Here's how sharing data can improve relationships with suppliers and customers and can vastly improve corporate efficiency.

Editor's Note: This article is an introduction to the white paper "Be Nice. Share Your Data."

Information is the fuel for click-driven commerce as well as brick-and-mortar businesses. How your organization uses information is a critical differentiator separating it from every competitor.

Organizations that are the most successful at collecting, evaluating, and applying information are consistently industry leaders. This article provides some insight into how to solve these challenges and help organizations find new ways to deliver the right information at accelerated speeds throughout the business.

More Information Expectations, Less Time and Budget

Do these situations sound familiar?

• Your company recently merged with a rival. Your centralized applications have used the same standards for years and have been consolidated onto one UNIX platform with several Windows servers. The new acquisition relied on a distributed environment and comes with a mix of IBM i, Oracle, and SQL databases and both Oracle and SAP critical applications. How do you integrate these organizations without undertaking a costly, year-long integration effort?
• One user community needs real-time query access to selected production data kept on an IBM Power Systems server running IBM i with a DB2 for i database. They would like this data rendered to a SQL Server database that hosts GUIs and applications that are familiar to end users.
• A large retail firm acquired a new pricing application that runs on a Windows/SQL Server platform. The organization needs to share pricing updates, in real time, with back-office applications that run on Solaris/Informix.

If you're like most small and mid-sized organizations, your environment evolved into this conglomeration. Some applications were internally developed, some bought from third parties, while others were acquired through mergers and acquisitions.

The inability to easily share data across platforms and application silos poses a significant obstacle to business strategies that require a more nimble, adaptable and knowledgeable enterprise.

Today, information is a boardroom issue. That puts pressure on IT executives to determine how all of these application silos can share data in a timely manner. Meanwhile, they must find a solution that keeps costs low.

Vision Solutions, Inc. is the world’s leading provider of information availability software and services for Windows, Linux, IBM Power Systems and Cloud Computing markets. Vision’s trusted MIMIX® and iTERA™ high availability and disaster recovery brands support business continuity, satisfy compliance requirements and increase productivity. Affordable and easy-to-use, Vision products are backed by certified worldwide 24X7 customer support centers and a global partner network that includes IBM (NYSE:IBM), HP (NYSE:HPQ), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), VMware (NYSE:VMW) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL). Privately held by Thoma Bravo, Vision Solutions is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA with offices worldwide. For more information, visit visionsolutions.com, search for VSIChannel on popular social networks or call 1 800.957.4511 (toll-free U.S. and Canada) or 801.799.0300.