A note from the Founder

I am the founder and CEO of Digital Reef, an enterprise software company that has recently emerged from stealth mode after two years of intensive design and development work on our unstructured data management platform. I started the company for two reasons. First, I discovered that the management of unstructured data was an unsolved problem at every large company I came in contact with.

Second, I realized that it was unsolved because it was a technically difficult problem. I am a business person and a technologist. I don't believe in technology for technology sake. My career has been devoted to solving large-scale business problems with technology. Presented with a problem like the growth and complexity of understanding and working with unstructured data, I was hard pressed to let it go.

When I first encountered this problem it was presented to me as a large and growing issue that emerged from the Sarbanes-Oxley mandates of the early part of this decade. As a result of this legislation, and other regulations springing from issues with organizations caught in the largess of the dot-com "crash", companies had been forced to save vast stores of electronic business records. The obvious consequence of complying with these regulations was that the tools that existed were woefully underpowered for evaluating the content within these vast stores of information.

This content evaluation task was strangely similar to others I had encountered while working with scientists at Bell Laboratories, back when I was CTO of Lucent Technologies' Wireline Business Unit. There, we learned that evaluating large amounts of content to identify insidious threats to network and server infrastructure required new approaches and functionality that did not exist in current network security solutions. The same concepts can be applied to understanding large content stores. That is what we are doing at Digital Reef: making content easier to understand and manage.

I am embarking on this blog in the hopes of sparking discussion around technology solutions to difficult business problems. My plan is to blog about business challenges created by unstructured data--topics including eDiscovery, data storage, knowledge reuse, data security, compliance and data governance, to name a few. I also plan to provide my assessment of some of the technology solutions out there today and my thoughts about what is coming in the future.

I look forward to getting the discussion started.