Today a new company founded by software industry veteran Ed Iacobucci began its operations, along with $8 million in seed funding. Its goal is to fight what Iacobucci calls "data sprawl" by developing a pervasive data indexing programming interface and architecture that will act as a guide across both cloud and private data stores. The idea is to index everything so that users can find files from any particular device, in the cloud, or on their local desktops and servers.The company, called VirtualWorks, is still at work creating its Virtual Index Architecture. The indexing will work across both structured and unstructured data, what the company calls content virtualization. The architecture will leave all data in place but just provide pointers to make it easier to access. VirtualWorks will develop a series of cross-tabulating indices that can bridge across multiple systems, and these will augment existing SQL databases, Sharepoint repositories, and other places that contain vast amounts of data. The company claims no integration is required for these indices and developers can easily create index-enabled apps that make it easier to uncover the particular data that you are looking for.
While this seems like grand plans with very little to actually show yet, the team behind VirtualWorks are all old software hands that could pull it off. CEO Iacobucci has been around the computing industry for decades, getting his taste of PCs with the second version of the IBM PC back in the early 1980s and one of the movers behind IBM's OS/2 efforts in the late 1980s. He left IBM to co-found Citrix and later tried to start a jet leasing service. Lars Morten Nygaard, who is Director, global product management, leads a development team in Norway and has worked in that capacity for Unisys.
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