As easy as selling Girl Scout Cookies

There are several reasons why people look forward to spring; better weather, baseball, the end of the school year.  For me, one of the rights of spring are Girl Scout cookies.  If there was ever a product that could sell itself, it's those little green boxes filled with Thin Mints, Shortbread, Samoas, and other treats.   Think about how easy these things are to sell; cute little girls fundraising with products that are not available elsewhere during the most optimistic time of the year.

In any event, I loaded up on a few (dozen) boxes of girl scout cookies a few weeks back and I started to think what technology products would 'sell themselves' over the next 12 months.  Here is my short list.

Database Archiving Software:  This solution solves database and storage problems that plague IT departments, but has not received the same attention as e-mail archiving.  In a nutshell, database archiving software allows customers to split off subsets of a larger database while maintaining referential integrity with the primary database.  Customers can store the subset on less expensive storage, limit access to sensitive data within the subset, and take a host of other actions.  As a result, the primary database performs better and more data is kept online for longer periods of time.

Information Classification Software:  Do you remember storage resource management (SRM) software?   These products showed customers how storage was allocated to specific servers, applications and databases and what the capacity utilization rates were.  The software also told you how man MP3 files were on your enterprise storage systems.  Information Classification Software is SRM on steroids (sorry Barry Bonds, I do not mean to offend).  With Information Classification Software, customers get an inventory of their files, e-mails and databases including attributes (creator, data modified) and an index of the contents of the file.  With this intelligence, customers can organize files together (all word documents with 'confidential' in the footer) and then manage those files as a group.  Customers can actually grasp what data is being created and stored in various formats.  Information Classification software will come in handy if an e-discovery request occurs, the U.S Senate decides to pass more stringent Information Privacy Laws (Senate Bill 500) or customers just want to further leverage their information assets.

Change Management (Database) Software:  Change Management Software establishes a profile of all IT assets and links the dependencies between applications, databases, servers, networks and storage.  Prior to making any configuration modifications, customers can see what other infrastructure elements may be impacted.  When customers make a configuration change, the solution tracks the changes while saving the prior configuration.  If something does not work after the modification, customers can compare the current configuration with the prior one to find out where the problem is.  This can help alleviate the risk of making configuration changes and provide customers with better overall picture of the relationship between all IT systems.

Customers should start to consider any one of these solutions as there are a plethora of problems they can solve.  They may not be as tasty as Girl Scout cookies, but may be able to quench IT's appetite when looking for a better way to manage information more intelligently.