One of the most daunting challenges of the information age – one that just won’t seem to go away – is the need to integrate those pervasive silos of information. Ever since companies have gone beyond one guy doing everything – hey I just put shoes on your horse, now pay up – there have been islands of information.

Even in a small company, say just two partners, information about a customer collected by one partner is not necessarily in the other partner’s domain. Maybe they talk, maybe they don’t. Now magnify the same phenomenon across hundreds or even thousands of employees and many databases and files.

Fact is there will always be islands of information starting from a single individual to workgroups to departments to divisions. Employees have important emails in personal storages – on their BlackBerrys. Workgroups have shared files and SharePoint portals. Departments have SAP, Oracle or legacy applications to deal with. Despite all the talk about integration of information, the amount of content in silos or more importantly the number of silos isn’t decreasing – it’s increasing with the steady advance of technology.

In this milieu, the challenge for IT isn’t eliminating or reducing the number of islands – an impossible task – it’s building flexible bridges. That’s why we continue to make a major investment in Genio -- our content and data integration product. We’ll be introducing a new version next month, and Genio will also figure prominently into our plans to strengthen content and data integration technologies in our broader ECM offering.

In a recent post about Genio’s expanded role, Barb Mosher over at CMS Wire put it well:

“Information Management is about what? Well, information, obviously. Information stored not only in content management systems but also in a wide range of corporate applications and decision support systems.

It’s the ability to integrate all this content and data that is necessary for a company to fully realize the ability to improve business processes and make good decisions.”

So what’s in the new version of Genio? Details will be forthcoming, but suffice it say that we’re staying true to our key principles of openness, flexibility, ease of use, and reusability. More than ever companies need pontoon bridges – and we’re here to help.