Exec Says IBM Seeks Simplification, Not Lock-in
Ambuj Goyal, general manager of information management at IBM, spoke with Computerworld last week after the company announced its Information Server bundle of tools. Excerpts from the interview follow:
Usually, when vendors create an integrated product suite, some users eye it warily as an effort to create lock-in and squeeze out best-of-breed rivals. How do you respond to those kinds of concerns about Information Server? We don’t do anything unless customers ask for it. They asked for simplification. They were spending time integrating my products rather than solving the [issue of] business value. I believe we are best of breed in all of the technologies today, and in the future, if we are not, we don’t force customers not to deploy best of breed. We interact and work with open standards.
If customers want to use a third-party product with Information Server, will it be possible to fully integrate them? It should be — if [third-party vendors] follow standards. If they don’t follow Web services standards, if they don’t follow metadata standards, it will be hard to integrate. In fact, that’s been our strategy in the software group since 1995, when the software group was founded, that we will win by better execution, not by controlling APIs.
Is Information Server tied in with your services organization, so that users are going to be co-opted into buying a lot of IBM services? No. The concept of Information Server was to reduce the drudge work associated with integrating and deploying our technology and [to let users] focus more on [work] associated with transforming a business.
What kind of influence do data management and products such as Information Server have on internal IT management models? Information Server will force some of the data governance that people have been struggling with. By defining just simple glossaries — by just getting an agreement on that before you start doing an information integration project — it helps [users] do data governance. And the more they focus on data governance, the better management of data they will have. Companies are starting to have chief data officers, or chief information officers — [someone focused on] the information, not the traditional CIO — whose job it is to get control of the data: customer, price, orders, locations
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