IBM smartens up business intelligence

To enhance the analytical capabilities of DB2, IBM on Monday rolled out software that better prepares and shares complex information for analysis by third party business intelligence applications.

Called Cube Views, formerly code named Aurora, the new software reportedly uses unique algorithms to automate the creation of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) metadata. OLAP information helps define, describe, and index information residing in a database.

Cube Views allows OLAP metadata to be created once and then shared repeatedly by both users and programmers across a range of different business intelligence applications for data gathering and analysis, IBM officials said. This functionality reportedly represents the first of its kind.

“We spent a lot of time [in the] last 18 months talking to users and they kept telling us the same things about their tight IT budgets and how they wanted to better leverage existing investments and enhance the performance of those investments. We think Cube Views can accomplish both of those things,” said Karen Parrish, IBM’s vice president of business intelligence.

Parrish said users and developers should think of Cube Views as a “bridging technology,” workable with a range of different modeling tools. Once they model a “metadata Cube” from inside the database, most of the popular reporting tools can use that single metadata Cube for their own purposes.

“In the Cube View environment, you only have to create one Cube that all of an enterprise’s tools can access. This way users have data integrity and get just one view of the data independent of their tool selection. We find that users and business partners like it because it eliminates a lot of manual labor,” Parrish said.

Programmers can use metadata to prepare information further for analysis by collecting it into cube-like four-dimensional charts, showing off the data from different perspectives. As one example, a cube displays product sales by region, time period, profit margin, salesperson, and marketing campaign. Users can then use whatever reporting tool best suits their analysis needs, a company spokesperson said.

IBM said they have lined up support from 15 vendors of business intelligence products for the new product, including Brio, Cognos, Crystal Decisions, Informatica, and Business Objects. All 15 believe the new product will complement and not compete against their respective offerings.

“We think by supporting Cube Views, we can succeed in attracting and retaining a good size customer base. We think we can offer a more optimized and integrated infrastructure which can lower costs and cut down on development time to produce BI [business intelligence] solutions,” said Patrick O’Leary, vice president of strategic alliances for Cognos.

With Cube Views, DB2 supplies users with a built-in “performance advisor” that optimizes and automates the process of gathering and tagging information just before it is analyzed. By compiling information better tailored for a particular query style, third party applications can work more efficiently, resulting in better performance, a company spokesperson said.

Available starting June 27, Cube Views will carry a $7,500 price tag per CPU.