My Digital Reef Inaugural Blog

I’m a senior consultant and founder for the INI Group and am working very closely with Digital Reef as a consultant, advisor and blogger. I’ve been in the high tech industry for over 23 years with a focus on the data management and storage arena and you can find out more about me at www.contemplatingIT.com. I believe Digital Reef has brought to the table an extremely impressive solution at a critical time when our unstructured data content is growing to massive levels.

In addition to being and advisor and consultant for Digital Reef – I’m going to be blogging for them on a regular basis discussing a wide range of topic areas from business issues, compelling technology, market dynamics and visions going forward.

Who and what is Digital Reef? They are a startup – an emerging vendor – that came to right conclusion that Enterprise search is woefully inadequate on multiple levels – the mechanics of making it work efficiently and intelligently in environments with massive amounts of content; and the ability to get relevant data to the user rapidly and without drowning them with irrelevant results.

I describe the Digital Reef solution as a data and content management platform leveraging intelligent and scalable search and indexing technologies. Digital Reef provides appliances with a grid architecture that ingests and indexes massive amounts of content spread across heterogeneous storage throughout the Enterprise creating a global federated index. Some of the biggest challenges with indexing include scalability, transparency and true global federation – and Digital Reef solves all three.

Once you have all of your unstructured data indexed – what are you going to do with it?Another big challenge with management of unstructured data is making order out of chaos. If you just use keyword searches there will be a large number of irrelevant returns that obscure what you really need.

The problem with keywords is that there is very little useful context. Digital Reef’s magic ingredient is its similarity engine – the ability to analyze content including documents, email threads and terms and return to you results based on a user defined similarity ratio. Digital Reef’s similarity engine is sophisticated technology that not only uses keywords but the associations of terms and the context in which they are used within unstructured data – providing relevant results.

Companies are frustrated because information is really three dimensional but we are using two dimensional tools to access and manage them. The first step is to implement solutions that provide us rapid access to relevant data for reactive purposes such as a discovery process, audits, research, customer support, projects, etc. However, think of the potential of really using information to also build revenue generating products and services leveraging existing intellectual property. The potential is compelling and landscape changing.