According to an IDC study, since 1995 more than 2 billion Web pages have been created on the Internet, with over 200 million more being created every month. These figures do not include the millions of private documents on corporate intranets. In a separate study, the Tower Group estimated that 7.5 billion office documents are created annually, and that the data stored on hard drives is expected to grow to 2,593 petabytes by the end of 2003. In other words, a wealth of knowledge is being transferred from human minds to computer storage systems as unstructured text in documents, reports, emails, presentations, memos, etc. Unstructured Information Management (UIM), often defined as 'content management and retrieval' software, aims to focus and articulate this knowledge effectively to a global user audience.
UIM software products are specifically designed to handle unstructured information. The content management component creates collections of digital works in any format or medium. The retrieval components provides meaningful access to those collections by classifying and indexing them, and providing search, browsing, navigation, and/or text mining capabilities.
UIM software functions as middleware between unstructured data stores and applications that can use the data. The technology must handle multiple formats for unstructured data, including documents, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mails, Web pages, and multimedia files. It must also interface with multiple repositories and databases, and to meet the needs of a global marketplace, . it must also handle multiple languages. This requirement is reinforced by the Tower Group, who estimate that, while the U.S. produces 25% of all textual information (mostly in English), the remaining 75% is produced outside of the U.S., often not in English.
Unstructured Information Management presents a significant business opportunity for IBM and our customers. With the UIM software market forecast to grow to $8.3B at a 24% compound annual growth rate between 2001 and 2006, our customers need to release the business value stored in their unstructured information, regardless of language. Within IBM, we have the technology, expertise, and strategy to help them achieve this goal. |
