IBM's 'Cobra' to help business leaders

BANGALORE, INDIA: IT major IBM today announced that it 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, said a press release.

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, the release added.

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.

IBM said the new innovations in the new version of the database software will help clients combat these issues by gaining greater insight from valuable XML data used in high performance transactions.

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.

He added that 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.

DB2 9.7 and InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 will be available in June, said the release.