A new PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology report explains how the Semantic Web and Linked Data can help enterprises manage their large-scale data better. The PwC Center for Technology and Innovation team spent several months researching and analyzing the problem of data silos in enterprises - and what solutions are being developed to help with that problem. The answer, according to PwC, is Semantic Web techniques. PwC believes that the Semantic Web offers a practical way to address the problem of large-scale data integration.

We downloaded the 58-page report and summarize some of the findings for you in this post.

Today marks another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.

Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annoucement that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spreadheets, and private video sharing and websites (internal and external). As Google continues to tap into the enterprise market - competing against the desktop office software monolith Microsoft - deals like the Valeo one show that its web office suite can scale for large businesses.

In the old days, somebody running a business had a cadre of middle managers who aggregated data about the performance of different parts of the business. They would typically write monthly reports highlighting trends, issues, and exceptions. In a modern, web-enabled, web-centric business, this role is served by the online dashboards provided by various services. The challenge today is aggregating and integrating those services. I see this challenge in the real world from running ReadWriteWeb's business operations. This gap seems like a good start-up opportunity. Perhaps somebody is already filling it?

According to a post on the Google Enterprise Blog this morning, there's a new tool for Google Apps users that lets businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps with the business's LDAP user directory system. If you're in I.T., you probably already know what that means, but if not let me spell it out for you: Google now syncs with Microsoft's Active Directory.