In my recent trip to San Francisco to speak about Content Nation I headed down U.S. Highway 101 from San Francisco with Shore's John Buckman to a string of appointments that moved towards the bottom of San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara and worked up 101 towards San Francisco again. As you may know this stretch of Highway 101 is the main artery of the bay area's tech industry, dotted with office parks that house many familiar tech brand names. I think of it also sometimes as a horizontal shopping mall for the content industry, with many of the companies that are driving the new value propositions for publishing flanking this highway as much as the hardware and software vendors that drove "big iron" used to dominate its multi-lane landscape.

At the end of our day's appointments, Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for InsideView, offered us an excellent dinner in the hills of San Francisco's residential neighborhoods during which he noted that there was another angle to Highway 101's linear relationship to content and technology. Rand observed that the bottom end of the bay was historically home to many of the companies that specialized in the lower-level aspects of the information industry such as hardware and operating systems, and that as one drove up the bay on 101 towards San Francisco you passed by the headquarters of companies that moved further up the technology "stack" towards the media-centric companies in and close to San Francisco itself. While it's easy enough to find exceptions to this rule, in broad concept it makes strong sense. If you're working for company "A" and decide to strike out on your own or to join another company, chances are you're going to choose a spot that has people who have sets and professional interests similar to your own. You see this also in the general design of places such as New York City, which traditionally had warehouses for raw materials lining the streets next to the cargo docks along the Hudson River, with the next tier of blocks dedicated to functions such as garment fabrication and the next tier of blocks inward from the river dedicated to the stores selling those garments.

Rand's model is particularly telling in relation to the content industry when you look at what happens in the middle stretch of Silicon Valley along 101. You have companies such as Google in or near Mountain View, rather on the southern-middle end of 101, that perhaps seemed to some like low-level technology plays when they were first launched that today have an enormous influence over the content industry as a whole. When Google's executives say again and again "We're not a content company" it is perhaps as much an affirmation of their south-Bay roots and culture deep in the technology stack as much as anything else. To some degree "content" to these folks means "those people at the top of the Bay." Looking at Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it makes perfect sense that a company in Redwood Shores, much further up the bay from Sunnyvale, would be far more in tune with the need to move more towards serving up content solutions rather than just hardware and systems software?

In the dead center of this stretch in San Mateo you find the headquarters of Mark Logic, a company specializing in XML server technologies that enable publishers and enterprises to create content services from multiple content sources. At our meeting with the team of Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg we heard how Mark Logic is enjoying prosperous times, in part because they've honed much of their infrastructure for delivering their services to a highly operable and scalable level and in part because they're looking up the highway, you might say, towards opportunities that service the content end of Silicon Valley more effectively. In a sense much of the center of gravity in the content industry is heading towards such technology companies that used to be thought of as "middleware," rather industrious but supposedly dull bits of this and that that helped to glue diverse information systems together. With source-agnostic content aggregation the focus of much of the value in the content industry these days, you can hardly call companies like Mark Logic dull, much less similarly focused companies such as Google, MuseGlobal and Really Strategies.

Then at the top end of the valley you have companies like Rand Schulman's InsideView, which specializes in providing value-add context to content from multiple sources for sales force automation platforms. InsideView's "secret sauce" is its ability to parse content from both traditional and social media sources through semantic filters which identify events that are likely to be triggers for specific kinds of sales and marketing activity. That description may not sound like a traditional "top of the stack" publishing company, but in fact that's where the top end of value is in the content industry these days - not in delivering content from a single source but in adding value to content regardless of its source. So what better place to find InsideView than in the hills of San Fran itself?

Based on this new "stack" for the content industry I have to say that I was a bit confused when John Battelle noted in a recent blog that Google was going to "act like a publisher" because it may be in the process of matching display ads with news content from premium sources in its news offering. Truth be told, in the new content stack Google's been thinking - and acting - like a publisher all along. If the middle of the technology industry's stack is driving much of the value in today's publishing, then Google's contextual ad-matching capabilities are a perfect match for placing ads against the highest point in the content value chain. This is why we're seeing many major media companies such as Time, Inc. becoming more aggressive in marketing their own contextual ad matching networks - and why Battelle himself continues to operate his own Federated Media contextual ad network.

Battelle notes in his blog post "Supply means branding, and branding happens in the magical world of publishing." Well, John, the magic means something different these days - a fact that many marketers are still having a hard time grasping. The magic happens wherever people find good content, a concept that's no longer restricted to a narrow group of denizens on the top of the old content "stack." Any good content produced or contexualized by anyone can have value - either for advertisements, subscriptions or high-value enterprise services. Traders at investment banks figured this out years ago when they started parking themselves in front of computer screens connected to hundreds of information sources from around the world. That same style of content value now reaches well over a billion people in the world today. The supply that people need is the most valuable contexts for good content, not just the content itself.

There are any number of reasons why the traditional publishing industry is struggling these days, but certainly one has to look at the "stack" concept carefully to realize that the enormous technology changes over the past decade-plus of Web development rewrote what publishers assumed was their value points in the traditional publishing stack. Some still struggle valiantly to redefine technologies that will set everthing "aright" again, but who's to say that it was really right in the first place? Technology changes, and with those changes value propositions change inevitably. Here's three cheers for any and all companies who can figure out how to deliver value in the content industry - on whatever street or highway may lead to them.

Labels: advertising, content, enterprise, insideview, john battelle, mark logic, museglobal, Rand Schulman, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Publishing, SiliconValley, Sun Microsystems

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

The shameless self-promotion division of Shore is proud to announce that I'll be amongst the speakers at next week's SIIA Brown Bag Lunch panel presentation on Wednesday, 11 June focusing on how to attract, monetize and retain audiences and clients through search technologies. The panel will be moderated by Leslie Kues, Senior Director at Microsoft's FAST with my distinguished co-panelists Kate Noerr, Founder, Chairman & CEO of MuseGlobal, Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer for EveryZing and Barbara Kroll, Director, Corporate Strategy for Wolters Kluwer. It promises to be a great panel, including both publishers using search in enterprise and media markets as well as two leading technology companies helping publishers and enterprises to get more value from search as a publishing platform. Registration information is here, it's going to be available as a live event at the McGraw-Hill Building in New York as well as an online video event.

As for myself, I will be emphasizing how search is a publishing tool that is not just about the "white box" and a list of results but a technology that can enable content to be aggregated in a "just in time" publishing environment to support a wide variety of content applications for media and enterprise markets. If you're planning to come you may want to catch my earlier entry "Beyond Search Engines: The Database is Now" to get a feel as to how search engines are starting to replace databases as the primary content gathering mechanism for content applications and its implications for publishing. Long story short, the way that financial markets thought about stock tickers and trading room system middleware is how more advanced publishers are beginning to think about search engines.

Hope to see you at the brown bag - no food but plenty of beverages and great cookies - trust me.

Labels: everyzing, FAST Search and Transfer, federated search, museglobal, search, siia brown bag, wolters kluwer

The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the marketplace. As enterprises today face an explosion of internal and external content sources that they need to integrate to create insightful content services there is a huge gap that has arisen between what most content platforms can do to unify that information and what enterprises really need. This is particularly true in enterprise search, where many search services fail to provide access to all of the sources that a person typically needs to access.

Federated search solutions have been one route to address this problem, querying interfaces to multiple searchable sources and assembling the results "on the fly" to yield a combined search result. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of the needed information into a single database or search index federated search enables content to live wherever it has to and to come together when needed via multiple queries into integrated search results. Some do this better than others, and some have been at it for longer than others. MuseGlobal falls into both camps pretty handily, having been providing federated content solutions for more than a decade which has allowed them to hammer out an infrastructure that will pull together thousands of different types of content sources together via federated queries.

All well and good, but the question is, how do you make this sing in the eyes of enterprise users? MuseGlobal's support of Adhere Solutions, a company that includes Googlephile Steven Arnold's son Erik Arnold as a Director, points towards a very powerful possible answer to that question: the Google Search Appliance. While the GSA is a popular search tool in many major enterprises it's not been deemed the "go-to" search interface when it somes to getting all the right content from the right places all in one place in many instances. Federated content capabilities from MuseGlobal united with the GSA seem to fill that gap very handily. Capable of searching any number of search engines, internal and subscription databases and feeds as well as harvesting content via its own site crawlers, the MuseGlobal platform turns GSA into a clearing house for all of the content sources than an enterprise user might want - all delivered on the highly popular Google interface that provides access to Web content as well.

Combine this with both Google's programming interfaces for applications development and MuseGlobal's own extensive library of content integration tools and all of a sudden the GSA looks like a lot more beefy competitor for expanded use within the enterprise. And since the MuseGlobal library of source connectors includes many interfaces to subscription content services as well it's a platform that can put subscription database providers on a new footing with their users as well. All of a suddent the GSA looks less like a user-friendly also-ran and a lot more like a growing hub for enterprise and online content resources.

We hear lots of talk about workflow as the key solution that's going to enable value-add enterprise content services to build new revenues, but the ability to pull together a comprehensive set of sources that their customers' users really need to do the job is a slow and laborious process oftentimes for many subscription database providers to accomplish. At the same time enterprise portal providers are stymied oftentimes by users who refuse to use their solutions to any great degree because they're used to getting the answers they want from the search engines they rely upon as ther real "go-to" workflow solutions. The All Access Connector solution offered by Access Solutions and MuseGlobal offer both camps a lot to think about as they ponder how best to ensure that they are delivering the content that their users want in the applications that drive their productivity the most. The era of The New Aggregation's ability to deliver more content value from more content sources more rapidly than ever is upon us in full, indeed.

Labels: access solutions, enterprise, federated content, federated search, Google, museglobal, search