There was software created for each platform, but you couldn't interchange it, and that was a problem. The center of the world was the application and the platform and not the data that was stored on it. The explosion in the amount of data available from both restricted sources, such as the intelligence community, and open sources, such as the Internet, complicates the storage issue. Stovepipes worked relatively well when we didn't have ubiquitous access to data. But now the Internet has changed that dramatically.
Information technology has five plus two components.
There is a need for strategic technology, and data storage is one of the cornerstones because the data storage element doesn't care what the data is. The network component is the same way. Among EMC's offerings that address this issue is a suite of products called Enterprise Storage and Enterprise Storage Networks. Warfighting information from all sources can be stored together, managed consistently and securely made available throughout the command structure from a single technological platform. The approach supports enterprise connectivity, which means that users can concurrently connect to and store and retrieve data from all major computing platforms.