Flickr Photo: Cubbie_n_ VegasIf you're anywhere around my age -- I'm 33, I can admit it -- you don't remember how small the world used to be. Before the advent of the jet airliner in the 1950s, intercontinental travel was long, hard, and expensive. Only the very rich went abroad. Getting around the U.S. was no piece of cake either: until the interstate system, traveling by car was long, tedious, and expensive, too.

Infrastructure improvements, coupled with rising incomes and an increased awareness of cultures other than our own, has caused travel to skyrocket world-wide. The National Academy of Engineering figures that, "Over the past five decades, Earth’s inhabitants have increased their travel demand from an average of 1,400 to 5,500 km, using a combination of automobiles, buses, railways, and aircraft."

This has fundamentally changed the way we live. Not only do we think nothing of taking a trip for pleasure, we don't worry about where we will live; our friends and family are always just a plane ride away. This mobility gives us the freedom to make choices for ourselves regardless of geography. And it only took us about 50 years to get to this point.

Now, let's think about your data.

Just a few short years ago, your data was stuck. It didn't have jet airliners or 10 lane highways. It was born unto your database(s), and there it stayed. Your data could not even move from one computer to another, that's how stuck it was. Databases were design to suck data in, but would not let you get it out.

A lot has changed in the last few years. More database vendors have begun offering APIs as a means of moving your data to and from applications. Increasingly, all kinds of other data exchange options are being built into databases. As databases shift from proprietary, desktop bound systems to Software as a Service, opportunities to move data hither and yon are only growing.

Case in point: today Convio announced a Charter Program for a brand new SaaS product built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. Salesforce has long been a leader in openness, building its business around the idea that the more open your application is, the more people will want to use it.

Other examples are all around us. MPower announced at the NTC that it would become MPower Open, and has open-sourced its database product. Even Blackbaud, a company notorious for its inflexibility, has opened up quite a bit recently: their netCommunity product not only has an open API, but a wiki for folks using it. (Of course, Blackbaud also recently bought Kintera, which has made great strides in openness, as well.)

So as the highways are being laid, and the jumbo jets are being built, the only question left is: where will your data go, and what will it allow your organization to do?