IBM has taken the first step in its new three year initiative to enhance its information management portfolio with the launch last week of a new version of its WebSphere middleware product designed for improving data quality, reporting and integration.

IBM WebSphere Information Server contains software acquired from data integration specialist Ascential last year and provides functionality for managing data quality, transformation and movement. Tommy Eunice, worldwide information management product manager for IBM, said the server provides a hub for data movement across an organisation and can be integrated into firms' service oriented architectures.

The launch coincides with IBM's pledge that it will spend $1bn over the next three years and assign 15,000 staff to provide products and services to enhance firms' information management efforts.

Eunice said the investment would focus on a broad range of information management technologies, including business intelligence (BI), business process management, analytics, data mining and content management. "We have the ability to collect and store data, but as an industry we are not getting the real value out of that data," he added. "The aim is to now deliver solutions for accessing, managing and manipulating that data."

Much of the spending is expected to focus on developing data management models that firms can then integrate with their own vertical specific applications, Eunice said. "The aim is to create pre-designed generic models or schemas for data mining or providing predictive analysis to meet a certain business requirement or regulation," he explained.