Cloud computing is an increasingly popular concept for enterprises trying to control their content and technology acquisition and distribution costs, enabling them to get more "bang for the buck" by turning many I.T. and publishing functions that used to be managed in-house over to third party infrastructure providers. Estimates of cost-efficiency benefits from using cloud computing services range in the 10x to 20x range over traditional in-house software solutions, so the motivation to use cloud computing services is clear. But as much as cloud computing is gaining in popularity, the ability to have business controls over who gets what content in cloud computing in a way that can scale with a company's operations has been a challenge for many companies on both sides of the content equation.

My recent trip to speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Content Nation brought me down the bay to a company in Santa Clara that is working actively to build content policy controls right into cloud networking infrastructure. Sonoa is a company that brings the problems of managing content distribution and management via cloud computing down to a level that fits many publishers and their consumer and enterprise customers like a glove. From the perspective of Sonoa, the problems of content distribution in cloud computing revolve around now to meet client expectations for content and applications services in a Web/intranet environment and how to enable service providers to understand who is using their content in a transparent and efficient manner and to establish quality of service controls. The solution to these problems from Sonoa's view is to give both sides in this struggle more intelligent network management tools to help both sides monitor, control and understand who's getting what content more effectively.

The core of Sonoa technology is in essence very efficient software that can operate in top of most popular Internet and intranet network router devices and identify which content and services are getting to which clients and end-users and to control both access and service quality. Because Sonoa technology works at a very low level in network infrastructure, it's easy to implement Sonoa capabilities without interfering with the overall design and management of both networks and applications platforms. This is a key factor for content that's delivered via feeds, digital objects such as video streams, widgets and embeddable software and services defined via programming standards such as SOAP and REST. Unlike DRM systems, which try to do the near-impossible (and largely undesirable) task of "locking up" digital objects once they've arrived on a digital platform, Sonoa is focusing on whether and how digital services get delivered to specific clients and the measurement of how they are used and maintained. This makes a lot of sense especially for digital services that rely on a network connection to remote resources to deliver their value: why lock up the payload that you're delivering when you know that they need that network tether anyway?

Sonoa Systems capabilities can be delivered via its own networking cloud as well as via a client's own networking. In other words, the policies for accessing content can be built right into a highly efficient cloud networking infrastructure, making administration highly cost-efficient and execution of service-level agreements with content licensees very efficient. I think of these capabilities as a "content policy cloud" - in other words, Sonoa technologies help to build into network infrastructure the implementation of agreeements between a publisher and an enterprise partner or client and makes it easy to enforce and monitor those access and service agreements. Unlike typical networking infrastructure, Sonoa's technology does this for individual content services and objects. This aligns perfectly with where many enterprise and media publishers are taking their business models - towards agreements in which their content gets integrated any number of ways into their clients' platforms. Instead of turning that embeddable content loose in the client's cloud and losing track of it, Sonoa enables complex deployments in client platforms to be monitored clearly at most any scale.

Sonoa technology enables publishers and enterprises to work cooperatively with their business partners to work towards both specific access limits and specific service level agreements that meet both parties' needs. Unlike earlier attempts at baking content distribution controls into network infrastructure such as Bang Networks, Sonoa Systems has the benefit of more mature and widely implemented object programming standards, more acceptance of external services coming in through the Web to enterprises and a more highly scalable design for supporting clients. Instead of beginning to wheeze after a few hundred clients are supported, Sonoa has the ability to scale up to mega-clouds of high performance content streams.

Sonoa Systems has a growing client list, including media companies such as MTV and Warner Music Group and enterprises such as J.P. Morgan, Pfizer, Wells Fargo and IBM. I find it very interesting that major enterprises interested in both productivity and security are opting for this technology. To me, that means that some enterprise-oriented publishers are behind the curve in terms of what their major clients are putting in place to implement and monitor content services. In earlier days we always worried about feeds and APIs creating "escaped" content services; with a service such as Sonoa Systems, it becomes far easier with this era's networked services to monitor usage more easily and to implement levels of service, access and performance that are easy to administer and that allow clients to use embeddable content in their own applications far more easily. Our visit to Sonoa Systems was well worth a trip down to the shallow end of the bay; I hope that major publishers have a chance to check out this emerging technology that can help them to forge more effective business models in today's content distribution environment.

Labels: cloud computing, IBM, networks, San Francisco, service level agreements, Sonoa Systems, Warner Music Group

I am looking forward to moderating a panel for the SIIA on the 19th that will focus on cloud computing and its impact on publishing. I am particularly pleased that we have a balance of publishers and technology companies that will be able to address the issue from both a media perspective and an enterprise perspective, an aspect that should be of particular interest to SIIA members. Marc Frons, CTO of The New York Times, Larry Schwartz, the President of Newstex, Charles Matheson of EMC and Matt Turner of Mark Logic will provide a multi-dimensional view of how important cloud computing will be to shaping the competitive landscape of the content industry. Please register soon for this event.

Below are the preliminary questions that I've assembled for our panel, if you have additional or alternative questions that you'd like to have asked please add them to the comments of this post. See you on the 19th in NYC - or online via the webcast!

1. How does your company use cloud computing to provide better services for your clients/audiences? How do your clients/audiences benefit from it? What really is the cloud from your perspective?

2. The key advantages of cloud computing revolve around scalability, economy, ease of deployment, and ease of content and services integration. Which of these are offering you and your clients the most “bang for the buck?”

3. Why should enterprise and media oriented publishers care about cloud computing? What real advantages can it provide to them in the marketplace?

4. When we say “cloud computing” there are three basic types of networks that can support content from cloud computing: enterprise networks, public networks, clouds that combine both enterprise and public networks. Looking at how enterprises are using cloud computing to access content, how open are they today to using cloud computing to combine their internal and external content resources?

5. A cloud is only as good as its ability to have access to everything that ought to be in it. Where are we doing well and where are we falling short today in making seamless access to content in cloud computing a reality? How is content affecting the way in which people think of content aggregation?

6. Cloud computing offers many companies the ability to scale up new content services inside and outside the enterprise very rapidly. If this is so, then how does a company allocate its proprietary technology resources most effectively to compete with potential competitors that can take advantage of the same scalability? Does cloud computing enable more publishers and enterprises to scale up more cost-effectively to be mid-sized and even large competitors more rapidly?

7. Thinking of everything that we’ve discussed today, what would be your recommendations for the best ways for enterprise and media publishers to approach cloud computing?

Labels: cloud computing, emc, mark logic, New York Times, newstex, panel, siia brown bag

The announcement of Oracle's deal with content connector specialists MuseGlobal, Inc. to deploy their EverConnect technology for Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search platform may appear like a passing note in enterprise search at first pass, but it's worth more than a casual glance if you're considering the future of high-value content services in enterprises. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search already comes equipped with a library of content source connector modules that make it possible for enterprises to integrate a wide variety of enterprise content sources into their search interface. Oracle is using MuseConnect, a platform-specific version of MuseGlobal's EverConnect content connector technology, to extend its search reach to include specific types of external content targeted at specific industry verticals, including Web and subscription sources for finance, legal, medical education and research.

Oracle is not alone in trying to integrate internal and external sources of content to better their value propositions for their enterprise clients, of course. Many enterprise publishers already have infrastructure that is designed to integrate enterprise, Web and subscription content sources on their own publishing platforms while other enterprise search vendors such as Google are also deploying content connectors for a wide variety of content sources to build up the value of their enterprise search engines. Not surprisingly, MuseGlobal technology figures in more than a few of these vendors' efforts, with each of them doing their utmost to define a useful aggregation of content that will add value to the daily workflows of enterprise workers. Content connector technology acts as the "glue" that makes such aggregation possible, widening the range of content sources available through a seamless interface and ensuring reliable access.

Content connectors are enabling a wider array of platform providers to create useful applications based on "content clouds," aggregating content from as many sources as possible with access to any specific source a technical detail that is generally not a concern of a person using the platform. If history is any predictor of the future, these content cloud applications that can combine enterprise and external sources of content are going to be powerful tools in the hands of organizations trying to make sense of large amounts of information on a day-to-day or moment-by-moment basis. Just as investment banks in the 1990s drove their profitability to new heights based on networked content source connectors that fueled powerful financial software to drive desktop and automated trading decisions more effectively, so will content clouds built for enterprise platforms enable a wide variety of 21st century organizations to become aware of threats and opportunities in their marketplaces and develop more powerful decision support services based on the widest range of quality content sources available.

So while you may think of content connectors as search engine technology, it's safe to say that their ability to connect powerful applications to a wide variety of content sources puts them in the middle of the "content clouds" that are likely to drive publishing and content technology profitability in many enterprises for years to come. Technology companies like Oracle, IBM, EMC and Google want to make sure that they can drive up their enterprise value propositions based on those clouds, of course, even as enterprise publishers try to do the same from their well-established position of creating insight from content sources. Certainly technology such as MuseGlobal's MuseConnect content connectors focused on content sources for specific industry verticals can help them to do that. In the meantime, though, the biggest winners in this wrestling match to deliver enterprise value may be the companies that can deliver the content clouds that clients want most effectively. That certainly was the case with trading room systems vendors in investment banking, so I don't expect it to be too much different as content clouds begin to become the focus of a wider range of enterprise publishing efforts. Keep your eyes on the content cloud experts, folks - and may the most seamless and flexible clouds win.

Labels: cloud computing, content clouds, content connectors, databases, enterprise, museglobal, oracle, publishers

I am going to be moderating a panel on the opportunities for publishing in cloud computing on November 19th - more to come on that - so needless to say my head is in the cloud (computing) to some degree already. But when Microsoft announces a major initiative to adapt its Windows operating system for cloud computing for Amazon's web services platform you know that the balance of power is shifting away from enterprise servers faster than you might think. This is great news for network services providers and potentially good news for Microsoft, whose desktop Windows operating system is becoming ever more ponderous and is being readied for a crash diet. The bottom line from a technology perspective is that we're returning to the days of complex technology being "out there" in the network and user-oriented technology being oriented away from general computing and towards serving up content from network services.

The move towards cloud computing may seem rather "back to the future" in some ways for those of us who lived through the days of mainframe computing and (really) dumb terminals, but when did it really make sense for companies to have thousands of dollars of over-complex content and software on people's desks in the first place? The network is the natural place for most content services to live, making it far easier for peers to communicate and collaborate with one another as publishers and to provide them with the ability to benefit from sophisticated services with a minimum of in-your-face technology hassles. This is no surprise to publishers that are succeeding with the move to online digitual publishing services, but it does pose an issue for content and technology companies that had been focused on enterprise sales.

In recent years much of the "value-add" component for sophisticated enterprise content services and the technologies that support them has revolved around tailored software and information services based on integration with enterprise I.T. platforms. The early enterprise entrants in cloud computing such as Salesforce.com's network-based services have strong participation from many enterprises, but the big push for margins has positioned many enterprise content providers towards strategic sales that involve I.T. teams in major companies. Cloud sales were an investment in the future, to be sure, but present revenues were focused behind the firewalls of enteprise publishing clients oftentimes.

Clearly the rapid acceleration of enteprise-oriented I.T. services towards network services available via highly scalable Web infrastructure is going to put more and more pressure on this line of marketing for high-end enterprise publishers. Web services, which enable publishers to integrate their content easily and rapidly with other content via standardized programming techniques, are flourishing in cloud computing environments, enabling user-defined "mix and match" content services intergrated into a wide variety of platforms and productivity tools. This is good news for publishers who want to get their content up and running as quickly and as easily as possible in enterprise-oriented applications - but bad news for publishers who wanted to sell people on the idea that doing so was really expensive and hard.

The go0d news for enterprise publishers is that cloud computing is likely to spawn a widening breed of tailored content applications that can be deployed more rapidly and efficiently. Long and risky product development cycles for advanced publishers are likely to give way to general frameworks for cloud-enabled content applications that will have easily tailored core functions that can be changed to meet individual client needs more rapidly. In the process of doing so, many major aggregators may begin to look at what their real core strengths need to be, leaving some likely to look further and further afield for just the right content sources to aggregate as needed for specific client applications. Instead of focusing on database curation, it's more likely that tomorrow's major enterprise publishers will be focused on Web services curation, being experts in assembling just the right content from any number of databases and Web sources that meet their clients' needs.

While in many instances existing staff skill sets will be transferable to the cloud computing environment, I expect that more than a few of the major publishers are ill prepared for the cultural leaps required to survive and to thrive as content services experts in cloud computing. We're all familiar with the reogranizations that have been the focus at major enterprise publishers such as LexisNexis that are aimed at blasting away very I.T.-centric product development cultures in favor of more client-centric cultures. What happens when the Web services-centric model of cloud computing impels these companies to accelerate the culture change for their core revenue lines that much more quickly? There are great opportunities for major publishers in the shift to network-oriented enterprise services, but I suspect that more than one five-year plan may be floating out their H.Q. office windows shortly as the depth of the impact of cloud computing services on the enterprise content industry becomes more clear to them.

Labels: amazon, cloud computing, enterprise, LexisNexis, Microsoft, publishers

A day that highlights world financial giant Citigroup's layoff of about ten percent of its workforce is a somewhat odd time to be running a profile of Thomson Reuters, but The New York Times has done just that. The article is entitled "The New Fight for Financial News," but of course the battle between Bloomberg and its perennial rivals now combined into a single company is fought on may levels well beyond the news front. Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer likens Bloomberg in the article to the equivalent of Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline shaking up the marketplace for transatlantic flights in the 1990s, an apt analogy on at least two levels. It's apt in the sense that Bloomberg forced its competition into many radical and painful changes to keep up with its growing market share - the new combined Thomson Reuters entity is just about toe-to-toe with Bloomberg for its piece of the financial information marketplace - but also apt in the sense that there's a new generation of competition that's putting both the financial information marketplace and the airlines on alert.

That new generation is not necessarily of the same type and heritage as either Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg. What impressed me most at the recent SIFMA conference and expo in New York was how the traditional financial information vendors are receding into the background as the technologists are coming to the fore. The exhibition floors were chockablock with networking technologies this year, both for low-latency automated trading services and for more general information and trade execution network services from vendors such as BT Radianz. Cloud computing was also on display at the SIFMA show from Salesforce.com, with a more aggressive and extensive display of its capabilities to support brokerage marketing operations. Also noteworthy was SDS Financial Technologies' moves to support more automated crossing networks for commodities and futures trading, helping to reduce execution costs and liquidity problems for a marketplace still tied to many face-to-face trading pits.

So while companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are going to continue to try to dominate on the desktops of investment bankers and portfolio managers for the foreseeable future, a lot of the action in financial information is taking place well away from the desktop and in the bowels of computer networks that support securities trading and sales. Not all of these stories are about the dominance of the Web as the cloud of choice - the financial marketplace has many specialized networks that support its sophisticated information-driven marketplaces - but certainly the concept of cloud computing popularized by the Web in which desktop technology is just an interface to sophisticated services from potentially any network providing information and execution services. Certainly the robust trading floor technologies developed in the past few decades will continue to be a part of this mix but with today's cutbacks by Citigroup serves as a reminder that we may be nearing the end of the era of big investment bank trading floors as the driver for measuring the success of financial information services.

With more and more workflows in securities trading having become fully automated in recent years it's not clear that the desktop-oriented services of companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are going to work out in the long run for high-growth information services. Instead, it's far more likely that more and more network-oriented "cloud computing" services are going to subsume more and more profitable parts of securities transaction support while information suppliers find an increasingly narrow range of clientele ready to spend handsomely on major desktop integration services. While the hedge fund trading of recent years hit speed bumps in recent months much as programmed trading caused hiccups in the 1987 crash, the ability of a small team of hedge fund managers to build dominant positions in a marketplace by mining information aggressively from alternative information sources not provided by traditional vendors should be a wakeup call to Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg that anyone can extract useful content from any cloud very quickly and effectively.

Major financial information vendors have had similar challenges in the past and have responded with valuable services to rebuild their position in the marketplace, but it's not clear to me that we're on another full-blown cycle towards that goal right now. I think that we're more likely to see cloud computing services gaining more and more power as they provide well-integrated information services to ever more concentrated and sophistated trading operations. I don't think that this means that Lehman Brothers will be moving back to its old South William Street HQ any time soon (now a cozy inn) but I think that we will be seeing the financial information industry looking more like it did in the 1950s than it did in the 1990s over the next ten years - with fewer and fewer direct product presences on trading floors and more and more integration into cloud computing services. There are opportunities there for Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg as well, of course, but perhaps not the types of opportunities that are driving their organizations today. In the meantime, congratulations to Tom for a great profile article.

Labels: Bloomberg, cloud computing, financial information, Salesforce.com, thomson reuters, tom glocer

The launch of the beta for Google Health
caught a bit of media ripple last week, but with the never-ending machinations between Microsoft and Yahoo I suspect that it got lost in the shuffle by some. That's probably just as well, given the hyping of last year's big health launches, some of which have gone on to greater glory and others of which are back at the drawing board. Revolution Health has been an enormously successful media launch, for example, closing in rapidly on well-established leader WebMD's visitor count in little more than a year, while Microsoft's heavy-handed HealthVault did a great job of collecting and touting major health care partners but also did an equally good job of scaring away people who felt uncertain how improving corporate productivity was in their personal best interests.

Google Health plies a middle ground of sorts between these two major efforts, focusing on relating expert content and online media to someone's personal medical history. Like other services Google enables the import of health information from a select list of hospitals and medical testing companies and can find information that relates to known symptoms as well as search for doctors in a given specialty in a particular location. As you can see in the expandable screen grab to the right it's a typically low-key approach from Google. It doesn't present itself terribly differently from any other Google application, explains the user benefits simply right up front and encourages one to explore its capabilities gently and incrementally well within a user's control.

In some ways Google has benefited from the relatively slow start to online medical records gathering by Microsoft, even if it's been a little snookered by Revolution Health's aggressive grab of media attention. An MIT Technology Review article makes it clear that Google is working
with its limited list of partners to understand what it will take to make people feel comfortable with entering and maintaining their health care information online. Terms and conditions make it clear to the user in the part that's appearing in the scrolling window that their information is theirs to control, so perhaps there's reason to hope. Starting with the approach that there's much to learn about what makes people comfortable with this particular kind of online personal data is probably a good approach, allowing Google to add features and content gradually.

In the meantime Google has also opened up its Google Apps APIs to developers, enabling anyone to use the highly scalable Google infrastructure to develop online applications that stand on their own or integrate with Google capabilities. WIth more that 150,000 developers already queued up to use the Google APIs we may be witnessing the beginning of the Google cloud beginning to subsume large portions of the online application development space. Combined with enhanced Andriod functionality for its mobile platform and the introduction of Google Gears, a desktop (and, presumably, mobile) client that will enable one to store data from the Web locally, it's clear that there's less and less space for Microsoft to lay claim to the personal content that's at the heart of its claim to personal computing. If the Web can lay claim as the primary repository for all of our content, with some items spun off to our local devices as needed, then Microsoft will continue to find itself positioned increasingly as a facilitator of appliance interfaces -a positioning underscored by Microsoft's announcement of a finger-friendly Windows 7 due to ship in...2010.

So on both the Google Health front and the Google Apps API front Google is continuing to position itself for prowess within the content cloud, building up relationships that will quietly unfold on a myriad of devices through a myriad of applications all developed on and stored in Google's powerful server and operating system infrastructure. It's not a media strategy by many people's estimates, much less an enterprise content strategy, but as these clouds begin to gather steam through the next few years prepare to be amazed yet again at the power of Google to keep focused on long-term objectives for delivering value through publishing that continue to amaze.

Labels: apis, cloud computing, Google, healthcare, HealthVault, revolution health, SaaS