Some of the key things Ibm Announced were agile Integration and governance, confidence in big data, and automated integration.  It’s been six months since those announcements, and these capabilities are really taking hold in the market. 

IBM also announced advancements in automated integration, a capability it was the first to champion as ‘the next frontier for data integration’.  The hypothesis was simple – in the era of big data, you’ll have more sources and more repositories for specialized analytic workloads, therefore you’ll have more integration, so it should be made simple.  And that’s exactly what has played out in the market.  Companies have adopted IBM’s Data Click to speed integration between big data sources and targets, and to offer business department ‘self-service’ to access big data.   This has proven extremely valuable, as more companies look to centralize big data in a ‘data lake’, and technical users in business departments want access to that data to bring into their own repositories for ad hoc analysis. 

And IBM’s capabilities in Agile Governance have received a warm reception from the market.  The ability to apply appropriate levels of governance at different points in time is the key to quickly, yet safely, harnessing the power of big data.  Many organizations have adopted IBM’s agile data security capabilities to monitor, mask and protect sensitive big data. 

IBM’s Information Integration & Governance portfolio is the market leader in Information Governance, and it was designed from the beginning to handle the biggest and most complex requirements.  That original design placed it in a fortunate position – it was already ready for the era of big data in terms of performance and scalability, and simply had to adapt for newer requirements such as variety, and new technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL.  So while competitors have played catch up and have reinvented their portfolio for big data, IBM has invested to move forward.  Be on the lookout for some exciting new innovations in IIG in 2014. 

For more information, go to IBM Big Data Hub.