Our objective is to provide the community with the means to generate peer-to-peer discussions and share expertise with other members. The community offers benefits in two major areas: 1) Group Activities; and 2) Content and services; provided through our web infrastructure.

Groups include local user groups and virtual user groups that meet on-line to provide broader coverage; and special interest groups (also virtual) aligned by solutions such as Master Data Management and BI/DW infrastructure. We will continue to add more groups worldwide and provide further opportunities for collaboration.

Our website www.leverageinformation.info provides information on all groups, upcoming events and community news. Valuable technical content including tech tips, access to forums and product/solutions information is available and constantly updated. You will also begin to see partners having a greater presence in the community through our Partner Zone which will include partner solutions, news and other partner content.

Stay tuned for future events including an "Expert Jam" featuring IBM's information integration experts from development, product management and support.

This is your community. Let us know how we should evolve the community to meet your needs. Give us your feedback at our Top of Mind page.

Rachel Helm
Director of Ecosystem Marketing
Information Management, IBM Software Group

Chicago and Wisconsin Information Server User Group
The Chicago and Wisconsin Information Server User Groups met on March 4th and 5th respectively at the IBM offices in Chicago and Milwaukee. Speakers Brian Elliott; Senior Sales Engineer and Paula Fricker; Product Marketing Manager for Information Server FastTrack and Metadata, provided various insights and updates to the audience. More

Harish Grama
VP, InfoSphere Development
Information Management, IBM Software Group

As many of you are aware, we launched the LeverageInformation community at our Information on demand Conference in Las Vegas last year. The idea of this community is to provide a "Meeting place" for people invested in the Information Platform and Solutions (IPS) space. One can think of this as the ecosystem of customers, partners, systems integrators, and IBMers who come together to share all manner of information - be it best practices or simply announcing a new solution - around the IPS family of products and solutions.

The 360 degree participation of this community is vital in insuring that LeverageInformation brings substantial and enduring value to its users. While there is something in it for all parts of the community, as the world-wide Head of engineering for IPS, I would like to share my perceptions on the value that such an ecosystem brings to our development community and the day to day impact it has on our ongoing development and release plans.

Click here to read the full article

On 11th March 2008, IBM announced Information Server FastTrack. According to Paula Fricker, Product Marketing Manager for Information Server FastTrack, "FastTrack provides a unique capability currently missing in the data integration market space. FastTrack helps ensure that business requirements are fully captured and accurately translated into application code." Click here to find out how.

IBM Information Server Change Data Capture - from the DataMirror acquisition; is now a part of IBM's product portfolio. It is a high performance, low impact, real-time data integration solution that scales to the largest environments and deploys in any heterogeneous ecosystem. Learn more about its unique technology that has helped connect Ricoh Europe's four System i based source applications to its data warehouse. It integrates in real-time; all ERP data coming from customer service, sales, marketing and finance and also replicates data from Ricoh's central DB2 data warehouse to its SQL Server. For more information, click here.

IBM Information Server iReflect - earlier a DataMirror product, now under IBM's portfolio, is a high-performance, bi-directional replication solution for Oracle environments. It is designed to virtually eliminate downtime within Oracle database environments, while also providing efficient distributed data processing and workload balancing. Learn more about this solution that helps Kyobo Auto Insurance Co. Ltd; replicate data from over 3,500 tables to two secondary System p servers running Oracle on AIX platform. For more information, click here.

A must-read for technologists: Technical Tips
Make leverageinformation.info your regular stop for useful technical tips. Here are some:

• IBM Information Server Business Glossary Anywhere Tour
• Getting Started with IBM WebSphere Information Services Director
• Reporting Choices: Console or Web Console? IBM Information Server Reporting from the Web Console

Blogs
Read the LeverageInformation Community Blog and share your thoughts and comments on the latest blogs:

• Paving the Cow Path by Paul O'Hagan
• Bad Data: Flu for the Enterprise? by Patrick Connolly
• A new market is emerging by Nalini Vanaparthy

Other Upcoming Events


Gartner Business Summit 2008

MDM Summit
Join us for the MDM Summit in London April 21-23.
Click here for more information.

FS3 2008
Join us for the annual Industry Models User Conference in Boston, MA from April 22-24.
Click here for more information.