The IBM Information Server, which will be available next month, is intended to be a one-stop shop for companies seeking tools for dealing with such data-intensive issues as business intelligence. Priced at US$125,000 and up depending on the number of product modules, it uses many existing products and capabilities available from IBM's information integration and server lines, including offerings from its WebSphere line such as Information Analyzer, QualityStage, DataStage and Federation Server.

But IBM officials said this server represents a new architectural approach that provides common metadata, user interfaces, reporting and logging access information in a service-oriented architecture.

Before Information Server, said Ambuj Goyal, IBM's general manager of information management, users would have to make specific calls to another source to obtain information. But this product will allow users to "get information from multiple sources, reconciled and bidirectional," he said.

Frank Brooks, the chief data architect at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee Inc., has been using many of IBM's data management tools, and he said the Information Server product struck him as an umbrella offering. He said it's an approach that's needed because "the problems are getting far too complex" for any one tool.

Managing data used to be a matter of just taking data on a relational database and running a report, Brooks said. "Now," he added, "it's not just internal data, it's external and it's also content," which includes material such as e-mail -- anything that's not in a relational database.