I’m excited to announce that IBM® Product Master is available on IBM Cloud Pak® for Data 4.0, IBM’s flagship data platform for managing all of an organization’s data-related tasks, from data cataloging to deriving meaningful insights from the data and operationalizing these insights at scale.  Today I’ll explain the new possibilities introduced by this platform, and why they are a big deal for IBM Product Master customers.

First, let’s look into some of the significant operational improvements when using IBM Product Master on the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform.

1. Installation and ongoing maintenance:

   With the containerized deployment of IBM Product Master on IBM Cloud Pak for Data, the installation can be completed in few minutes as opposed to the days or weeks required for a traditional install. In addition, the ongoing maintenance is significantly simplified, as there is no need to bring down the instance or services to install a new version of the software when it becomes available. And the services can be installed individually—for example, the workflow service can be installed on its own without deploying all the software.

2. Auto scale up and down:

   The individual services scale up and down automatically without need for the manual user intervention required by a non-containerized installation. As a result, you and your organization won’t need to worry about the sudden spike in load that could happen when you import a huge number of entities or when too many suppliers log into the system to enrich or query product, material or any other data.

3. Consistent user experience:

   The overall user experience of IBM Product Master is aligned with the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform, which means a reduced learning curve for end users.

4. Centralized logging, metering and monitoring:

   Because these aspects are centralized, customers don’t need to put in additional efforts to manage the IBM Product Master environment. They simply leverage the capabilities from the platform for smooth day-to-day operation of the product.

In addition to the operational benefits mentioned above, organizations can also achieve the following strategic benefits from using IBM Product Master on IBM Cloud Pak for Data:

1. Integration with IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog:

   IBM Product Master is natively integrated with IBM Watson® Knowledge Catalog on IBM Cloud Pak for Data. The integration means that with one click, you can publish the metadata of the entities being processed in Product Master to Watson Knowledge Catalog.  The metadata is thus governed in Watson Knowledge Catalog, supporting organization-wide compliance. In addition, business terms and glossary can be assigned to the published metadata, helping ensure that there is a consistent definition of the same data across the enterprise.

2. Leveraging IBM Data Stage and QualityStage:

   The availability of IBM DataStage® on IBM Cloud Pak for Data means DataStage can easily be your ETL tool for connecting to different source systems and populating those entities into IBM Product Master. When you use the tool and the platform together, you get seamless extraction and transformation of the data from various source systems. Similarly, the availability of IBM QualityStage® helps ensure that the various data quality rules for the entities being processed are leveraged from the QualityStage solution that acts as the enterprise-wide solution for data quality.

3. Data virtualization:

   Leverage virtualization on IBM Cloud Pak for Data to make the data in IBM Product Master available throughout the enterprise with all relevant governance and security checks. When you do this, you support seamless compliance with data regulations.  Data virtualization also helps ensure that users can access trusted data in real time using their analytics tool of choice.

4. Watson Studio:

   Leverage the various machine learning models from IBM Watson Studio—in combination with other data, if desired—to derive meaningful new insights from your data. These insights can not only be leveraged to find new efficiencies in the management of your Product Master data, but also to drive new strategic initiatives.

Stay tuned for more because this integration will only get stronger over time.

To learn more about the benefits of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, visit the IBM Product Master page.