Mark Logic's David Kellogg - Creating Media From Unstructured Content
David Kellogg is a veteran of the IT industry, he was key in growing Business Objects into one of the most successful French IT companies.
His current position as CEO of Mark Logic, is a challenging job because of the unique database technologies the company represents. It's an approach to structure unstructured content -- a holy grail for many companies.
Mark Logic has several media companies as customers because it's technology enables them to pull together content from several sources in order to create new types of media products and services.
The company's chief architect is Christopher Lindblad, the architect of Infoseek's Ultraseek Server technology, which is used by Autonomy, the largest UK enterprise software company.
I recently met with David Kellogg, here are some notes from our conversation:
- It used to be that Silicon Valley companies would be good customers for databases and other software but these days they all use open source software and they don't want to by anything. But there are many large companies that do buy software and that benefit greatly from Mark Logic.
- Our goal is to be the Oracle of unstructured information.
- Relational databases are very inflexible. We use a hybrid approach that combines search technology with an unique database technology.
- A lot of companies are having to develop their own database architecture because relational databases are too slow. Our database technology can quickly deal with a wide range of unstructured data.- One of our media customers, in the medical publication sector, is able to repurpose its content in order to create an interactive platform that helps radiology personnel to identify diseases, by stepping them through the identification process based on thousands of images and other information. Once you build one such application, it is easy to deploy it against new sources of content.
- We also have customers in the intelligence community.
- We believe that our technology is potentially disruptive, if you use it to build your business rather than Oracle, you can run queries very much faster.
- We face a challenge in that companies need to acquire the skills to use our technology but once they do, they see a quick payback.
- So far, we are growing at a faster rate than Oracle was at the same stage.
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Mr Kellogg is also an avid blogger and always has unique insights into industry events and topics.
Here is his take on explaining unstructured information:
The Information Continuum and the Three Types of Subtly Semi-Structured Information
Here is his analysis of the SAP acquisition of Sybase:
Thoughts on the SAP Acquisition of Sybase: In Search of Credibility
Additional info:
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Please see: Every Company is a Media Company - EC=MC - the transformative equation for business.
