Channel opportunities in data?

Looking for a new channel angle to help business growth? Robert Malone wrote an interesting article for Forbes.com talking about structured and unstructured data and how channel companies can play a role. Malone talks about the fact that as the data streams that are constantly being fed into companies increase, data gets lost, improperly filed away or becomes too difficult to track down.

He mentions two companies — Teradata and Attensity — that are taking on the task of providing the service of sorting, organizing and maintaining these data streams. Sounds like a professional service to me. Will more VARs think about getting on this bandwagon?

Personally, I think they should. How far removed is data management from storage management? Part of the value add could a program or three that will help sort and maintain information before moving it off to be archived and stored. Seems like something that could be bundled into the service.

-Brian Kraemer