Everyone’s hearing about the mess on Wall Street. In that context, this bit in Computerworld caught my eye:

 Paul Polishuk, president of the research group at Information Gatekeepers Inc., said that the increasing number of mergers and acquisitions will boost the market for IT firms that specialize in integrating networks.

“Because Merrill Lynch is going to be bought by Bank of America, their assets are going to have to be upgraded,” he said. “And since Bank of America and Merrill Lynch are two very different businesses, a good deal of work will have to be done to get them integrated.”

It made me think about some of the new “web oriented architectures” and how all of that will get effected. Now, ideally, the “web as platform” erases those problems, right? Yea, right (not)! It seems to me that “glue” companies might just be born in the fires of various cutting edge integration projects that this crisis will bring. After all, nearly every great software company was born in a “recession.”

2008-2009: the years of crisis that give birth to Glue software companies. Mark the dates.

We’re ramping things up around here — revamping the website, beginning to recruit some sponsors, and just generally turning up the heat.

In the meantime, I thought it would be good to start highlighting some “Glue” companies. My feeling is that folks are going to be bombarded by “cloud” or “SaaS” or something conferences in the next year - none of which will properly hook into the Glue aspect that is crucial to it all. As such, I wanted to starting getting a flavor of what we mean when we say “glue” (from so many different angles).

Accordingly, here’s a great ten minute video interview with Eric Marcoullier of Gnip (pronounced, Gah-nip) - it’s a great early example of Glue (gah-lue - sorry, couldn’t help myself) stuff.