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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Smart_Asset who wrote (20071)	1/12/1999 12:44:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Respond to of 29386

Tamson, The way I look at it is that the data warehousing concept is the driving force along with some critical developments and decisions in the hardware industry, among them FC public loop drives and very inexpensive hard drives. Another organizing concept is where much of the data currently resides - on mainframes. It takes a lot of IT time to get that data back out to work stations. To give you a concrete example, I recently tried to access MRI scan data so I could use it to prepare Powerpoint demonstrations. The task was basically to move the data back from a UNIX to an NT environment where I could put it (a total of 6MB) on a Zip disk. It was a very time intensive process(hours). From reviewing what I think could be done with existing FC hardware it could have been done (theoretically) in a matter of milliseconds. I could imagine there are a lot of companies out there with similar 6MB pieces of data in their mainframe environment, that they feel like they need to have - but they just never hope they have to access. Needless to say, you can't warehouse and search data this way. In fact, I am beginning to understand that the mainframe data might be fragmented into hundreds or thousands of separate database formats that would create a nightmare for someone to search across. Even more amazing, some of those databases might not be Y2K compliant. If this is critical business data, and you have people that know how to search it - that would seem to be a competitive advantage. That would be true in terms of looking at demographics or offering more flexible customer based service. George D.