Robert Greene, Versant: Hi I'm Robert Greene, I'm from Versant Corporation. I've been working with Versant for about 10 years -- also seen the ups and downs of the industry and I'm experiencing the winter, but I also feel that there's some potential for comeback.
I think that looking at the State of the Union, if we think about where we've been, where we're now, where we gonna go, it helps to put things in a little bit of perspective. Looking back we were very, very datacentric in our approach, focusing very much from a data perspective, driving that back up into sort of a structured programming paradigm and how does it operate over that data. As things have evolved and we've begun to think more about objects and domain driven designs, we're naturally now at the stage where we are trying to figure out how does it take the evolution in the language layer and bring that down into what we're doing in the data tier.
So the things you've seen happen in the Java space in particular with object relational mapping are first efforts to dealing with that problem. The reality is, most of the data out there is in relational form and we're increasing in XML form. So we need ways to deal with that but in the same time we need to appreciate, that evolutions in the language layer are as important as abstractions that we put over existing data infrastructure. So that ultimately we can create solutions that will solve the problems at hand in a more efficient scalable way.