As should be clear from this paper, modern commercial database sys-tems are grounded both in academic research and in the experiencesof developing industrial-strength products for high-end customers. Thetask of writing and maintaining a high-performance, fully functionalrelational DBMS from scratch is an enormous investment in time andenergy. Many of the lessons of relational DBMSs, however, translateover to new domains. Web services, network-attached storage, text ande-mail repositories, notification services, and network monitors can allbenefit from DBMS research and experience. Data-intensive servicesare at the core of computing today, and knowledge of database systemdesign is a skill that is broadly applicable, both inside and outside thehalls of the main database shops. These new directions raise a numberof research problems in database management as well, and point theway to new interactions between the database community and otherareas of computing