1. A brokerage firm finds that storing and searching its data on magnetic tape is a cumbersome– and potentially costly– endeavor and seeks a faster, more efficient method.

2. A navigation software company, that stores information on roads, postal codes and points of interest for PCs. PDAs and cell phones, struggles with how to manage, compress and search its collected data.

3. A company that wants to offer vast collections of documents on the web as well as through DVDs struggles for ways to make the information easily searchable and accessible on both large servers and desktops.

4. A worldwide patent company sells data via an online database - however, the backend language has become outdated and doesn't merge well with how data is recorded and also is having more difficulty dealing with these immense, complex data sets.

5. A market research company compiles information about an industry with more than one million outlets, each which dispense thousands of products. Under the current storage system, it's almost impossible to do detailed searches and when they are done, it takes a long time. Sales associates, who might benefit from patterns of purchasing and other information collected, cannot easily tap into the information their company possesses.