Nice lunch and good conversation with Richard Winter about various DW appliance products. Back to my warm seat.
 
InfoSphere Discovery by Alex Gorelik, Chief Architect, and Todd Goldman, Program Director. The objective is to accelerate time to deployment by automating data discovery to document the data objects. The use case is data growth, data integration, and data privacy. Components are: Transformation Analyzer and Source Data Discovery and Unified Schema Builder. The demo discovered tables/relationships related to ORDERS among 30+ tables. Several more demos of finding complex business rules buried in the data and sensitive personal data embedded in other files. Impressive! Wished I had this tools years ago!

Todd drove the key points by doing several magic tricks (smoothly executed) for us. As first-time presenters to the Gold group, they done well...

IBM Integrated Data Mgt by Curt Cotner, IBM Fellow and VP/CTO for Database Servers. Curt is a regular at the Gold group so the conversation goes like, "last year we discussed this but now it is that". Curt gave us a tour through a series of products like: InfoSphere Data Architect, Optim Data Privacy, Optim Database Administrator, Oracle support in Optim Development Studio, pureQuery variations, and Optim Query Tuner.

IBM IMS Update by Betty Patterson. IMS is the top revenue-producing software product, long running over 42 years and going strong! See the Wikipedia entry for IMS's history. Why is IMS still relevant to Enterprise IT? Betty argued that IMS has become an integration points for SOA and a solid performance/reliability/security record. And, IBM has continued to make considerable investments into IMS.

One program is educating the new generation of IT professionals in IMS skills. An academic initiative for System z has involved over 600 schools with 50,000 students, resulting in 30 courses, exams, and Application Programming certificate. Another program is application modernization to increase usability leveraging IMS investments. The third program is a simplification of database administration reducing the skill level for performance tuning, etc.

IMS version 11 is available this month. A list of new functions is here, and fact sheet is available here. Betty continued by covering future directions for IMS, which was under NDA.