Industry Insider

I might be a little old fashioned, but I came up through an Electronic Content Management (ECM) and Transaction Content Management (TCM) community where you never put BLOBs directly in your database. By BLOBs, I am referring to Binary Large Objects (not the 1988 thriller movie) which are chunks of images or other large data stored as a single object. I was taught that the database should hold pointers to BLOB content stored on another inexpensive storage system like SAN or NAS drives. However, when I entered the world of SharePoint, I realised that everyone was storing BLOBs in their databases.

Acaveo, a provider of File Analysis software for analysing and managing unstructured data, has been awarded a Build in Canada Innovation Program (BCIP) contract to deploy its software at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC).

Anyone who's had the responsibility to manage an end-user centred system has heard this refrain when asking people to get rid of old emails, documents, files, voice mail recordings, pictures, or any other electronically stored information (ESI). "I need it to do my job" or "It has business value and I need to save it".

Macedon Ranges Shire Council is a local government area in Victoria, Australia, located in the central part of the state. It covers an area of 1,747 square kilometres and, at the 2011 Census, had a population of 41,860.  It is home to distinctive mountain range of the same name, and the iconic Hanging Rock.  The region is popular with both domestic and international visitors, due to its natural attractions, wineries, and its proximity and accessibility to the Melbourne metropolitan area.

Texthelp, a provider of software for the education sector, has incorporated ABBYY’s Cloud-based OCR (optical character recognition) technology to perform text recognition in its Snapverter app for Google Apps for Education users.

IBM has introduced new data discovery and question-and-answer capabilities for Watson Analytics that promises to make it easier for users to extract insights from their data. IBM also announced widespread adoption, with half a million professionals registering for the Watson data exploration and visualization service since its introduction less than a year ago.

Dell’s 10 year program to build an end-to-end enterprise software suite reached its culmination this week with the stunning $US67 billion takeover of EMC, rounding out the company’s portfolio with a compressive set of solutions for unstructured data management.

Claiming that “forcing GPs to adopt half-baked e-health record [is] a dud idea,” the Australian Medical Association (AMA), has opposed government plans to link GP incentive payments to the adoption of the scheme.

In the information technology industry today, information is our primary asset. Information is what we provide to the business. Information is also pivotal for the success of the IT organization in providing valuable services to the business.

Shortly after Lexmark’s $US1 billion acquisition of Kofax, Howard Dratler was appointed head of sales with Lexmark’s Enterprise Software division and placed in charge of the global field organisation. On a recent visit to the region, IDM got the opportunity to quiz Dratler on the progress of merging the operations of Perceptive Software, Kofax and ReadSoft.