IBM Information Management System (IMS) is a joint hierarchical database and information management system with extensive transaction processing capability.

There are three basic forms of IMS hierarchical databases:
1. "Full function" databases
2. "Fast path" databases
3. High Availability Large Databases (HALDBs)

Collectively the database-related IMS capabilities are often called IMS DB. Suffice it to say that IMS DB has grown and evolved over nearly four decades to support myriad business needs.Prior to IMS, businesses and governments had to write their own transaction processing environments. IMS TM provides a straightforward, easy-to-use, reliable, standard environment for high performance transaction execution. In fact, much of the world's banking industry relies on IMS, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. For example, chances are that withdrawing money from an automated teller machine (ATM) will trigger an IMS transaction. Several Chinese banks have recently purchased IMS to support that country's burgeoning financial industry. Reportedly IMS alone is a $1 billion (U.S.) per year business for IBM. IMS faces competition today from DB2, IBM's relational database system, introduced in 1982. In general, IMS performs faster than DB2 for a given task, but requires more programming effort to design & maintain.

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