The crowded auditorium of 500+ XML content professionals erupted with applause as MarkLogic CEO, Dave Kellogg took the stage. Dave’s presentation started by providing an overview of the search engine/database divide (the no man’s land that used to exist between the document-centric folks and the database-centric people). He used various examples to help the audience understand how we got to where we are today — in most organizations, not fully able to leverage all of the information available to us in meaningful ways. Specifically, he talked about the reasons why these two worlds — data from databases and content from documents — are colliding.
Dave talked a bit about MarkLogic Server, and the company as a whole, which is in the enviable position of having tremendous growth and profitability. According to Kellogg, the company has experience 60% grow in revenue during Q1 of 2009, something most companies could only dream about.
MarkLogic is serving organizations with lots of unstructured information, not always books and documents, as one might expect, says Kelogg. “You might be surprised to learn about some of the other types of content our customers need help with — email, spare columnal data, recursive data, metadata, and even, content scraped from websites.”
“Generally, customers use the system to ‘slice-and-dice’ information and analyze it for critical business reasons,” says Kellogg. “They also use the system to build custom applications [often for 100 TB or more of data] for a wide variety of purposes.”
XQuery is the technology that makes MarkLogic such an important and game-changing tool and Kellogg touched briefly on this. You can learn more about XQuery in Norm Walsh’s article (for Data Conversion Laboratory) entitled Making the Case for XQuery.
Dave provided a great example of the search for meaning: Wolfram Alpha. It’s a computational knowledge enegine that answers queries from users. Give it a whirl.
Disruption is happening all around us. Open source. Software-as-aservice. Cloud computing. Kellogg says these and other changes are inevitable and will need to be addressed.
“Pure, technological disruption is less in vogue today,” Kellogg shared. “It’s the delivery model that is being disrupted.”
He’s a very quotable individual and a great writer. His award-wining blog (CODie 20009 Award for Best Corporate Blog), is loaded with useful posts, heavy with insight and loaded with context — and useful hyperlinks. Stop by and subscribe to his RSS feed.
