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Insights and headlines from Shore analysts on trends in enterprise and media content markets.
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| Wednesday, January 06, 2010 |
  When News Corporation took over Dow Jones two years ago, it was quick to move out key senior Dow Jones managers and move in its own team that had a vision for how to make the brand a profitable and thriving outlet for business news and information. At that time I said on ContentBlogger, "The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow." I also speculated at the time whether Dow Jones Enterprise Media head Clare Hart would stick around to become a player in this mix or move on, suggesting that at least for a time she was respected enough that it was worth her hanging in there.
Two years later, Clare Hart and her work for DJEM remains respected, but times have moved on, and, according to news reports, so has Clare as the enterprise media group at Dow Jones is being merged with their consumer media group. Dow Jones CFO Steven Daintith is taking over the Dow Jones COO role for now, an indication that a promotion into that role for Hart was not in the offing, so moving on seems like a good bet for her at this time. While some may read "glass ceiling" or "Murdoch loyalists" into this move, I think that it's more a matter of where companies like Newcorp need to bring business information services such as their Factiva property to gain more profitability. The direction for more profits from the licensed business media sources in Factiva's database is definitely towards the online media side of Dow Jones operations, a move that requires a different set of skills than those needed to make subscription business information database services successful in increasingly complex enterprise technology markets.
As I noted last October in ContentBlogger when the Wall Street Journal Pro Edition was launched, the rise of real-time Web news aggregation is accelerating the need for business media properties to become more effective news aggregators. At the time I noted that this would be a good move to make better use of Factiva assets in the Pro Edition framework, a move that seems far more likely to unfold now that the siloing of Factiva and other Dow Jones enterprise assets has been eliminated. Among those other assets that are more likely to emerge more aggressively in the new alignment is the Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence group (formerly Generate), whose alerts-oriented mining of news sources will have a broader market to tap into via the Pro Edition platform. Thinking of Newscorp's push to gain more online revenues from paid content sources, these types of premium services are ripe for better integration into ad-supported Dow Jones content.
This is also, of course, a somewhat back-handed way to say that there really isn't much of a strategy available to Dow Jones to increase revenues simply by waving a wand over broader segments of its existing online content. That ship sailed many years ago, as the WSJ Online edition gradually moved towards a large portion of its content being available online without a subscription. Their hope lies in providing more value in their offerings to individuals who may not have access to large subscription databases and sophisticated alerts services in their companies or who have found access to such services harder to justify under central information budgets. Moving to make DJEM resources more available via their consumer and "prosumer" platforms is a natural bridging strategy into these needs that can set up broader enterprise sales strategies over time.
In the meantime, though, this move is somewhat of an admission that the subscription database business for business news is a dying business model. Factiva has been as aggressive as any other player in business information in adding features and integration capabilities to its offerings, but at the end of the day the value-add from such services is drifting away to enterprise technology players more quickly than Factiva or other enterprise news aggregators can counter with improved products and services. There are just too many enterprise platforms in which this type of content is needed, creating broad product and feature disintermediation. Harvesting structured information from unstructured news and information sources is one approach that many enterprise content vendors are taking to counter this trend, but this alone ultimately doesn't justify the typical subscription structure for news databases.
You can see where this consolidation of enterprise-oriented resources with consumer media resources at Dow Jones may spell problems in focusing on enterprise opportunities, but at the end of the day the software and the thousands of licensed content sources that Dow Jones pays for have to grow profits for them more quickly if they are to be worth the price. With enterprises increasingly reluctant to pay for licensed content that offers few or no advantages over Web-accessible content, the Web is the only probable point of strong growth for old-line news aggregators. This may not be a pretty transition for many Factiva staff, but it's one of those long-delayed and necessary moves that will at least set the stage for more robust growth in enterprise markets for Dow Jones in the long run - even if that growth comes from non-traditional channels. Labels: B2b media, Business Information, clare hart, consumer, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, News Corp, NewsCorp, Wall Street Journal
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:58 AM |
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| Thursday, October 22, 2009 |
 I've been suggesting to my friends at Dow Jones for more than five years that they needed to consider how to use their Factiva content more aggressively on the Web as a source for virtual aggregation of news and business information. Well, five years isn't that long in enterprise content product cycles, I suppose, so when I tweeted the announcement by Dow Jones of its new Wall Street Journal Profession Edition yesterday morning, I was pleased to see that the WSJ had finally started to package licensed content from Dow Jones Factiva's news and business information database into an editorially-managed online edition. The WSJ Pro package will be strictly a premium offering, offered at first only to Dow Jones' enterprise customers starting in November, with wider availability expected next year.
In a loose sense you can think of WSJ Pro as a Huffington Post for business professionals, a mix of content developed by WSJ staff writers and six sections of sector-oriented business news and information culled by WSJ editors from Factiva's extensive database and Web search infrastructure. However, using the extensive search-based analysis tools that Factiva has amassed, WSJ Pro will also provide its subscribers with the ability to unearth trends from its content. With a year of archived Factiva licensed content available along with two years of WSJ archives, WSJ Pro subscribers will be getting access to both content and trend analysis from in-depth premium business information sources unavailable in on the Web in many instances. Other must-have features such as custom alerts for email and mobile devices are also included in the subscription package, which will cost USD 49 a month.
Some are labeling the WSJ Pro package as a shot across the bow at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which is a shot not too far off the mark, given that for decades many financial services companies have been able to negotiate similar price points from major financial information services for people off their trading floors, who used them mostly for news retrieval and casual price quotes on securities. WSJ Pro is aimed largely at such people, who are very Web-centric already in their information retrieval habits and looking for something a little more professional-grade. The trading arena itself uses more machine-executed trades and the remaining people on trading desks using very sophisticated analysis packages, so there are fewer people who can use the high-grade financial information products developed by companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. It makes sense, then, to focus on average professionals accessing better-than-the-Web information about business and finance who are willing to use a ad/subscription-supported prosumer product like WSJ Pro.
This move is also, of course, a way to counter some of the stagnation that Factiva faces in large-scale enterprise subscriptions. With central information budgets facing cutbacks in many of the enterprises targeted by Factiva and other major business information providers, using a more media-oriented model for delivering business information to specific individuals who are willing to pay for it offers Factiva a way to slide its content over into a new sales profile that can weather central budget cutbacks by appealing more to individuals who may be willing to carry a personal subscription to their products from other budget sources - perhaps even from their own pockets. Pioneering Web business information providers such as Hoover's have established the viability of this type of media/subscription model for years, so there's no reason to think that it won't succeed for Dow Jones as well.
So as much as professionals who already use Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters services may be targets for WSJ Pro, clearly a broader range of enterprise business information users may find the package to be appealing. The "prosumer" segment of business information is likely to be one of the fastest growing segments for business information use in the years ahead, as central information budgets recover slowly from the effects of the economic downturn while more aggressive executives in need of support for decision-making decide to up their personal investments in business information to close their knowledge gaps.
You can quibble a bit about the pricing, perhaps, which is not high compared to WSJ print packages but at a non-bulk price still a little high compared to some premium business information services, but no doubt WSJ has done their homework on this and is likely to meet their revenue goals with their "prosumer" WSJ Pro package. I have little doubt that this package will be a strong success - if but because both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are now scrambling to come up with business news assets that can help them to broaden their own offerings. When you get the incumbents moving quickly, you must be doing something right. Labels: B2b media, Bloomberg, Business Information, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, News, prosumer, thomson reuters, Wall Street Journal, WSJ Pro
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:37 PM |
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| Monday, June 29, 2009 |
The Special Libraries Association convened its annual conference in Washington, DC recently, an event which had reassuring energy and solid attendance. SLA President Janice LaChance observed that attendance was up at this year's event compared to last year's conference in Seattle, Washington, an indication that lean times may not get people to remote locations but convenient locations are worth at least a day or two of investment for this key enterprise content community. I put together a summary video for your enjoyment below and more comments below the video that expand on some of the items featured in the video. While many of the changes in the enterprise content industry on display at the SLA conference were evolutionary in nature, the thing that struck me most about this year's event is how much enterprise content brands are being absorbed by the focus on workflow-oriented products and services. Yes, subscription database services such as Dialog, now a ProQuest property, are still popular in their own right with enterprise information professionals, but as a brand the Dialog name no longer represents the goals of many of its subscribers. Instead, enterprise content services providers are focused intently on discerning which market segments they can serve most effectively and profitably with highly tailored services.
In the instance of Wolters Kluwer, for example, this means providing a natural language interface for clinical practicioners in medicine such as nurses that will enable them to find answers to practical questions from Wolters Kluwer medical information resources.For Thomson Reuters, products such as Business Citator blend financial, legal and public information sources into a tool that can accelerate the productivity of professionals conducting due diligence efforts on business acquisitions and partnerships. For Dow Jones' Factiva unit, it's focusing on highly tailored software solutions for sales, market analytics and competitive intelligence.
These companies have been focusing on these more tailored market opportunities for quite some time, but it's clear from this year's SLA event that the lion's share of their revenues from traditional database services are diminishing in importance rapidly as these more tailored approaches to content solutions gain more favor on the end-user desktops of enterprises. As always, this leaves the role of enterprise information professionals in some flux, as reflected in a conference program that highlighted the application of infopro skills to competitive intelligence as well as more traditional information management topics.
The influx of more tailored solutions from enterprise content vendors also means that more general content access tools are gaining a broader foothold in the development of enterprise portals. Access Innovations, for example, was showing off their new alliance with Perfect Search, which enables them to combine their indexing and categorization technologies with a platform that can create tailored search solutions for both enterprises and content vendors that provide enhanced content navigation features as well as high-performance searching. So even as many enterprise content vendors are trying to integrate enterprise content into their own products, many enterprises are looking at the problem from the other side and looking at new ways to integrate external content into their own workflow services. Sometimes these types of vendors come out on top, sometimes the information vendors, and sometimes OEM partnerships allow both to win, but whoever wins in the end the competition for solving enterprise workflow issues continues to intensify.
The SLA is to be commended for shepherding an organization of highly talented professionals facing challenging times into supporting what continues to be a first-class event. While the ranks of traditional corporate infopros have thinned in recent years, the need for people with their skills is still strong, even as those skills get repurposed often for more specific functions in the enterprise. As infopros become more adept at interpreting the needs for specific applications that address people's information demands and technologies become more easily configured to respond to those insights I expect that we're at the beginning of a new era for information professionals that will see them becoming new types of "gurus" for on-demand information services. When the world is your library, it will certainly take someone special to do that. Labels: access innovations, conference, content, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, information professionals, perfect search, sla, thomson reuters, video, wolters kluwer
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:02 PM |
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| Thursday, July 26, 2007 |
 The announcement of Factiva's deployment of improved integration capabilities via browser-based Web applications is being heralded as a major leveraging of Web 2.0 technologies to improve Factiva content delivery. The new tools allow Factiva SalesWorks content to be integrated into enterprise portal applications via user-embeddable widgets into Web 2.0 platforms using technologies that eliminate having to deal with feeds into back-end server applications. This is an important step forward into allowing both enterprise users and development teams to use SalesWorks content where it matters most to them, without having to rely on expensive and time-consuming custom integration efforts. SalesWorks offers a good range of content, but as enterprises turn to a wide range of CRM applications, Wikis and other platforms as their "go-to" business information platforms services such as Factiva have to move quickly and effectively to make their content a part of those user-centric environments. While these new integration capabilities are hardly revolutionary by overall industry standards they do represent an important step forward by a major enterprise content aggregator to move further away from its own platform to offer customers the ability to put their content where they will find it to be most useful. Much of the focus on enterprise workflow integration by aggregators has been on creating comprehensive tools to solve specific information retrieval problems. By moving to browser-based content embedding technologies aggregators can move more quickly to bring their content to users via the applications that matter in their workflows already on a day-to-day basis. This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course: in ceding the complete workflow to other applications integrators trade off more complete integration for more quick market penetration. As penetration is the key to both retaining subscription bases and expanding opportunities for add-on marketing efforts it pays to go the embeddable route - a picture that will become more clear to more aggregators in time. Aggregation is no longer such a rarefied game - both Factiva and other content aggregators will face increasing competition from technology-oriented companies that know how to provide value-add functionality on top of many different types of business information content sets. It's a race of sorts to see how providers of licensed content sets can switch to a strategy that will get embedded in desktops securely before these other providers gain the upper hand. In the meantime Factiva has made a strong move to claim their place in the new widget-oriented enterprise desktop as quickly as possible. Labels: aggregation, Business Information, Dow Jones, embedding, Factiva, widgets
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:05 PM |
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| Thursday, July 19, 2007 |
 paidContent.org notes the Dow Jones boardroom resignation of Dieter von Holtzbrinck in protest over the pending News Corp deal, but away from the acquisition soap opera are some interesting details culled from the recent Dow Jones earnings report. Though overall earnings are down notably online revenues are up 5 percent and paid subscribers to The Wall Street Journal Online grew 23.6%, buoyed in part by a USD 99 combo package for the print and online edition. These are good numbers at a time in which business news is challenged in all directions by new sources. Think of the WSJ as the world's largest country club, a point of social distinction that allows one to join an elite (kind of) group for very nominal greens' fees. It's a model that social media plays will be leveraging more in search of high-value focused market segments, which begs to some degree when WSJ will be doing more to integrate community features into their platform. I have great respect for Gordon Crovitz and his business acumen, but the WSJ's shyness on social media is likely to leave additional "gated community" revenues to others in time. And perhaps time will be the factor - they aren't growing any more WSJs any time soon, as Rupert Murdoch knows very well, so Crovitz and others with deeply entrenched media brands seem content to let their content become contextualized elsewhere. A little imagination is in order here to consider how to build a new clubhouse at this online country club - for premium fees, of course. Meanwhile over at Dow Jones Enterprise Media the Factiva buyout makes things look temporarily rosy on the unit's top line but Factiva's compartively thin profits dragged down the unit's operating margins to 23.2 percent. The Enterprise Media unit is another example of where Clare Hart does a magnificent job of talking about Web 2.0 but so far has not really touched its potential to change the fundamental profitability of a licensed content aggregation business. By contrast Thomson Financial's recent deal to incorporate executive background briefings and private company profiles from Generate is a key foray to use Web content to build premium content revenues via direct extensions to their core content sets. The New Aggregation that we talked about a few years ago, in which publishers and aggregators must embrace Web-generated content and contexts aggressively to generate better margins, is now being embraced by key business information providers very aggressively. Hopefully the Factiva buyout will enable Dow Jones to infuse their Factiva investment with more capabilities incorporating Web content that will improve both margins and content quality - once News Corp acquisition formalities have settled down. In the meantime here's hoping that Dow Jones' model for online and enterprise success continues to broaden both coverage and online audience engagement. Labels: Dow Jones, earnings, Factiva, financial information, Generate, Thomson
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:59 PM |
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| Wednesday, June 13, 2007 |
 While Nexis tinkers with the edges of its market footprint Dow Jones's Factiva unit is pushing forward with two key enhancements that are designed to change the scope of what business information users are likely to expect from their suppliers. Dow Jones' upgrades to its Synaptica taxonomy management services enable different taxonomies for different user groups - an essential tool for adapting business information into departmental functions - and enhanced semantic support for RDF, SKOS and OWL semantic standards that will enable Dow Jones clients to process and interpret a wider range of content types more effectively - including multimedia content. No small surprise, then, that the other announcement from Dow Jones is a deal with EveryZing (recently renamed from PodZinger) to integrate audio and video content from major suppliers such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, BBC Radio and other major suppliers. EveryZing's already heavily categorized video content includes news from around the world in several major languages, making it a natural for integration into the Factiva set of general news and research content, enhanced all the more by the increased semantic prowess of their semantic tools. Video is certainly all the rage on the Web and gaining steam within the enterprise as network backbones and security infrastructures are tuned to deal with more pervasive video consumption. Dow Jones' aggressive positioning of its integration capabilities combined with timely multimedia content will position them well as a supplier of both content and integration tools as enterprises think more seriously about how to integrate business-ready video into their portals and collaborative tools. In a sense this gives Dow Jones additional leverage against the increasing penetration of services such as Google's enterprise search appliances that enable both enterprise content and content from the Web that will be backed by their "Universal Search" capability to make its way into corporate Webs. But the "catch-up" nature of the EveryZing deal underscores the degree to which Google is developing business-ready content sets far broader than Dow Jones and other business information suppliers. Dow Jones, Nexis and others hope to continue to pull trumps on Google with more select licensed sources at their disposal tuned to very specific enterprise audiences. And with sales and support staffs that have been knee-deep in enterprise needs and solutions for years folks like Dow Jones have some important edges in being able to integrate content effectively into enterprise platforms. Yet one wonders how much longer search-oriented business information suppliers such as Dow Jones are going to be able to leverage their licensed content sets to stave off more direct competition from Web-oriented integration specialists such as Google. Is Dow Jones' Factiva unit a search and taxonomy company with licensed content or a subscription database service with some nifty integration tools? Neither answer may be sufficient as stronger competitors enter the stage with better generic answers to these questions and others with more sector-specific answers. But for now, kudos to Dow Jones for keeping Factiva fresh and relevant. Labels: Audio, Business Information, Dow Jones, Factiva, Semantic Web, Taxonomies, video
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:29 AM |
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| Tuesday, April 03, 2007 |
Two major conferences focusing on business information services point towards two very different approaches to creating revenues and profits from today's enterprise and media markets. Yet both database publishers and media companies are circling around many of the same opportunities to develop value for business information markets. The battle for the future of business information has just begun in earnest, with no clear winners in sight but with many "old guard" attitudes from both camps in dire need of ejection from the scene. Click here to read the full News AnalysisLabels: Business Information, enterprise, Factiva, LexisNexis, media, News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:25 PM |
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