2005: The Year We Hog-Tie Data - Page 2

Warzecha thinks that Adobe is well-positioned to benefit from what he sees as being a regulatory-inspired buying spree in 2005, as well. He pointed to what the company has done around .PDFs, what with the ability to combine .PDF documents that contain an audit history with the ability to change the digital rights of the object and to secure the object when its outside the owners control. For enterprises in this post-Enron era, thats gold. Say youre dealing with a merger or acquisition, for example. What prevents someone from distributing a sensitive document to 20,000 of their closest friends? Conversely, what if its locked down, and you need to distribute it to 20,000 associates or partners? Adobe has come up with some very clever ways to deal with these issues, Warzecha says. Another easy 2005 prediction: BI will be everywhere. Janet Perna, IBMs information management group general manager, is painting 2005 as the year when databases come into their own with business intelligence. "Its important to our customers, more and more so: Information is becoming central to them and their ability to compete," she told me recently. "If you look at the whole focus that companies have today on growing revenue and growing the top line, it requires they be able to sense and respond more quickly to changes in the environment, to new opportunities they have for services and products, for competitive threats in the environment. "The ability to leverage information and gain insight from information becomes very, very important in their ability to compete," she said. "That requires more than a database. It requires the ability for them to search, analyze and gain insight from all information available to them. Thats why the whole notion of information infrastructure and the broad topic of information management have become so important and why weve invested so much in the past 10 years." Both companies say they were the first to do it and are being aped by the other, but Oracle is in lockstep with IBM on the BI front going into 2005. Judging by attendees reaction to Oracle BI 10g at its Oracle OpenWorld unveiling, these BI-fortified databases are going to be hot in the coming year. One attendee, Randy Zenk, team leader of database administration at health insurer Priority Health, told me he was delighted and amazed by the technologys ability to touch the database, pull in data and modify a report. Im predicting that information management headaches are also going to drive database users toward these new BI-beefed-up databases as they try to do two things: The first is that theyll streamline the awful mishmash of BI servers, applications and databases and get it down to one, consolidated BI platform, as users have been threatening to do for some time. Next Page: Why customers want what the vendors are selling.