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Today TIBCO announced the general availability of its master data management (MDM) solution - TIBCO Collaborative Information Managerâ„¢ 7.0. In 2005 TIBCO acquired Velosel, which had a Product Information Management (PIM) solution. TIBCO has used to technology to create a solution suitable for managing information in a distributed service oriented architecture.

Sid Suri, MDM Product Marketing Manager at TIBCO , says the task of master data management "is a process problem. Anyone can build a big database. But what is going to keep it current? The problem is how to keep it current over time." This requires managing processes around the flow of data, to ensure the information is correct. TIBCO's Collaborative Information Manager (sounds like a prime target for a new acronym - CIM) is an event-based application that combines data process automation and business rules.

In my opinion, TIBCO has the right vision here. Information management needs to be central to the enterprise SOA strategy. Creating an abstraction layer for data services is necessary to ensuring both the integrity of information as it moves across systems, as well as enabling the goal of quickly creating new business solutions from existing IT resources. Many some developers have expressed skepticism that such an abstraction layer will never perform. TIBCO has addressed the performance problem by including distributed caching, and asynchronous processing of large volumes of data.

Because SOA is an inherently distributed architecture, including process management for data is absolutely key. Data management is not just about a metadata repository. Data governance across distributed platforms is also a requirement. TIBCO's inclusion of a rules engine makes it a good solution for SOA data governance. I still think there is a need for semantic integration to automate the task of translation and transformation across systems, and this capability also needs to be part of the Information Server layer.

While in some large organizations information management is a separate group from the SOA team, it is clear that MDM has a major role to play as part of the SOA initiative and organizations should take a holistic view of how it fits into the overall IT architecture strategy.

Posted by bethgb at 07:32 AM in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Neil Ferree at September 24, 2007 02:56 PM