Twenty years ago, data was technical, boring, and mostly unregulated. It was Fortran, C code, schematics, budgets, and the like. Today it is personal. It is baby photos, love letters, medical records. As a society, we haven't even come to grips with how to deal with this new kind of data. Whenever you see a headline about the European Union suing Google or Facebook, the underlying issue is usually about what we think the rules should be for people's personal stuff. Data has gotten much more interesting.

A big challenge is that data sharing has become more common. Data is often networked, sometimes even part of a large cloud infrastructure. So sharing is easy, which is good when we want to share, but challenging for data (like medical records) that are illegal to share. Using virtual machines also makes data management trickier. What's so cool about virtual machines is that they can so easily jump from one physical machine to another, or maybe from one data centre to another with hybrid clouds, but that only works if the data can jump around just as easily as the VM. Bottom line, the world of data management has become much more challenging in the past two decades, but in terms of our business, that's a good thing because it gives us plenty of room to innovate.