Too much information?

Corporations are now facing a deluge of data gathered from the electronic trails left by their customers, according to Gartner analyst Bob Hayward.

Hayward pointed to an emerging trend for data accumulation, not strictly as a result of customer information sought and captured, but due to an increase over the years of internet services to facilitate customer transactions. A by-product of these internet services was that customer information was now streaming in faster than corporations could analyse it.

A solution is likely to come from rapid developments in search engine technology, according to Hayward.

"It's positive that Microsoft and Google are engaged in a battle for the search engine space. It will definitely have good spin-offs for enterprise," he said.

To effectively manage IT resources, companies are now taking a holistic approach to deployments. "Companies are starting to view their IT resources as one pool, as opposed to a collection of individual units. Every single CPU cycle is now important and developments such as Oracle's Grid computing may be one answer."

As evidence of this trend, Hayward pointed to an average increase of 30 percent, year on year, of the volume of data many corporations are having to manage.

"Companies are being forced to spend more on simply keeping their IT departments running, when they want to be using resources to making use of the data they are accumulating."

Ben Mansill travelled to Kickstart 2005 courtesy of MediaConnect.