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 »

David Van Couvering’s post undergirds the idea that Wiki integration will become the next data integration trend soon. Incompatibility between heterogeneous Wiki formats is an issue, definitely. As a result, a number of software vendors are already developing some integrators between Wikis, blogs, e-mails, and so on.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will surely accelerate this future trend. The more enterprises, as well as their departments, consolidate with 3^rd parties, the more they need data-and-knowledge integration. As an “Enterprise 2.0” essential element, Wiki can be seen as a “service” inside enterprise’s SOA model, too. Therefore, some integration tools will be needed to weave Wiki-based data between either sources, or applications.

And you know what? Since Wiki is a collaborative-based effort, open source will be a winner in this game, sooner or later.

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

Eric Roch followed his “SOA ESB Product Selection” post with the new one, “ESB SOA RFP Questions”. There he compiled a comprehensive list of generic Request for Proposal (RFP) and Request for Information (RFI) questions that help select ESB/SOA product. Thanks, Eric!

However, even if you have already chosen a vendor, Mr. Roch’s list will surely help you gain more understanding of ESB/SOA implementation. It is better to analyze the answers to all these questions before you sign the contracts. Commonly, there are some challenges and hidden misunderstandings. Be aware and avoid them.   

Filed under: Enterprise 2.0, Data Integration, SOA, Enterprise Service Bus | No Comments »