The IBM DB2 information management strategy
DB2 information management is a core competency for IBM. Therefore, IBM has a large, multisite organization that is dedicated to helping you manage your data and leverage your business information. The IBM DB2 information management strategy has evolved over time as technological advancements and needs of IBM customers have changed. 
One of the major recent changes in the industry is the advent of e-business on demandTM. (e-business on demand is the integration of business processes—end-to-end across the company, with business partners, suppliers, and customers—that enables a business to rapidly respond to customer and market demand.) In its DB2 information management strategy, IBM recognizes and thoroughly supports the need of businesses to move into the world of e-business on demand. “Chapter 10. DB2 and the Web” provides an overview of the role of DB2 in the Web environment. In that chapter, you can read about many general concepts (such as HTML and XML) and about IBM products that help you develop e-business applications. 
This section briefly describes the IBM DB2 information management strategy.
The IBM strategy for DB2 information management has three basic components:
Capturing data. To leverage your business data, you need to first capture the necessary data.
Integrating and analyzing data. Next, you integrate and analyze the data that you captured so that you can gain valuable insight into your operations and your constituents. (Constituents include customers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and members of the community.)
Managing all types of business content. Finally, you can take advantage of the breadth and depth of the IBM DB2 information management solutions by managing all forms of business content, such as Web information and large documents.
Figure 1.2 shows DB2 Universal Database as the foundation for the other segments of the strategy. DB2 runs in many operating systems, as you can see at the bottom of the figure. Around the IBM DB2 information management systems is a structure that includes tools for analysis, data replication, warehouse management, content management, and information integration. Complementing the tools is a range of partners that IBM works with to complete business solutions.
The left side of the figure represents the core applications, which satisfy the major business needs of the organization. WebSphere® software is a family of IBM products that you will read more about in this book. In addition to these IBM products, your organization can acquire applications from various independent software vendors.
The top of the figure demonstrates the importance of the IBM relationships with its business partners, such as SAP and PeopleSoft. These companies, and other companies like them, develop and support core applications for their customers. These applications provide vital business functions, such as Customer Relationship Management and Supply Chain Management. 
On the right side of the figure, you see the enterprise management segment of the IBM data management strategy. Tools such as the IBM DB2 and IMS tools collection offer organizations a broad range of tools for everything from database management to performance analysis. The DB2 Universal Database Control Center also provides tools for managing your environment. In addition, many IBM products support Tivoli tools, which help organizations manage enterprise information. You can read more about IBM support of enterprise management in “Management tools” on page 21.
The backdrop at the center of the figure demonstrates the goal of the information management strategy: to provide an information infrastructure that keeps pace with rapidly changing application development and with management of information for an integrated e-business. Today, your applications need to work with a wider variety of data than ever.
In addition to traditional application sources, businesses need to integrate sources such as XML, text documents, scanned images, Web content, and e-mail. Information integration technology provides fast access to diverse and distributed data. Using innovative and emerging technologies that include technology, replication, and XML helps businesses leverage information to stay competitive. Federation technology provides access to all forms of diverse and distributed data sources. Data replication lets you refresh data across a variety of data sources and targets that are relational and nonrelational and that run on IBM and many other vendors' systems. XML support is being integrated into the DB2 engine, and XML support is already available in WebSphere Studio tools.
The segments in the center of Figure 1.2 represent three key components of the IBM data management strategy:
Content management
Today's variety and volume of digital content are driving business leaders to focus on managing their electronic content, or e-content. To support better, faster, and more profitable customer service and to streamline internal processes, businesses must leverage all pertinent content. IBM Content Manager is a robust cross-platform datastore for all types of content, such as images, computer output, documents, and rich media. Datastore is a generic term for a place (such as a database system, file, or directory) where data is stored. IBM Content Manager enables rapid integration of content into core business processes.
Analysis
Decision makers in today's organizations need to be able to get answers to questions that demand multidimensional analysis. The IBM DB2 OLAP ServerTM delivers analytic applications that give organizations a competitive edge. For more details about DB2 OLAP Server, see “DB2 OLAP Server” on page 25. Other analysis tools that IBM offers are the DB2 and IMS collection of tools, Query Management Facility (QMFTM), and DB2 Intelligent MinerTM. QMF is a tightly integrated, powerful, and reliable query and reporting tool set for the DB2 UDB DBMSs. (You can read more about this set of tools in “DB2 QMF (Query Management Facility) for Windows” on page 115.) The DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data is a tool that helps you gain new business insights and harvest valuable business intelligence from your enterprise data.
Warehouse management
Recall from “Providing information to decision makers” on page 8 that organizations depend on their data warehouses for access to critical business information. DB2 Warehouse Manager supports this segment of the data management strategy. This tool extends the scalability, manageability, and accessibility of your DB2 warehouse. For more details about DB2 Warehouse Manager, see “DB2 Warehouse Manager” on page 23.