Moving Forward with the On Demand Real-time Enterprise

Chapter 4. IBM technologies supporting real-time 169

real-time, integrated access to business information structured and unstructured,

mainframe and distributed, public and private across and beyond the enterprise.

Such information may reside in diverse source systems such as Oracle

databases, SAP applications, Microsoft spreadsheets, flat files, the Web and

news groups and be distributed across a variety of operating environments such

as Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX and IBM z/OS® operating systems.

The software components that comprise WebSphere Information Integration are:

򐂰 WebSphere Information Integrator

򐂰 WebSphere DataStage

򐂰 WebSphere ProfileStage

򐂰 WebSphere QualityStage

4.3.1 WebSphere Information Integrator

WebSphere Information Integrator software offers a range of capabilities, such

as enterprise federation, transformation, data placement (including replication

and caching) and event publishing designed to meet varied integration

requirements and easily integrate with industry-leading analytical tools, portal

environments and packaged applications, application development

environments, messaging-oriented middleware, service-oriented architectures

(SOA) and business process software.

With these capabilities, business intelligence and business integration

applications can find and access diverse and distributed information as though it

were a single source, regardless of where it resides. Changes to information can

be monitored in order to notify individuals or to trigger business processes.

Moreover, administrators can more easily distribute, consolidate and

synchronize information to facilitate application integration, maintain data

warehouses and support business continuity across complex, multiplatform,

multivendor IT environments.

IBM WebSphere Information Integrator integrates and transforms data and

content. These capabilities are positioned on the IBM WebSphere Information

Integration framework are depicted in Figure 4-44.

170 Moving Forward with the On Demand Real-time Enterprise

Figure 4-44 WebSphere Information Integration

The platform

The platform enables the following capabilities:

򐂰 Delivers accessible, consistent, timely and complete information.

򐂰 Provides leverage for businesses by allowing multiple types of business

problems to be solved in an integrated manner, with a high degree of reuse

and standardization.

򐂰 Supports validation, access and processing rules that can be reused across

projects, leading to a high degree of consistency, control over data, and

efficiency in IT projects, both in the initial development and over time as these

rules need to be adjusted to meet changing business requirements.

The following sections outline the areas of functionality depicted in Figure 4-44.

Understand

Understand and analyze information, including its meanings, relationships and

lineage. Businesses today deal with massive volumes of data often without much

insight into the content, quality and structure of that data. Complex business

transactions from customers and partners plus operational information moving

within the enterprise are often the basis on which key business decisions are

made. These decisions are often undermined by the lack of insight and

understanding of the data. WebSphere Information Integration solutions provide

the automated data profiling, analysis and monitoring capabilities to gather

information about source data content, quality and structure.