COBRA, new database s/w from IBM

INDIA: IBM is addressing the challenge of today’s business leaders to deliver greater return on their IT investments with new versions of DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software. Code-named "Cobra" the new version of DB2 introduced today reduces an even greater amount of space needed to store data, helping clients save up to 75 per cent on related energy costs -- more than any other available database software.

The new software includes workload management and autonomic computing features that improve the performance of key applications such as closing quarterly financial reports and helping IT staff more efficiently manage their growing data, leading to a time savings of up to 35 per cent. This savings enables companies to refocus highly skilled employee time on driving better business results rather than on administrative and performance tuning tasks. 

As the information generated by companies continues to grow exponentially, there is a huge burden placed on database infrastructure, with a corresponding increase in costs to manage, power, cool and house more data.  The net effect is that many companies don’t have sufficient budget for storage expenditures and the problem is only getting worse with energy costs increasing.

New innovations in the new version of IBM's database software will help clients combat these issues by gaining greater insight from valuable XML data used in high performance transactions -- an industry first.   The software will also help companies better utilize hardware, improve administration efficiency, easily run applications written from other database software, and generate new intelligence. 

“Industries such as banking, health care and retail are grappling with the increasing costs of energy while managing, analyzing and accessing information to achieve better business results,” said V Subramanyam, vice president - Information Management. Development, IBM India/South Asia, “With the new innovations in DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, IBM is again delivering clients and partners higher performance, lower energy as well as operating costs."

Helping clients lower operational costs and create new intelligence for competitive advantage is fundamental to IBM’s Information Agenda for turning information into a strategic asset.  To enable companies to cost effectively analyze more of their valuable information and make smarter decision faster, DB2 9.7 adds XML warehousing support to the leading transactional performance of DB2 pureXML. 

InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 Enterprise Edition, powered by DB2 9.7, also includes tools to simplify data analysis and data mining, as well as a new Departmental Edition of the software, ideal for departments and mid-sized businesses.  This new edition meets the needs of these organizations, allowing them to transform their company's data into reliable and consistent business intelligence.

Companies that have participated in IBM's Early Access Program have noted significant time savings when deploying applications to the new version of DB2.  "To move our application to an older version of DB2 would have taken an estimated two-year effort. We were thrilled to see it took only one week to move it to the new version of DB2. This represents a terrific opportunity to expand our international community of users, partners and developers. We’re very excited to partner with IBM to make new deployment options available,” Paolo Juvara, CTO of Openbravo, an Web-based Solution ERP provider and IBM business partner.

DB2 9.7 and InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 will be available in June.  Customers, developers and partners can test drive DB2 9.7 by taking advantage of IBM's Early Access Program.