Big data requires a consistent approach to Web and content management. It’s no secret that most data available in the world today is unstructured. Paradoxically, companies have focused their investments in the systems with structured data that were most closely associated with revenue: line-of-business transactional systems.
Enterprise Content Management systems evolved in the 1980s to provide businesses with the capability to better manage unstructured data, mostly documents. In the 1990s with the rise of the web, organizations wanted to move beyond documents and store and manage web content, images, audio, and video.
The market evolved from a set of disconnected solutions to a more unified model that brought together these elements into a platform that incorporated business process management, version control, information recognition, text management, and collaboration. This new generation of systems added metadata (information about the organization and characteristics of the stored information).
These solutions remain incredibly important for companies needing to manage all this data in a logical manner. But at the same time, a new generation of requirements has begun to emerge that drive businesses to the next wave. These new requirements have been driven, in large part, by a convergence of factors including the web, virtualization, and cloud computing.
In this new wave, organizations are beginning to understand that they need to manage a new generation of data sources with an unprecedented amount and variety of data that needs to be processed at an unheard-of speed.