Search entraps Big blue too

BANGALORE: The world's largest IT products and services company, IBM is the

latest to join the search battle, eyeing the large enterprises exclusively. It

has sent out the beta version of its upgraded database product, DB2 with search

engine feature.

The `search' market has attracted also attracted the world's largest software

maker by investing millions of dollars. This has intensified the battle, which

was keenly contested by Google and Yahoo a while ago.

Large corporates are betting big on the market.

IBM plans to announce shortly, the beta trial of the next version of DB2

Information Integrator, code-named 'Masala' and will be made available by the

end of this year.

According to the company, Masala will enable customers to manage and combine

huge surge of data sources pouring into their IT environments from across their

enterprise and make informed business decision.

Through its research project WebFountain, IBM had been conducting ongoing

research on search technology to its software to enable its customers a seamless

search of disparate data sources much like a search engine.

According to reports on the web, IBM is likely to use the software in its

portal product, WebSphere Portal. Masala will incorporate the Web crawling/data
gathering capabilities and will let users better analyze the information

gathered from distributed data sources. The software will allow users to tap

into wide range of data types, including multimedia files and packaged

applications.

According online
reports
,

Nelson Mattos, director of DB2 Information Integrator, IBM reveals that, "Masala

drastically reduces application development cost and hand-coding efforts in

enterprises juggling large amounts of data by speeding query results across

federated data sources 10 times faster than prior incarnations of DB2

Information Integrator."






In this upgrade, the company is also introducing new utility, 'event publisher,'
that monitors and tracks events and sends alerts to users for ex on stock

prices.

According to IBM, it now has about 1,300 customers for its DB2 Information

Integrator and its customers are using the software to monitor the flow of

transactions through their companies.