Integrating Information for On Demand Computing Nelson Mendonça Mattos Return to Keynotes Abstract Businesses are increasingly replacing manual processes with electronic ones and integrating processes horizontally - two steps that are key to becoming an On Demand business. Integrating these business processes requires the ability to find, access, integrate, synchronize, and share a wide variety of data and unstructured content. This is an increasing challenge that is top of mind of IT organizations worldwide. Information Integration is the technology that is enabling companies build an IT infrastructure that provides real-time, integrated access to all business information - mainframe and distributed, structured and unstructured, public and private. It provides a unified view of the data regardless of differences in data format, data location and access interfaces, dynamically manage data placement to match availability, currency and performance requirements, and provide autonomic features that reduce the burden on IT staffs for managing complex data architectures. This talk describes the motivation for integrating information for on demand computing, explains its requirements, shows the underlying technologies, and illustrates its value through usage scenarios. As it will be shown, there is still a tremendous amount of research, engineering, and development work needed to make the full information integration vision a reality and it is expected that software companies will continue to heavily invest in aggressively pursing the information integration vision. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery