MarkLogic are an interesting and rapidly growing company in the enterprise space right now: essentially they replace the relational database model in ways that make their next generation purpose built tools fit your unstructured data.
Their servers coral all the heterogeneous information companies create to index everything they see, pulling together information in context. Despite the current social whirl around modern 2.0 tools in business, working with information old and new across the enterprise stack continues to be a major challenge, and Mark Logic are one of the interesting companies working at a foundational level with information, particularly in media, government and security and financial services field.
My video discussion above with MarkLogic VP of Product Marketing Kenneth Chestnut includes a fascinating story about the famous US Airways Hudson River Plane landing in 2009, the result of a bird strike and a major media event. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) use MarkLogic for situational awareness, consolidating information to make better decisions in real time by pulling in multiple heterogeneous sources of information from weather, FAA reports etc including traditional media and new media such as Twitter.
While we are all aware of the blizzard of information in the moment around an event such as this, formally making sense of it requires significant effort, organization and parsing of both structured and unstructured information.
Filtering and effectively leveraging the long term sheer volume of information we have created is an increasing problem for all sorts of business entities, and the US Army, Department of State, Defense Information Systems Agency and a number of other large government agencies use MarkLogic at scale for this reason.
The company was founded in 2001 by current CEO Christopher Lindblad who was formerly chief architect of the Ultraseek search engine at Infoseek, and a professor of computer science at Cornell and UCLA Paul Pedersen. The intent was to take advantage of XML document markup and XQuery as the standard means for accessing collections of XML documents up to tens or hundreds of terabytes in size, and this.
The ability to slice and dice information across organizations regardless of silos is of great value, whether to identify trends and patterns or to surface information buried in layers of Sharepoint and other content repositories.
Making information discoverable is of high value for GRC and legal issues …creating a system of record around metadata can arguably solve many of the problems brute force enterprise search generally fails at, and MarkLogic also has the advantage of sophisticated role and compartment based security to protect sensitive information.
250 languages, with advanced support for 20-30 of them, makes MarkLogic a truly global company, while their scale capabilities are illustrated by projects such as digitizing information and creating metadata for the US Library of Congress across the entire national archives - 8-10 petabytes of information!
