Silvon Plugs in to IBM DB2 Metadata Program
Silvon Software Inc. (Westmont, Ill.) has taken a major step toward industry data unification by joining IBM's DB2 Metadata program. Part of IBM's Business Intelligence Partnership Initiative (BIPI), the DB2 Metadata program was created to give data collected by business intelligence solutions a greater degree of universality.
Silvon is expected to support the IBM DB2 Metadata standard to provide its customers with the ability to exchange information between Silvon's DataTracker business intelligence solutions and the applications and tools offered by other IBM Business Partners.
The primary benefit of metadata -- data about data -- is the greater degree of control and commonality it provides over the data in business intelligence solutions, which comes from numerous components, many different platforms and data formats, and components from different vendors.
Using IBM's Visual Warehouse, the AS/400 market has the capability to manage and access metadata across business intelligence environments. Visual Warehouse is designed to provide a centralized metadata repository that offers functional access to various databases in the data warehouse/data mart environment but also provides an "Information Catalog" to document and publish all aspects of the business intelligence environment for everything from user documentation to impact analysis.
"The benefit of this DB2 metadata initiative is that it offers our customers an ability to extract data from a wider range of operational databases to manage their entire environment," says Mike Hennel, Silvon's president and CEO. "With this open architecture, any compliant cleansing, transformation or data visualization tool can be easily added to and integrated into the overall business intelligence environment within Silvon's DataTracker software.
"As a result, this provides a solution-oriented architecture that will drive modern successful businesses of all sizes and complexities," Hennel continues. "In fact, it is not just for use by administrators to manage the warehouse, but also by business users who are able to use the metadata to identify available information in a business context."
--L. Greenemeier