on its original promise of providing integration for both structured and unstructured data in a unified platform,” said Phillip Russom, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Masala is due for general release early in the fourth quarter.Blue Titan, meanwhile, will introduce Data Director, which it calls “the industry’s first native SOA data store,” said Sam Boonin, vice president of marketing at Blue Titan.The software provides meta-data management for SOAs to handle messaging, XML schemas, events, contracts, and logs, Boonin said. Data Director is intended to accommodate distributed data coming from service-based applications such as portals, BPM (business process management) systems, and mobile applications. One pilot deployment features Data Director detecting systemwide anomalies and invoking processes for manufacturing, distribution, and regulatory reporting. “Along with the rise in SOAs is coming what we call ‘data chaos.’ What’s happening is that if you understand the way that service-based applications work, they rely on meta data,” which is required for various applications to work together, Boonin said.Data Director is already in deployment at several Fortune 100 companies, the names of which were not released by Blue Titan. General availability is slated for summer. Pricing will start at $100,000. Databases