Stamen goes on, “The rep needs data about the customer’s interactions from lots of different data sources (purchase histories, support issues, call and email logs, payments, etc.), but he also needs to limit the information he sees to only the information that’s contextually appropriate. My colleague, Rob Gonzalez, calls this the horizontal big data problem; it’s the challenge of combining data not only from big centralized databases, but also from small local databases, spreadsheets, documents, and from the Web.”