Nelson Mattos, IBM’s newly minted vice president of information integration, detailed new functionality planned for the Serrano release which will be branded as WebSphere Information Integrator.
Mattos explained that a key focus of Serrano will be to help users understand the information sources they have at their disposal more intelligently. Rather than simply providing basic descriptors of the data sources available users, Serrano will be able to discern the relationships that exist between various sources wherever they may reside.
Mattos said that Serrano would automate the tracking and management of these relationships in order to drive actionable searches which he explained would allow end users to directly modify or annotate returned documents and store them back into the system without leaving the native search environment.
The underlying search capability in Serrano will continue to be based on OmniFind, IBM’s core search engine technology. Serrano will also expose IBM’s unstructured information management architecture (UIMA) to ISV and solutions partners in order to plug-in their own domain or industry expertise for solutions development.
Serrano will also add records management technology that IBM gained from its 2002 acquisition of Tarian Software Inc. But Mattos said this version will not include identify resolution technology IBM picked up SRD last month, though he expects this to be added in later releases.
The Serrano code is in a restricted alpha phase right now and will got to an open beta later this year. IBM has not yet decided the version release number for Serrano.
The key features planned for Serrano reflect a growing interest in applications that extend across structured and unstructured data like regulatory compliance, insurance claims adjustment, criminal investigation, and pharmaceutical research.
Serrano will be the second major release of Information Integrator which IBM last month aligned from DB2 to its WebSphere product brand.
Since the last major release of the product (codenamed Masala) 18 months ago over 1,700 customers have been bought on board. Significantly 40% are not DB2 accounts.
