This is the IM Blog. Multiple Bloor analysts will be contributing to this blog over time: not just me but also various colleagues such as Gerry Brown, Peter Williams or any of our security team, where their concerns overlap with information management (which is a lot). So, what’s it about?

In the first instance, Bloor Research has a new formalised one-page format that covers new product releases, which we will be publishing on the Bloor Research web site. We will be making these available to IT-Director and IT-Analysis, which may choose to publish them under a separate tab but we won’t be writing these in article format anymore (though there may be one or two still in the pipeline). There are several updates in the new format that will be appearing shortly on various data warehousing products, including Vertica, Greenplum, ParAccel, EXASOL and Kickfire. The aim is to update these product overviews whenever there is a new release. I’ll probably give them a quick mention (or more if they’re really cool) here and I’ll notify any of my Twitter followers (@InfoPhil) when that happens or, indeed, when I publish anything else. Alternatively, if you’re following Bloor Research (@Bloor­_Research) you can get the news from there.

So, how do we define the difference between a blog and an article? Basically, the former is shorter and or/or may cover a number of topics. Articles in future will be more like mini white papers or discussions around a particular theme.

What else is going on? Well, we’ve finalised our Information Management Mind Map, which you can view by clicking here. I’ll be writing a separate piece that talks about this in more detail but, briefly, this illustrates our view of the Information Management space from a technology perspective. We have tried, as far as possible, to avoid having the same technology in multiple places. Where that is unavoidable we have entered full details in once place and then we show a colour-coded “IM overlap” branch. You will note that we have included separate branches for overlaps with other technical and conceptual areas.

I expect we’ve missed a bunch of stuff. You will probably also disagree (or not—I hope not) with our classification and, perhaps, terminology. In any case we would welcome feedback. In the future we will be publishing a further mind map that outlines the value propositions associated with Information Management.