SigEx Foundry Nanodata

One megamerger after another married the promises of market leaders in different worlds, stiring the excitment and the promise of some day delivering global business solutions, movies and music to customers. Vivendi and AOL Time Warner represent symbolically the current economic models, both from the potential synergies and the ellusive capabilities of delivering such products and services. Two years ago, both AOL Time Warner and Vivendi each made multi-billion dollar deals and promised to leverage their media warehouses into interactive broadband services, transforming themselves into the new media communications companies. These models have transformed their owners, not into capable deliverers, but floundering suppliers.

The catch-22 facing our potential deliverers is the ability to provide real-time access to products measured in terabytes and in some cases approaching the "holly grail" petabyte, literally a mountain of data distributed throughout the enterprise and needed in some cases globally. The AOL Time Warner merger has recently been questioned regarding its viability and ability to generate revenue. The premise for the merger was based on the ability to deliver broadband digital services of Time Warner movies and media content, but the lack of a single delivery platform capable of warehousing, identifying and distributing secure data services has robbed the future of AOL Time Warner with posted losses of $54 billion of write-downs, reflecting the decline merger value as of the first quarter year 2002.