As organizations increasingly adopt AI and integrated business planning, access to trusted enterprise data has become more important than ever. Financial, operational, and business data is often distributed across multiple databases and cloud platforms, making it difficult to bring together the information needed for planning, forecasting, and AI-driven insights.
With the 3.1.10 update to Planning Analytics as a Service and Planning Analytics Advance Certified Containers, IBM introduces Planning Analytics Data Sources, a new capability that simplifies how organizations connect to enterprise data sources and bring data into TM1 databases. By reducing the effort required to access data where it already resides, Planning Analytics Data Sources helps organizations build connected planning solutions faster while creating a stronger foundation for AI-powered planning.
The initial release supports ~20 data sources, including relational databases such as Db2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as modern cloud-native platforms including Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, AWS S3 buckets, and more. Support for additional data sources will continue to expand in future Planning Analytics Workspace updates.
Rather than spending time configuring complex connection infrastructure, administrators and modelers can quickly establish connections using only the information required for the selected data source. finance teams and business users can focus on building planning applications instead of managing supporting services, while guided imports make it easier to transform connected enterprise data into dimensions and cubes.
The new Planning Analytics Data Sources are powered by a connector service integrated directly into Planning Analytics Workspace. While the ODBC Data Connector remains a supported option, Planning Analytics Data Sources provides access to supported data sources without requiring the installation and configuration of ODBC Data Connector services, simplifying deployment and ongoing administration.
Beyond simplifying connectivity, Planning Analytics Data Sources is designed to provide a high-performance and scalable foundation for enterprise data integration. The new data sources leverage the Flight data source type introduced in TM1 12.6.1. Apache Arrow Flight provides underlying high-performance data transport, while Planning Analytics manages complexity behind the scenes. This enables organizations to benefit from improved performance and scalability without additional configuration, creating an architecture that can grow alongside expanding enterprise data environments.
Data connectivity is no longer simply about integration—it is the foundation for connected planning and AI. By making it easier to access a broader range of enterprise data while providing a scalable, high-performance architecture, Planning Analytics Data Sources helps organizations spend less time overcoming integration challenges and more time generating business insight. As support for additional data sources continues to grow, Planning Analytics Data Sources establishes a modern foundation for bringing trusted enterprise data into Planning Analytics and enabling the next generation of AI-driven planning experiences.