Found a great post by Paul Weinberg observing a recent survey report by Taneja Group, storage and server industry analysts. They surveyed 238 IT decision-makers in North America and Great Britain around different industries. To give you an idea about the audience, I’d quote that “53 percent of users had 11 terabytes or more of unstructured data in their environments”.

So, what’s the state of corporate information in today’s enterprises? 62 percent of the respondents reported that the unstructured data within their companies was growing between 16 and 75 percent per year. Despite the fact that the dispersion in this result is definitely too wide, this seems to be true.

Taneja discovered that the major drivers for unstructured data growth among survey respondents are Microsoft Office (78 percent), e-mail attachments (66 percent), and backup and archival (81 percent combined).

As you can see, enterprises are still sufering from files disintegration. For them, it is still a challenge to manage e-mail attachments and MS Excel spreadsheets as a part of one-view structure or SOA.

Furthermore, Steve Norall, senior analyst at the Taneja Group, is inclined to think that people are not going to move all of the data into a single storage space. Why?.. Due to huge expenses. (Yep, yep, the open source middleware is a Joker here.) So, he predicts that file management and integration companies will benefit from this and “should prosper”.

Finally, the majority of respondents expected their file management and control budgets would grow by up to 20 percent in the next 12 months […]

This means the problem is really a headache and the executives are ready to pay for a solution. Besides the adoption of open source data integration and file management software, I expect that any related services are going to be on the rise, as well. One of the probable solutions is to take an open source toolset and allocate a budget for customizing this software to your unique integration needs.

In this case, the unstructured data management costs may stay far below the 20 percent level expected by the executives.

Filed under: Business Intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Data Integration, SOA, Data Warehousing | No Comments »

Have you heard the news of the day? Sun Microsystems acquires MySQL. The two open source monsters are converging to deliver services and evolve together. “Being part of Sun will give MySQL more resources for everything from development, support, services, sales and marketing,” Zack Urlocker, Executive Vice President of Products at MySQL, said.

This acquision will surely accelerate the further adoption of MySQL and strengthen Sun’s credibility as an open source leader. Community members are already wondering, who will by Sun afterwards. =) Oracle? Or maybe Google?

I’m personally interested to know if the guys are planning to offer any new technology solutions for Java platform and MySQL database. Another question is how will the deal change the communities. Though Zack claims that for Sun “it is a part of an overall strategy to change the world”, it would be interesting to know WHAT actually is going to be changed.

Any predictions or thoughts?

Filed under: Open Source, Data Warehousing, Java | No Comments »

Dear fellows, inviting you to read the technical article I’ve written for TechRepublic. Complete with diagrams, this how-to guide covers 5 steps necessary for building an integration with Salesforce.com.

“If you’re considering or currently administering a SalesForce.com account, this article may help you explore how to integrate your CRM data between SalesForce.com and in-house databases, flat files, and legacy applications. Here’s a deep look at how to get the job done without having to study SalesForce.com APIs and writing, debugging, and maintaining custom code.”

Read the full article at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=265

Filed under: Open Source, Software as a Service, Enterprise 2.0, Data Integration | No Comments »