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IOD 2010: IBM introduces advanced case management

The launch of IBM’s advanced case management services has emerged as one of the key developments at IOD 2010.

By Tom Brewster, 20 May 2010 at 12:30

IBM has introduced advanced case management services to help businesses tackle case-related processes.

Launched at IBM's Information on Demand 2010 event in Rome, advanced case management is an umbrella term for a range of end-to-end software capabilities, offering an integrated selection of services that help firms improve the management of specific business activities, such as investigations or incidents management.

With this, companies will be able to take advantage of IBM’s expertise in enterprise content management and business process management as well as advanced analytics, among other services.

A significant development

According to Ron Ercanbrack, vice president of enterprise content management at IBM, the introduction of advanced case management is one of the two most important developments discussed at the event, alongside the content analytics announcements.

“We already do case management today. Advanced case management is another level of sophistication that we are announcing on top of it,” Ercanbrack said, in an interview with IT PRO.

“A lot of the processes that customers use for case management tend to be linear and a little siloed. What we really need to do is make it optimised.”

Ercanbrack also said that EMC’s entrance into the advanced case management sphere was following in IBM’s footsteps. Even though EMC announced its advanced case management work prior to Big Blue’s Rome event, Ercanbrack said that IBM had started talking about this area a few years back.

“I think it is more a copycat by EMC,” he added.

Big Blue looking to take on Big Data

IBM has also launched a range of new services and solutions to help deal with the superabundance of information being generated, or what Big Blue calls Big Data.

The InfoSphere BigInsights offering is powered by Apache Hadoop, an open source technology that analyses large volumes of information and assists organisations in making sense of significant chunks of data.

Included in the package is a selection of Hadoop software and services, also known as BigInsights Core. With this, organisations can implement custom analytics and workloads so they can break down and gain business value from what IBM calls “internet scale volumes of data”.

Then customers can use Big Blue’s BigSheets technology, allowing them to view the data using specialised visualisation software and draw value from it at speed, all through a web browser.