Brooks said IBM has been good about working with third-party tool vendors on the use of their products with its product sets. "I think they realize that they can't provide every possible solution," he said. The Chattanooga-based health care provider, for instance, is using a tool developed by ClearForest Corp. for analyzing unstructured data.

The IBM Information Server works with third-party tools, but IBM officials said those tools won't have the same ability to leverage the integration and analysis capabilities of its integrated offering.

The Information on Demand conference, which drew about 5,000 attendees, combines IBM DB2 technical and content management conferences into a broader-themed symposium. It's a combination that made sense to David Williams, a DB2 administrator at the Georgia Department of Labor, who said his agency is implementing DB2 content management systems for imagery to provide access to document images, among other capabilities.

Kristie Steinmetz, an application programmer at Dairyland Power Cooperative in LaCrosse, Wis., said she attended the conference to learn what plans IBM had for FileNet Corp., a company that it acquired for $1.6 billion. Her company uses products from both companies. The FileNet deal was completed last week.

One longtime DB2 user, Scott Walton, an application database administrator at Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. in Indianapolis, said the rock 'n' roll opening could have been toned down. "Everybody here is sold on DB2, or they wouldn't be here," he said. "We don't need a pep rally on IBM products."