Why can consumers search the web in less than a second while enterprises struggle to pull together simple information? Ten years ago, we set out to answer this question.

We were executives at a global outsourcing company, struggling to integrate data from hundreds of clients, and create a holistic view of our own work. The more time and money we spent on the problem, the worse it seemed to get. So we decided to take a fresh look.

After several years of investigation, we arrived at a simple conclusion: the three-decade-old paradigm for managing enterprise data and technology has reached the end of its road.

Stitching together best-of-breed systems without strong centralized data governance was viable in the eighties and nineties. However, as the volume and complexity of data has exploded, this loose integration model is running into severe difficulties.

Signs of a crisis are emerging. Good, clean data is harder to get than ever. Development times are ridiculously long. Costs are on a runaway train. Security breaches are commonplace. And catastrophic outages—from stock markets to airlines—occur with increasing frequency.

It’s time for a fresh start. In our view, enterprises need to get tighter control over their data, and enforce as much discipline over information as they do over clients, employees and suppliers.

We’ve spent countless hours thinking about this challenge and have built a pragmatic solution to a gnarly problem. Mezocliq provides a new way to manage enterprise data and with it, a superior solution for enterprise technology.