LAS VEGAS, NC, 27 Oct 2008 -- IBM today announced the expansion of its Integrated Data Management(IDM) software initiative with new offerings from the Optim ™ portfolio, to help organizations manage application data with greater consistency across the enterprise. IBM ’s IOD strategy focuses on helping companies unlock the business value to gain competitive advantage.

With IBM Optim, companies can manage data seamlessly across each phase of the lifecycle, from requirements to retirement, to align with their business goals. Building upon a foundation of shared information, teams can develop and deploy enterprise-ready applications faster, with better performance, while mitigating governance risks.

"Organizations today rely on complex, heterogeneous IT infrastructures to execute their business processes, from shipping a sales order to posting a payment,” notes Arvind Krishna, vice president, IBM Data Management. “IBM Optim expands on our Information on Demand strategy, providing an open, integrated environment for customers to manage the data across related applications, databases and platforms, from design through sunset. Our clients can reduce cost and complexity through automation, collaboration and improved productivity."

Leading companies are proactively implementing IBM Optim software to protect data privacy, a key governance concern. Colgate Palmolive, a leading global consumer products company, focused on oral care, personal care, home care and pet nutrition, chose the Optim Data Privacy Solution for SAP applications to guard its critical human resources data.

“Good governance is the foundation of everything we do at Colgate,” said Jim Capraro, Director of Global Information Technology at Colgate-Palmolive. “Therefore it makes sense that we would look for a way to help us to automate our existing manual processes that protect personal data for our employees around the world. The Optim Data Privacy Solution offers application-aware data masking for our SAP system -- creating a safe environment for development and testing activities.”

A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM describes the state of a comprehensive data management strategy in organizations today, with a clear call to action: “These issues call for a more comprehensive, coordinated and planful approach to the full data lifecycle: design, develop, deploy, operate, and archive or retire. Like other maturing aspects of IT, a more effective, end-to-end data management regime will be more efficient, more agile, less risky, and less costly. Enterprises need to take a closer look at their data management strategy and plan to drive improvements into this neglected corner of their organizations.”

With more than 10 new offerings to be delivered in Q4, IBM is again extending its data management market leadership. IBM launched the industry’s first Integrated Data Management software offering, Data Studio, a year ago. Since then, the IBM Optim portfolio of multi-platform data management products has been added to the Information on Demand portfolio following the acquisition of Princeton Softech.

The following integrated data management products are planned for delivery in 2008:

Optim Change Manager 1.2 (formerly Data Studio Administrator)

Optim Data Relationship Analyzer 1.1

Optim Data Privacy Solution 1.2

Optim Data Privacy Solution for SAP Applications 1.1

Optim Data Privacy Solution, PCI Module 1.2

Optim Data Growth and Test Data Management Solutions 7.1

Optim Data Growth and Test Data Management Solutions 6.1 (z/OS)

Optim Development Studio 1.2 (formerly Data Studio Developer 2.1)

Optim pureQuery Runtime 1.2 (formerly Data Studio pureQuery Runtime 2.1)

DB2 Performance Manager 3.2

DB2 High Performance Unload 4.1

To learn more about IBM’s Integrated Data Management offerings, please visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/optim-solutions

For more information about IBM, visit http://www.software.ibm.com/data.

Contact(s) information 
Lizette Kodama 
IBM Media Relations 
Office: 646-675-0750