The smell of lawsuit early in the morning...
There is at least one company out there which is trying to do this for generic tasks and I bet that they have patented at least some of the underlying mechanics. So this is being done and it is quite hard by the way.
IBM has clearly gone for the low hanging fruit on this one, because they can make the database aware of the underlying system so that there is little or no migration and much less remote data access compared to a generic system.
It will be interesting who got more relevant IP. Lawyers at dawn?