A company's IT infrastructure evolves over time. So far, so inevitable. But that evolution comes at a long-term price. As investment in these disparate systems grows (in terms of data, time and money) so does th reluctance to migrate. And the longer the decision is avoided, the harder it is to take.

Information is a company's biggest asset. But information is not data. Data without a context in which it can be interpreted is useless. Data is useful to a computer; information is useful to humans. The problem arises when the context in which the data can be interpreted encompasses more than one system. Translating such data into information is the challenge of systems integration.

Example? The marketing department decides it wants to push a particular product. It needs input from the Sales department so that it doesn't spend money marketing to a customer who already has the product. It needs a marketing database (probably third-party) to get the appropriate names and addresses of target personnel and companies. And it needs the web-logs from the web server to derive a list of companies who are actively looking at the product. That's three different data sources to produce one set of information.

IT Managers face challenges like this every day. Bring legacy systems into the equation and the problem multiplies. How is an EBCDIC mainframe flat-file to be joined to a Relational Database? How do we create information from this legacy data and deliver it to the people who matter? And how do we do this, not just once but time and time again?

Trinem's team of consultants can help. They have many years' experience of data migration and mining and can help you both derive and implement a clean technical solution.