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As information is distributed around the Information Grid, the other consideration is integration. What if, in addition to keyword search style queries, one also wants to perform "joins" across different data sources on the grid, or perform advanced "slice and dice" queries a la SQL or OLAP? The assets in an Information Grid are not all relational, so simply using a distributed SQL engine is not feasible; however, since the assets are all expressible as XML, a query language based on XML can be used to join across them. The emerging XQuery standard, combined with connectivity technology such as the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA), can be used to query across joins of, say, documents (expressed as XML) and relational data (also expressed as XML). The strength of XQuery is that by using the XML data model intelligently it can express queries across all these kinds of data, whether physically stored in XML or viewed as XML via the Information Grid. You can now ask to join customer name from an invoice database to an e-mail system to see how many people have sent in questions on their invoices, and so on.

Information retrieval also goes beyond keywords. A picture is worth a thousand hit lists, and visualization techniques in the Information Grid are providing pictorial summaries of queries: maps that are color coded to show relative incidences of results, charts that indicate the distribution of data for a query, theme-viewers that highlight the most important concepts in an e-mail or document. It is a brave new world.

Where Do We Go from Here?
The Information Grid combines virtualization and convergence for holistic data management to extract full potential from all enterprise information sources and easily exploit new information relationships as conditions change. The benefits are not only the cost savings and reliability that accrue through the virtualization of infrastructure and application resources, but functionally as well: rich, end-to-end business intelligence across all information assets. Organizations must plan beyond the virtualization of CPU or storage, and look toward the coming XML-ization of all data and metadata across Information Grids.

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