Rock and a Hard Place

A really intriguing article went up on B-eye-Network.com today. It's almost a thesis, really, focusing on the future of the information management system. As many of the top names in the industry have suspected that sooner rather than later - traditional document management programs (IE, hard copy storage, delivery services, etc.) and newer forms of data warehousing will converge. The other of this piece disagrees, suspecting instead that these areas will stay independent of one another, although with significant overlap in places. Below is what I would point to as the main selling point of the article. Follow the link for complete text.


The position of this article is a skeptical one that data warehousing, e-discovery (email), and enterprise content (document) management will not converge. These will remain separate markets for the foreseeable future, but with an increasingly broad and deep overlap of infrastructure and application functionality that embraces structured and unstructured data, especially email and the structured transactions that correspond to the messages.
There is such a substantial installed base of data warehousing that bridging the gap between transactional data and archiving, document management, email, and e-discovery will be a requirement for the foreseeable future. The same thing can be said about the giant installed base of document management systems.