Big Data is the digital convergence of structured and unstructured data. Those organizations that can capture and analyze their data, regardless of what type, how much, or how fast it is moving, can make more informed decisions.

IBM today announced new software to provide clients with a sophisticated way to tame the data deluge and speed up business processes, making it easier for decision makers to gain insights from data. Based on innovations from IBM labs, the new software continuously accesses, compresses, and analyzes data, freeing up IT staff to work on higher value tasks such as big data and business analytics.

Over the past four years, more than 100 clients, 200 business partners, and hundreds of experts from IBM Research and Software Development Labs around the world collaborated to develop the new software.

In the era of big data, organizations are struggling to gain insights from information assets to transform business operations and be competitive in their industries. The challenge is compounded by new high performance applications that require instant access to new types and massive amounts of data from social networks, sensors, and mobile devices, along with data growing exponentially inside .

New Software Helps Clients Find Answers Up to 10 Times Faster and Free Up Storage

To help clients meet these challenges, IBM is unveiling DB2 10 and InfoSphere Warehouse 10 software that easily integrates with big data systems, automatically compresses data into tighter spaces to prevent storage sprawl, and slices information from the past, present, and future to eliminate expensive application code.

During testing, clients performed data warehouse queries up to 10 times faster to speed up decision making, freed up up to 90 percent to dramatically reduce storage needs, and easily migrated data from expensive Oracle Database to IBM DB2 software with 98 percent code compatibility that didn't require changing the data or retraining staff.  Using the new software, clients can:

Access big data for deeper insights –- Big data integration and real-time data analysis provides faster insights from unstructured data, such as information or text from mobile devices. Insights from Hadoop-based systems are now easily integrated with real-time analysis of structured data in the warehouse to enable better and faster business decisions.  

Speed up business processes and lower data management costs -- Adaptive Compression and Multi-Temperature Data Management instantly compresses data to make it easier for business applications to use it and place into the most effective storage. Compression speeds up the flow and better manages big data for use by analytics applications. The new automatically assesses how frequently data is needed and moves it to cost effective storage based on how "hot" or "cold" it is.  

Look into the past and future to improve decision making -- Time Travel Query enables easier access to data at any point in time. For example, an online travel agency can automatically detect inconsistencies in itineraries such as a hotel booked in Rome for eight days while a car is reserved in New York City for three of those days. Previously, database administrators and application developers had to write complex code to uncover this relationship.  

“Today’s growing data volumes make it tougher for clients to access the right data when they need it to stay competitive," said Arvind Krishna, general manager, IBM Information Management. “IBM has advanced database and data warehouse technology to the point where data management can be automated and insights shared more broadly than ever before, freeing up decision makers and IT staff to focus on growth.”

More information: For more information on DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, visit www.ibm.com/software/data/db2-warehouse-10

Provided by IBM