Hospitals, government agencies, retail chains and other industry sectors are being buried by data. As the piles of digital files, X-rays and scanned-in paper records grow higher and higher, data-management applications are coming to the rescue, creating new opportunities for solutions providers. Applications showing the most promise include business intelligence, PDA-based mobile databases and content management, the last of which allows searches across both relational databases and "flat-file" data like video clips and Lotus Notes.
In this complicated and quickly evolving space, statistics tell only part of the story. International Data Corp (IDC) projects that the worldwide document and content technologies market will soar from US$1.1 billion in 1999 to almost $4.4 billion by 2004. More telling is the fact that top vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sybase are pouring resources into partnership programs for this emerging market.
Meanwhile, database products keep improving and are less costly and easier to use, thus opening the doors to more solutions providers and customers.
On the down side, however, despite these product enhancements, some business-intelligence implementations are too complex to handle without specialised knowledge, while solutions providers pursuing the mobile database market must quickly climb the wireless learning curve. Also, the newness of integrated content-management products require heavy customisation.
BI-directions
In business intelligence (BI) implementations, data warehousing typically goes hand-in-hand with data mining, for analysing or "drilling down" into the stored information.
Many of the top BI solutions providers have been doing this type of high-end work for years, much of it in the medical and scientific community. Back in 1996, for example, solutions provider Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) began to build a data warehouse for an organisation called Cancer Care Ontario. The ultimate goal? To reduce cervical cancer rates in the province by 50 percent. By now, the repository contains 5 million records on 3 million women, supplied by various medical labs throughout Canada.
