Overview
In today's business environment, reports are essential for analyzing efficiency and managing the multi-faceted aspects of every business. Problems arise when reports must be generated from data that is warehoused in diverse sources and repositories. Often, a large spectrum of data including measurement data, performance data, reports, billing information, trouble ticket data, inventory, and capacity must be seamlessly queried and included in a single report. When different kinds of data come from different sources, traditional solutions fall short of providing a flexible and reliable report delivery system. Many businesses are faced with the challenge of rapidly collecting data that is up-to-date, and that reflects a true picture of query results for analysis. Businesses need accurate and timely decision support information to analyze performance and increase productivity and profitability.
The Unified Customer Reporting (UCR) project solves this problem by providing a generic infrastructure for creating reports from multiple, heterogeneously correlated data sources. The solution is geared towards commercial customers and IGS personnel, including network administrators, system administrators, and executives.
The UCR infrastructure is extensible and modifiable, and is based on multi-platform standards: Java, Servlets, XML, XSL, and Web. UCR presents a report as a structured text file in XML, so it can be viewed and used by any number of applications. XML is rapidly becoming the standard for data interchange, both across the Web and between applications.
As opposed to traditional solutions, where data is copied from its original source to a central warehouse, UCR uses a virtual unified schema and a repository of mappings; it maps the data sources to the unified schema. Whenever data needs to be queried or accessed, UCR uses the repository of mappings to retrieve accurate and timely data from the data sources.
UCR was developed as a joint project by the IGS Service Delivery Technology Center (SDTC), and the IBM Haifa Research Labs. The technology is being deployed in the IBM SRM (Server Resource Management) service.