The Business Object Management System

The Business Object Management System (BOMS) is a distributed resource manager that generalizes and extends the concepts of shared corporate information to include not only data that are structured such that the data can be held in relational tables but also generalized, complex business information objects. BOMS allows enterprises to store, manage, and query the totality of their documents, business transaction records, images, etc., in a uniform and consistent way. With this system, businesses can make more effective use of information that has in the past been inaccessible to thorough and systematic queries and that could not be integrated effectively into existing or new business processes. BOMS is targeted toward very large collections of information objects (on the order of a billion objects, equivalent to terabytes of data) and allows enterprises to unlock information treasures that would otherwise remain hidden in collections of that size. BOMS is influenced by theoretical concepts, such as object-orientation and hypermedia, but relies on proven relational database and transaction processing concepts. BOMS has been implemented with DATABASE 2™ (DB2®) and Customer Information Control System/Enterprise Systems Architecture (CICS/ESA™) and has been in productive use since 1991.