Bill: The concept of databases really hasn't changed that much, but we now have moved from dealing only with structured data to unstructured data as well. Therefore the quantity of data has increased substantially. Databases have become more powerful and easier to use. We now have them for our personal use and the enterprise archives are massive, routinely dealing in billions of records.

David: You also ran ParcPlace, the Smalltalk company. We all know the story of Xerox PARC and the Apple interface. But are elements of Smalltalk in today's systems? What about in the Notes/Domino and Lotus applications?

PARC was the leading 'think tank' of its day and phenomenal technologies were developed there. Yes, you are right, object-oriented programming was also invented there. The whole concept of object-oriented technology was to increase the productivity of programmers sometimes as much as 10-fold. It also made very difficult concepts possible. Smalltalk was the precursor to Java.

The compartmentalization of the major functions in an application also came from PARC. We called it MVC (Model, View, Controller), which essentially separated the business logic from the GUI from the data. This coupled with object-oriented programming was the fundamental change in programming that is embodied in modern languages.

Recall that Java is an easy-to-use OO language that pulled together C++ and Smalltalk. It syntax was like C, but it was easier to use like Smalltalk. Domino actually does benefit from the OO legacy in that everything in Domino is defined as a document object and contains the properties therein.

David: You've spoken of ILM. What is it? The ILM we've all heard of is Industrial Light & Magic (the special effects company behind movies like Star Wars). Surely this ILM is different?

Bill: ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) is a term initiated by the storage vendors to describe a new approach to tiered storage -- Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) -- HSM on steroids, if you will. And while appropriate use of storage is part of the picture, it's certainly not the full story. True ILM consists of four key elements and requires an integrated hardware and software approach. These include tiered storage management, long term data retention, data life cycle management, andp olicy-based archive management.

David: In an earlier discussion, you mentioned the ILM foodchain. What does this mean?

Bill: I'm sure there's more than one way to interpret this, but to me, ILM foodchain refers to the process of moving information through different storage based on its value (in addition to its age). Statistics show that most information (such as email for instance) is seldom accessed 90 days after its creation. So having a policy that moves aged or less valuable information to cheaper storage can save an organization considerable money.

David: We talked with Marie Patterson earlier in the year, so we've gotten a nice introduction to records management. How does your technology differ from search engine technology?