Sifting the Haystack

5:20 PM -- Quiz time. Answer "yes" or "no" to the following questions:

• Are you saving too much data because you simply don't know where it's duplicated?
• Does a particular type of unstructured data (email, presentations, image files) clutter up your storage and cost you money?
• Do you dream of having tiered storage, but can't plan it because some stored data must be culled out first and you aren't sure how best to do that?
• Has your boss called you onto the carpet within the last 18 months for not being able to produce an electronic file, email, or document that you know was saved?

If you answered "yes" even once, you can expect vendors to come knocking, if they haven't already.

Products designed to manage and organize stored data are the next hot button for IT. A range of emerging solutions are available, including ones that gather and classify data, convert it into a Web format for searching and querying, or link it to storage management applications in the SAN or NAS.

This is what CA is after with its purchase of MDY. (See CA Buys Records Mgt Firm.) And it's what Kazeon is up to with Google. (See Kazeon, Google Search.) Many of the new products are OEM'd by archiving and backup vendors. Examples include Kazeon's deal with NetApp and FAST's agreements with Archivas, Avamar, and others. (See Avamar, Fast Team Up and NetApp, Kazeon Sign OEM.)

Some products are designed to be tailored by ISVs to specific niche markets, such as healthcare -- that's what Index Engines aimed at with its SDK. (See Index Engines Chugs Out SDK .) Others are geared to certain kinds of data, such as the "print stream" files used in some bank statements (Xenos/Oracle), unstructured data (Njini), or both structured and unstructured data (Scentric). (See Njini Granted $13M, Scentric, and Xenos, Oracle Team Up.)