BizTechTalk

aiimALERT: Amazon Content Delivery Improvements Coming

I've been testing out various Amazon cloud services for a few months, and received a message as an AWS customer today. Interestingly, our Q4 Market IQ will be discussing Content Delivery, and we're in the midst of refreshing our ECM Training Course to (potentially) include more about the options of SaaS and cloud computing. Timing is everything, eh?

New AWS Service Under Development for Content Delivery

Dear AWS Customer:

Many of you have asked us to let you know ahead of time about features and services that are currently under development so that you can better plan for how that functionality might integrate with your applications. To that end, we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS -- a content delivery service.

This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections. Our goal is to create a content delivery service that:

• Lets developers and businesses get started easily - there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use.
• Is simple and easy to use - a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
• Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 - this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
• Has a global presence - we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You'll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you'll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It's that simple.

We're currently working with a small group of private beta customers, and expect to have this service widely available before the end of the year. If you'd like to be notified when we launch, please let us know by clicking here.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

Sounds to me like their going to seriously start encroaching on Akamai, Mirror-Image, et al. Hope the "old guard" (disruptive innovation anyone?) have been prepping for this moment. Still amazes me that Amazon has made this long slow journey from virtual bookseller to virtual infrastructure, and may end up being THE provider of choice. Of course we'll have to see how that pans out - but it's interesting to see Amazon step up to provide what many people are already attempting to do with AWS and S3.

Anyone thinking of dropping their current Content Delivery Network (CDN) once this is available? I haven't been an Akamai customer for 6 years or so - so don't have hands-on experience with the current state of integration there.

If you're interested in our upcoming research on Content Creation and Delivery, fill out the form below, and we'll notify you once the research is available in Q4.

aiimALERT: Captaris Fronts Open Text as Newest Acquisition

Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX) (TSX: OTC), a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, and Captaris, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAPA), a provider of software products that automate document-centric processes, announced a definitive merger agreement last week in which a wholly owned subsidiary of Open Text will acquire Captaris for approximately $131 Million. Captaris's software products include document and data capture solutions that let customers convert paper documents to digital content, and manage associated processes. The acquisition is aimed at expanding Open Text's partnership offerings by creating tighter integration with Open Text's invoice management solutions that work with SAP and Oracle. Captaris also offers business information and delivery solutions built on the Microsoft .NET framework which integrate, process and automate the flow of content (see press release).

Other commentary that I've seen is only focusing on single issues rather than the big picture of this acquisition.

There are (at least) 4 components to this acquisition:

1. Adding more "front-end" to Open Text's native capabilities
2. Tighter integration to MOSS/SharePoint
3. Acquisition of content recognition technology
4. An inexpensive acquisition for Open Text, and exit strategy for Captaris

On it's surface... Front-end meet back-end!

The press release mentions that "Captaris's technology will strengthen Open Text's ECM solutions by providing another on-ramp for integrating content into our ECM solutions" which, interestingly enough, is our focus for Q4 2008 Market IQ, namely the on- and off-ramps of content.

Now of course it's not as if Open Text doesn't have front-end content creation or capture already, whether "user generated" in a 2.0 style interface, via their RedDot Web Content Management, or in other interfaces. The Captaris acquisition is very specifically aimed at tightening up the digital capture of paper content in the form of fax content (their RightFax solution), and the full process of invoice management, which (for Captaris customers at least) tends to be paper-heavy, and it's a classic imaging scenario. Until paper is entirely gone, all organizations need SOME strategy and capability to convert to digital as early in the process as possible.

Next up - Tighter integration to MOSS/SharePoint.

Open Text is betting quite a lot on the rising tide of Microsoft in the world of ECM (see my presentation "Who's the Boss, MOSS?" - over 4,000 views), and this again ties to item #1. They have a specific business unit that is built entirely to be the back-end records repository (think long-term archiving, lock-in, recurring revenue) for MOSS content. Captaris is reported to have strong integration in this area (notably, the Captaris RightFax Connector for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and Captaris Single Click Entry), which, if executed well, helps Open Text to continue their anticipated growth in this area. Open Text already has some integration in this area, but this extends and tightens that integration.

Almost nobody is mentioning this next item - Acquisition of content recognition technology

In January of this year, Captaris acquired Oce Document Technologies GmbH (ODT), a company that specialized in document capture, text recognition and document classification. These capabilities serve to add the intelligence to capture to make any digital image more than mere "dumb" pixels, and into data-enriched documents that you can actually find and manage once they have been inserted in a repository and/or workflow/process environment. There is some hint that not only does this part of the acquisition add to the technical capabilities of Open Text as a whole, but that competitors of Open Text who are licensing the underlying engine now have one less differentiator from Open Text, and becomes a competitive blocking move as a result.

Lastly - An inexpensive acquisition for Open Text, and exit strategy for Captaris

I don't normally comment on the financial implications of acquisitions, as I'm not a financial analyst, so in this I'll defer to analysis provided in the article

A Good Deal for Captaris and Open Text—but Impact on Seattle-Area Innovation Is Less Clear by Gregory T. Huang at xconomy:

"Captaris, a $90 million public company, eked out $220,000 in net income last year, down from nearly $4 million the year before, and it seems like that inability to grow may have forced their hand in seeking a buyer."

Sounds like a similar story to the acquisition of FAST by Microsoft earlier this year. FAST, being beaten down in the Norwegian Stock Market after some shady financial reporting (and retractions), became a more affordable acquisition for Microsoft, and a way for Microsoft to innovate (as always) through acquisition. Of course paying less than more for an acquisition is always a sound move - and the financial analysts seem to believe this is a solid move on both sides.

I will say that I disagree however with CMS Watch analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe, quoted in a PCWorld article (Open Text to Buy Captaris ) as saying "Over time, Open Text could become "more of a holding company than an ECM firm," he suggested."

Unless all other companies that have a history of acquisitions (EMC, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) would be categorized in the same manner, I don't see why Open Text would be called out as a holding company rather than ECM firm. The integration amongst the components only seem to be growing tighter, rather than looser, which a holding company strategy would lean towards. Open Text has not (of late) pursued the more typical Cisco style of acquisition and re-branding that they once did, but many of the acquisitions they have made in recent years have had quite strong brand recognition in themselves. It would be bad business to cut and run on the brand front, and in this regard, they are no different than EMC, who still maintains Documentum, Captiva, RSA, and many others as named brands/families.

aiimALERT: Microsoft Acquires Powerset

Microsoft has acquired (after vehemently denying) Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company (see the Live Search Blog and Powerset Blog for more details).

Between Microsoft's $1.2 Billion acquisition of FAST earlier this year, their $240 million investment in Facebook to provide ad serving capabilities, the $6 Billion acquisition of aQuantive's ad network last year, and the (currently undisclosed but rumored at $100 Million) acquisition of Powerset, Microsoft is finally clueing in that it's not enough to provide tools/platforms/systems to create and store information - if it's not FINDABLE, it doesn't exist. In fact, in our upcoming Market IQ on Findability, one of our findings was that 69% of respondents stated that less than 50% (half) of their content was even available online. That is a completely different problem when compared to the web, which has millions to billions of pages at your disposal.

What does the Powerset acquisition bring to the Microsoft table?

Thought #1 (it’s about ads):
The primary driver of the Powerset acquisition is part of the play to compete against Google for consumer-based web search, rather than their acquisition of FAST, which is more “enterprise focused” and the area that most AIIM Members would typically be concerned with.

Microsoft is competing of course not simply from a “our search engine is better” standpoint, even though this is exactly the "elevator pitch" that Powerset has been using since they first unveiled themselves.

The point of the competition between Microsoft and Google is that there is money in advertising on the web. Lots of it. Metric tons of it. And who wouldn't want more?

So the goal for Microsoft with this acquisition is not really about giving the world better web search, but rather a “we can make our advertisers (and thus ourselves) much more money.”

I have to say that I am dubious that this will be the case.

The best online ads that surround the search experience are typically very targeted, and when done well, lead buyers to landing pages and an entire experience that is keyed in on the original query quite specifically. It creates and solidifies a path from the mind of the searcher, straight to a purchase path. This is "Modern eMarketing 101" (or should be).

Given the complexity involved in targeting ads CURRENTLY (without semantic/linguistic technology involved), how is this going to make advertisers more effective at selling?

Powerset/Microsoft had better innovate one heck of an advertiser/marketer friendly interface to actually make this work. While Microsoft may have some of the most popular user interfaces (by sales) on the planet, they do not have a great track record at simplifying the user experience (open every toolbar available in Microsoft Word, and you will no longer have space to create a document). This is not a simple task.

 

Thought #2 (it’s about better search – ha!):
From a “pure” search experience, people can barely be bothered to enter more than 1-3 search terms – what would make us think that users are going to type in fully formed questions as a query? I’ve joked about this many times in the last decade that Natural Language Query is at this point possibly the most UNnatural search experience possible. It would SEEM easier to allow people to “ask questions” of machines, but ingrained habits are terribly difficult to overcome, and the vast majority of interfaces that people are using for search do NOT train us to ask pointed questions of search engines (as The Atlantic’s recent cover story [by Nicholas Carr of "Does IT Matter?" fame] says, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”).

That is not to say that linguistics/semantics technology cannot be useful. Although there are certainly benefits, is this the silver bullet that Microsoft can aim in the direction of Google to take back or win ad revenue? Not by itself. Then again, Microsoft has been busy with all sorts of acquisitions to take this quite seriously (as mentioned above).

The other competitive front that is being mentioned around this acquisition is that it is not about competing with Google, but instead with Ask.com. Given that Ask.com is indeed built for natural language queries, that may make more sense, although Ask.com does not have anywhere near the mindshare of Google, MSN or Yahoo! Microsoft can of course afford to compete on multiple fronts however, and they certainly are spending quite heavily on improving search. Time will tell how users end up benefiting.

So lets sum it up as saying that of all the acquisitions or investments (such as into Facebook) that Microsoft has made in the consumer-facing, public web search market - as interesting as the techniques that Powerset uses are (Semantic Web, where art thou? Not here yet?) - this is much ado about nothing. It is a tiny blip -  one small, subtle capability that is going to take quite some time (if ever) to make a significant impact on this aspect of the Microsoft search business. The benefits of this type of approach, and the fabled "Semantic Web" have been talked about for a LONG time.

If only the same amount of investment and energy went into making enterprise Findability a reality, which we’re finding in our Market IQ on Findability is NOT the case, then the working world of “knowledge workers” would be a near utopian dream. And it’s not. Reality is much messier, and the problem isn't just technology. But more on that in the Market IQ, soon.

Other resources on this topic:

Microsoft Shoots and Scores with Powerset Purchase by Ron Miller

Cruising the Mall: Microsoft Scoops up Powerset for Universal Search by John Blossom

Report: Microsoft to Acquire Powerset Natural Language Search for $100M+ by Adam Ostrow

Method Or Madness? by Sean Park

aiimALERT: Intalio and Open Source as a Service (OSaaS)

Recently Intalio, Inc., an Open Source BPMS company, announced Intalio|On Demand, an open source Business Process Management System delivered as a service. Intalio|On Demand is available by signing up at www.intalio.com/on-demand. The subscription for the service starts at $1,500 for each dedicated server, and includes bandwidth, licenses, maintenance, and support. Users can receive a free 5-day evaluation. (more info at Intalio.com)

The three biggest movements within the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) world, and Business Process Management (BPM) - whether integrated into or stand-alone from ECM - are:

1. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
2. Open Source
3. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007)

(Note: While MOSS is not typically associated with "high-end" BPM offerings, the impact of MOSS on the market, now that Microsoft has realized they can apparently make a billion dollars USD a year on that platform without seriously trying, means that it is a force to be reckoned with, and in many cases, the light-weight BPM provided by MOSS can accomplish most of what typical enterprises are expecting for entry-point workflow that is non-transactional and not at a high-volume.)

These burgeoning movements are not mutually exclusive, and one should not expect that traditonally licensed, on-premise solutions are going to disappear any time soon.

What makes this announcement by Intalio intriguing is this ability to mix and match the solution, based on the deploying customer's need.

While it is not terribly rare to "host" open source with a third party, truly architecting an "on-demand" or SaaS offering is a bit more complicated than installing and running a new instance, and it does appear that this is the first marriage of Open Source and SaaS.

Is this the best of both worlds? Hard to say this early in this model, but as a conceptual model, it would seem to be path to take moving forward.

This use of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (known as EC2) is relatively rare for "enterprise" applications (vs. the consumer-oriented usage of so many of the Web 2.0 startups, such as twitter) at this point, and given some of the issues of Amazon's cloud infrastructure blacking out in recent months, this is by no means a bulletproof solution. But nothing is, and the illusion of perfect uptime is preventing traditional IT shops from taking advantage of the speed and flexibility that SaaS has to offer. The ability to layer solutions with both on-premise and cloud-based solutions is a model that has been proven to work. Akamai as one of the pioneers in providing an elastic/scalable ability to provide fast access to large multimedia files is part of what has made Apple's iTunes Music Store the success that it has been.

Given Intalio's adherence to (and apparent dedication to) open standards for connecting between systems, one should hope that the ability to mix and match Intalio's offerings, under the hood, should be fairly seamless. Whether you start with the on-demand model, or the on-premise, the nature of BPM and BPM as "process glue" makes this a perfect meta-layer where the architecture SHOULD be possible to modularize.

Both buyers and suppliers should keep an eye on this model, and consider the ramifications from a budget standpoint, flexibility in deployment, and time to deliver new offerings, or upgrade existing technology-based solutions.

aiimALERT: InsideView Brings the Outside In

InsideView recently introduced the concept of "Socialprise" as a framework for understanding the way in which the unstructured data of social networks and media are influencing enterprises. A newly announced product, SalesView, is specifically designed to mash-up social data with search and intelligence capabilities to help sales teams automate prospecting, accelerate sales cycles and close more deals. (see http://www.insideview.com/cat-company-press.html for more details)

InsideView are essentially a meta-meta-aggregator of relationship and social data, which can be used to infuse/enrich Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, or be used as a stand-alone tool similar in some respects to ZoomInfo (one of their underlying data sources) or other "relationship/contact databases" such as Hoover's.

What does InsideView bring to the table? It helps to provide salespeople and marketers further informaiton to understand their prey, customers and prospects beyond the bare minimum information (such as name, phone, e-mail, company name, title) they might otherwise have to work with in their CRM or Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems.

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the "2.0 age" rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

The various sources that they tap for this information are a mix of both typical structured data sources as well as in crawling and pulling in unstructured information that would contain social/relationship information (such as from blogs, Facebook etc.). InsideView has a wide range of paid and free sources that they aggregate and examine to algorithmically determine the relevancy and accuracy of this information. Factors would include such things as: the recency of updated information, determining whether the self-owned and updated sources (such as profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook) are more accurate than automated information collected via subscription service, and so on.

Between the acquisitions of SRD via IBM (in 2005), Interface Software by Lexis Nexis (in 2004), and Contact Networks now part of Thomson West (as of January 2008), this aspect of social networking or social intelligence/relationship intelligence is adding serious firepower for internal enterprise users.

I've been talking about just this sort of "relationship enrichment" or "relationship intelligence" since 2003/2004. When I was with Delphi Group, we began rolling this functionality into the world of "Information Intelligence" as a higher-level topic, with several conferences discussing the mashup of business intelligence, dashboards, search, knowledge management, portals, and more, into a "meta layer" that could unify all of the mess of siloed content/information/data/knowledge underneath. In 2008 we might be more tempted to simply call all of this Enterprise 2.0 (see our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0).

Further food for thought: See my "Death of a Salesman?" article from 2004 (on Scribd), and March 2008 presentation on "Build Smarter Internal and External Communities" (on slideshare.net) - both of these relate to the enterprise use of social networking.

Social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your "friends" (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

This would provide both the ability to build communities explicitly for the sake of building a community, as well as in using that community as a source of "intelligence" to provide deeper insights into the community as a whole (collective intelligence or "the wisdom of crowds"), as well as the individuals themselves.

All of this latent "social information" is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one corporate, even deeper than "normal" (spreadsheets, reports, PDFs, etc.) electronic information is. Sadly, most organizations have only just recently begun to understand the value of their more explicit "information assets" (even the value of intellectual property in the form of patents are not well understood in many organizations) and the idea of including social/relationship intelligence as a valued asset is well behind that train in the majority of cases I've come across.

There is a giant opportunity here, and for myself, I'm looking forward to the day when we can turn around say "How in the world did we even function without the ability to tap our relationship intelligence?" The early adopters for this type of functionality may easily run away with marketshare, if their competitors stay asleep too long.

Where will you and your organization be on the adoption curve?

aiimALERT: OMG - the OMB (US GOV) and the Wiki Workplace

From the Washington Post, and columnist Stephen Barr, column today on the "Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia" which describes how the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), a staid federal office if ever there was one, has used secured wikis to cut "earmarks" (pet spending projects) in half, per a challenge from President Bush to Congress:

"With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB."

In the commercial world, we'd call this faster TTM (time-to-market)...

"The wiki also created, in essence, a powerful insiders club, where members are encouraged to engage in collaboration before they arrive at business decisions."

Social networking meets collaboration, at the federal level. "Insiders club" seems to smack of negative overtones, although one would hope that a side-benefit of this project is the breaking down of barriers, such as political party lines, and tending towards "open collaboration" (although of course that's perhaps overly optimistic). Another subtle point of what most (including us, AIIM) are calling Enterprise 2.0 - it's not just about TTM (as above), but can easily be about getting more input, and consensus, as well as getting the outcome with much greater speed.

"The wiki was launched in December 2006 with the prosaic title "Budget Community." By September 2007, the wiki had proved so popular that it was renamed "The MAX Federal Community" to incorporate other government-wide issues and agencies. The MAX in the name refers to the OMB's technology system that agencies use to produce the president's budget."

As happens in many cases of technology use, but even moreso with solutions that tend to have "emergent" properties - early focus (the budget project), ease of use and massive adoption are the keys. And lead to further expansion and adoption as people see more reasons TO use the solution, rather than to NOT.

The article also briefly mentions "Intellipedia" - essentially the Wikipedia (of sorts) of the US Intelligence Community. By all accounts, a resounding success.

Timely article, and well worth a read. Stay tuned for our continuing coverage of Enterprise 2.0 and all of the related technological and cultural issues that are rolled-up under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella. Free webinar coming up on March 27th on this very topic (brief blog entry or register directly).

aiimALERT: The Long Tail (and Arm) of Discovery

On December 3rd, 2007, ZANTAZ (an Autonomy company) announced "Desktop Legal Hold" a legal hold solution for the preservation of relevant information on desktops and laptops. (see press release for further details)

The integration of ZANTAZ's capabilities, recently acquired by Autonomy, into the core of Autonomy IDOL platform continues, with a "Legal Hold" twist, which takes advantage of the capabilities of the combined Autonomy and ZANTAZ technologies.

As discussed in our Market IQ on Content Security (released in October 2007, freely downloadable), policy-driven (rather than purely "human-driven") security is the key to managing the security of content throughout it's lifecycle.

There has been much buzz about The Long Tail, particularly in the search market, since Chris Anderson wrote the initial article in WIRED, October 2004, and later released the book of the same title. Summary: There is untapped value in the vast amount of information we have available to sell, buy, find, use. That discussion comes primarily from the commerce side of the discussion, and is well worth understanding, from both a Business to Consumer standpoint, and an internally facing Enterprise Search standpoint. For legal/compliance purposes though, it's worth keeping in mind the latent danger (and opportunity) for the vast amount of information floating within an organization.

Hence, the Long Arm. The capabilities of the ZANTAZ Desktop Legal Hold offering are specifically meant to enforce policies out "at the edge" of desktops and laptops, rather than strictly within the safe confines of an Enterprise Content Management or Enterprise Records Management repository.

The agent-based, policy-driven capabilities are specifically tasked with essentially auditing and understanding the content "at rest" on the many devices that make up the desktops/laptops where works in progress, and copies of content (e-mail in particular) live, and can so easily be deleted or hidden.

This solution then has multiple purposes:
To be aware of content, wherever it lives;
To know, when a legal hold event occurs, how to prevent that content from being deleted/tampered with;
To take the manual compliance burden out of the equation (aside from the development/deployment of policies on an administrative level);
and perhaps most importantly, to be able to do this with systems that may frequently be on the road, and not "within the firewall."

This is another step in the evolutionary path that we in AIIM Market Intelligence are tracking, as search and agent-based technology meets enforcement and security technology, rather than e-discovery purely as a "so what DO we have in these haystacks anyway?" Russian Roulette game.

aiimALERT: Facebook and Microsoft - Social Networks are Big Money

PALO ALTO, Calif. and REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Facebook and Microsoft today announced that Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook's next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation, and the companies will expand their existing advertising partnership. (see full press release for further details)

The world of social networking continues to heat up, and it's 2003 (and the dot-bomb) all over again. In 2003 I had been fending off invites to join LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut, OpenBC (now Xing), Spoke, Ryze, etc. - and finally decided I should take a peek into the world of personal/professional social networking. After 3 months and conversations with nearly 200 users of such systems at the time, I was convinced this was serious business, and we would see growing ramifications in roughly 5 years. Here we are 4 years later, and LinkedIn is nearly one of my daily tools (see the post "100th Post, 1000th network connection" last month), and as with many people already steeped in social networking and what that can do for you on a personal and professional level, I finally made the jump onto Facebook as well. It's the wild west, but probably not as strange as you're thinking, if you haven't actually used the site and it's thousands of apps.

Is Facebook a fad? Who knows. Did Microsoft over pay for such a paltry percentage stake? Perhaps. This investment makes the earlier run of social networking investment in the 2002-2004 timeframe look like chump change by contrast. Entire companies were bought or fully funded by investments much smaller than this - and in this case $240 million buys a 1.6% stake. Turning down the offer a $1 billion dollar acquisition offer is certainly seeming like a good call at this point.

But through all of this, realize that the name of the game in this investment is all about the eyeballs and yes, online advertising - ironic given the "web 2.0" crowd tends to think of the race for eyeballs as "so web 1.0." Microsoft has been a partner with Facebook since the advertising on Facebook first came about, and as it turns out, that's a pretty brisk business to be in. After all, Google makes the vast majority of it's revenue from advertising one way or another, and Microsoft's earlier acquisition of aQuantive for $6B (a significant player in the digital marketing world), the times they are a changin'. Let's not forget that Microsoft's acquisition of Hotmail (eons ago) was because of it's viral ramp up in user adoption. It wasn't the best, it wasn't the first, but it took off dramatically, and Facebook has certainly had similar characteristics, although it's far beyond a web-based e-mail platform.

From a user and business perspective, if no other sign has piqued your interest in this thing we now call "social networking" (and by the way, have for several years now) - it is time to take a serious look. It costs you nothing, it may open your eyes to connections you wouldn't have thought possible (as well as bring out the crazies from time to time), but how long can you afford to stay on the sidelines and not do something with a network such as Facebook?

aiimALERT: RSA (EMC) Grabs Tablus to Round Out Content Security Play

RSA, the security division of EMC, announced it's intent to acquire Tablus, a privately held company in  the more narrowly defined (but no less important) Data Leak Prevention (DLP) space. Once completed, Tablus' solutions will be integrated into EMC's Infoscape intelligent information management offerings. (see press release for further details, eWeek article By Chris Preimesberger, and News.com coverage by Dawn Kawamoto)

Busy times for EMC in recent years, as it knocks down pin after pin in the quest to own a significant portion of the "best of breed" solutions in the overall Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) picture. The Tablus acquisition adds an ability to know exactly where content is and what is being done with it, particularly for what is called "data in motion" (over the network) and "data in use" (typically on a desktop).

No doubt there is massive Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry consolidation going on these days, with IBM, Oracle, OpenText and Autonomy (see aiimALERT on Autonomy acquisition of ZANTAZ) all in the game. While the financial implications to EMC and all its subsidiaries are interesting to consider, the real interest here is in the arsenal of solutions and the entire ecosystem that EMC is putting together to own DIRECTLY.

Conceptually, EMC's acquired solutions have one thing in common - virtualized policy-based information (structured or unstructured, data or "information") management - regardless of the type or format of content, regardless of what type of storage medium is being used, regardless of what system it lives in. It's not enough just to virtualize your storage, nor to have policy-based capabilities, yet have to implement that policy in multiple siloed systems. The closer to full integration, the more likely you are truly to have "managed" your information for both proactive and reactive purposes.

In short, with ILM, information is managed, cradle to grave (creation to destruction), and includes not just an "IT View" of information (typically concerned with operational matters), which EMC provides via it's core storage business as well as through the Legato and Dantz acquisitions, but also a "Business View" -  (i.e. compliance and regulatory matters, "knowledge worker" and managerial productivity concerns, findability of content, and information-centric processes and productivity), which EMC provides via Documentum, eRoom, AskOnce, TrueArc,  Legato  and Authentica acquisition).

Add a portal and/or Web Content Management solution such as Vignette (a next acquisition?), re-surface Enterprise Search (where has AskOnce disappeared to in the EMC stack?), address the mobile/untethered market (on both security and information access overall), and support all operating systems from Windows, Unix, OS X and Linux, and EMC will essentially own the entire solution, tied together in Business Process Management via  the ProActivity acquisition (in 2006).

At one time it would've seemed absurd that EMC could come remotely close to this unified vision, but it seems a real possibility at this time, and only getting more real as the days roll on. What had started out looking like an oddball acquisition strategy from it's storage roots has over time looked to be brilliant maneuvering towards dominance and complete ILM solution ownership by EMC.

This most recent acquisition, Tablus falls within the realm of content security.  in this regard. the path taken by EMC mirrors the content security definition and strategy that we have been touting in AIIM Market Intelligence research, and in our former work at Delphi Group. (This is the topic of our upcoming AIIM Market IQ, scheduled for release in early October.)

Put succinctly, content security is a full life-cycle policy-based approach to securing content at its source - and in dynamic use or context. This approach to security minimizes risk, while simultaneously maximizing secure collaboration and knowledge exchange.  The promise of content security (as defined) comes as the result of business strategy and (granted) a potentially complex technology strategy. Between the rise of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and platform independent standards, as well as "all in one" solutions such as EMC is pursuing, the coarse building blocks for full information management is essentially a clear possibility, and the rest of the story is in the hairy work of true "off the shelf" integration between all of the components that EMC has acquired, and the ongoing system integration premiums that early adopters in the "whole solution" are going to experience.

It is interesting to note that while EMC is not the only solution provider building an ILM platform, they are ahead in the strategic acquisition race, and this is significantly different than the approach that companies such as Microsoft and Adobe are taking. Where MS and Adobe are creating a loose-knit partner ecosystem which puts all of the risk (and fun) in rounding out specific capabilities in a market space out in the hands of the startups looking to push the boundaries and innovate at the edges of a particular set of business/technology issues, EMC seeks to own the entire "information stack" itself, in theory offering better integration and faster time to deploy. More expensive in the short-term for EMC, and with higher risk for EMC, but this plan seems to be bearing significant fruit thus far.

This is a fascinating area of the broad information management business - the idea that security is FINALLY being addressed not just at the device or network level, but to information itself, in a dynamic real-time manner, is a key issue that gets to the heart of how organizations should handle their information assets.

Stay tuned as we dive further into this area of the market in our forthcoming Market IQ (Intelligence Quarterly) on Content Security, being released early Q4 of 2007. It's high time that the world of traditional information security and business management of information tied together...

aiimALERT: SchemaLogic expands into targeted Media and Publishing Solutions

Last week, SchemaLogic  announced the release of its Business Semantics Management software specifically designed for media and publishing enterprises. SchemaLogic customers in this market include the Associated Press (AP), Corbis, Reed Business International, and the International Press and Telecommunication Council (IPTC) among others (see press release).

SchemaLogic has been providing collaboratively-oriented solutions to building controlled vocabularies for a wide variety of solutions, cutting across many different vertical industries, for several years now. This  honing of the solution for the media and publishing industry is a sign of market maturity, such that SchemaLogic can dedicate themselves a bit to a targeted solution like this, rather than pursuing a purely horizontal offering. I can safely say this is definitely a turning point, if not a tipping point, moment. Out of the chasm? Perhaps not - but heading out of the innovators and into the early adopters at the least, and certainly getting close to a chasm jump.

But overall - what does this mean beyond the world of Publishing?

This is another case where internally-facing ECM deployments need to look to the commercial arena for inspiration and action. If information is truly a business asset, then making connections between the user’s intent and the end result, whether that user is an employee or a buyer/consumer, ultimately results in large chunks of revenue/time/cost that just simply cannot happen without serious attention being paid to Information Organization and Access (IOA).

To *not* make the effort to seek out opportunities for "soft-dollar" benefits (faster find translating to higher sales, faster inventory turnover, more rapid product development, etc.) is just short of irresponsibility on the part of an enterprise. Mismanagement of information should factor nearly as important as mismanagement of funds, but does not... yet.