Writes News.com on the launch of BEA’s new product, “which glues together all types of business information stored in various locations, allowing people to search and view that data as if it were stored in one location”:
The problem is as old as the computer industry itself. Despite years of development in database and infrastructure software, it’s still difficult–and sometimes impossible–to search across a corporate network for all e-mails, documents and spreadsheets related to a specific project, for instance. Searching through video, audio and image files is kludgy at best.
“So why is everyone trying to do this? It’s an age-old problem: Old data never goes away. It hangs around forever. So as you keep adding new applications and new databases, it gets more complex to try to make information integrate,” said Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Giga Information group. “Customers today have a concern with the difficulty in doing data integration. Its complexity is always an obstacle. It’s in the interest of IBM, BEA and others to remove those obstacles.”
This seems to be more of what a Digital Dashboard and Information Refinery should be doing. Would be interesting to see what BEA is doing, because we are trying to solve similar problems at a much smaller case for the smaller companies. Blogs are going to play a key part in this future.
