EMC World - Update 2

I had the opportunity to attend the first half of Mark Lewis' keynote on Tuesday morning. Mark is the Senior Vice President of EMC's Content Management & Archive unit. I found his opening theme to be interesting, though the messaging did not convey the true power of the metaphor he used.

The metaphor Mark employed pertained to money, value and intelligence. His description of money and value began with great promise. Money, or a discussion thereof, invariably grabs listeners’ attention. Such was the state of keynote attendees, sitting poised to here of a very powerful comparison that could and would speak them as well as to any stakeholder in the IT purchasing chain who may not be so “close” to the technology.

The metaphor was built on the fact that money is “dumb.” As a thing, it has no intrinsic value. Money only derives value in context. Mark then compared information to money, and twisted the metaphor by stating that information must become intelligent. It maybe a semantic difference, but I think Mark would have delivered a more powerful message by declaring the need – nay, necessity – for “dumb” data.

In service of brevity, let me state that the reason money is powerful is because it is absolutely fungible. Money only derives value in context. Money has no absolute value as evidenced by Foreign Exchange fluctuations and notions of price. As I said, and Mark began by stating, money is necessarily and beneficially “dumb”.

Data too is dumb. Data (or “content” if they can be used as synonyms) only becomes intelligent when the context ascribes value to "data" that's employed for a purpose. Even at rest, data may have value, but "rest" is merely one characteristic of that specific data instance's context.

The message conveyed in the Keynote was that content is becoming intelligent. The truth is that the context is becoming intelligent and data must get "dumber." In fact, I'd argue that the success of De-Duplication technology is a result of end-user's realizing that data is dumb and that eliminating dumb redundancies is a relatively easy and necessary process.

Under this slightly modified scheme, dumb information becomes, like money, absolutely fungible and therefore far more powerful. The "value context," one of a million or billion individuated states of experience, becomes the point where value and intelligence are added to data much like a merger & acquisition is a specific "value context" and money, dumb money, becomes the medium to exchange value between parties - even across distinct currencies.