Well, after a bit of a hiatus due to my crazy schedule, I've got a bunch of updates. I spent a LOT of time in the fall trying to qualify Dr. Michael Stonebraker's Morpheus project. Mike Stonebraker is a known quantity in the software world, being the founder of Ingres, Illustra and Streambase. He collaborated with the Univ of Florida(no, wait it gets better) on the development of a tool for handling schema transforms across databases, code name Morpheus. At first this appears to be a significant problem as corporate IT shops continue to try to consolidate applications and databases. Because of this drive for centralization, there is a need to resolve naming and schema definiations. An example is the idea of an "account" for a financial services company. There might be multiple definitions within the enterprise, depending upon whether we're talking about front office or back office apps.
To make a long story short, after spending time trying to validate the market, it appears the most fundamental problem is that the technology is too immature, so immature that no one at CSAIL (Computer Science and A I Lab) can give me a high quality demo. Desphande Center funded this, but after my analysis was circulated, this is taking a lower profile at Deshpande. That raises a bit of a flag with me as to how serious Desphande is about qualifying the technology/innovator pass the smell test. I'll keep my eye on this, but for now, I'm putting it on the back burner.
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