A Cloud Apart: MuseGlobal, Content Integration and Cloud Computing

The SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco last week was a great event for MuseGlobal to strut our stuff amongst the major and up-and-coming players in the content and software industry. While there was some ballyhoo about this being a new convergence of industry players, it's no secret that software and content companies have been joined at the hips for many, many years.

There was a fair amount of that "everything old is new again" atmosphere at NetGain, including the touting of "cloud computing" from major service providers such as Google, Oracle and Salesforce.com. Well, of course all of these companies provide very powerful software and services, but the cloud was with us even well before the Web became a reality. As soon as there were servers and client computers on networks the network cloud was being exploited to deliver high-value content services to major enterprises and, eventually, consumers. From that long-term perspective, you could say that content has lived in the clouds for a long time.

The difference today is that with more and more content staying in the network cloud instead of being downloaded into desktop applications and enterprise servers making the cloud a universal source of information for specific purposes becomes all the more important. After-the-fact integration of other important sources in desktop applications or through enterprise databases becomes harder when you're basing all of your content resources in the network. This means that you need to get all of the right content in the right place at the right time inside of network content serving applications.

While managing transparent access to content sources can be hard for some technologies to manage, MuseGlobal content integration technologies make getting comprehensive and unified content from any range of content sources in network-based content services easier than ever. Yet again, MuseGlobal was there before the idea of transparent access to diverse content sources had become a fad. We've been sussing out the details of how to connect to thousands of different kinds of databases, search engines, feeds, subscription content services and Web mining applications on the widest range of networks for more than a decade. The architecture that we've put into place to manage this simply and reliably in a way makes MuseGlobal a content cloud unto itself - and given our track record with major publishers and content technology companies around the world, allow me to say that we see ourselves as a cloud apart from the rest.

The nice thing about MuseGlobal OEM technology is that you can decide for yourself how you want to work with our content cloud. You can take in content from MuseGlobal into the back end of your own content cloud, or you can use our integration software to create a content cloud that surrounds your own core content delivery technologies. Best of all, you can tune which sources you want to present from MuseGlobal and how you want to filter and present them very easily. Vertical search engines? We're there and all over it before you know it. Business intelligence engines? Been there, done that. Consumer ecommerce portals? Our cloud will be raining content on products that they'll be eager to buy.

So when you think of cloud computing, remember that you need to think about how much of the right content it will take for your own platform to be the rainmaker on the networks of your choice. Don't settle for a drizzle of the sources that your clients want - let MuseGlobal help you to make your content own cloud the one that pours it on.

Unifying Content in the Enterprise with Google, MuseGlobal and Adhere Solutions

MuseGlobal has been an OEM partner with many of today's leading enterprise search engines and search infrastructure providers through more than a decade of developing advanced technologies for content integration. Partnerships are at the core of our value in the content marketplace, after all, making it possible for companies to use our content integration technologies to make their own platforms shine. I must say, though, that our new partnership with Adhere Solutions to enable content integration for the Google Search Appliance is one of the more exciting opportunities that we're encountering in the enterprise marketplace.

Everyone knows Google, of course, including the millions of people in enterprises worldwide who use Google every day as one of their primary "go-to" resources for information found on the World Wide Web. For this reason sometimes Google is seen as "the enemy" in enterprise I.T. and knowledge management circles, the interface that keeps on getting attention as they try to engineer their own solutions from in-house and subscription content sources. In many of these institutions you can find the Google Search Appliance as a tool that departments or whole enterprises are using to unify external Web content with some internal content sources. It's a powerful concept, but one that needs every possible source included to gain everyone's attention - otherwise the GSA becomes just one of a number of searchable sources.

This is where the All Access Connector comes in. Using Adhere Solutions' extensive background in integrating the Google Search Appliance into enterprise environments MuseGlobal now has a partner that can help enterprise partners to leverage the full power of the MuseGlobal's content integration capabilities through the most popular search interface around. The All Access Connector enables over 5,400 different types of content sources to be integrated rapidly into the GSA. Subscription databases, internal databases and document repositories, Web content, feeds, content harvested from intranets and external sources, multiple search engines - all these and many more can be made available through one search interface and returned in whatever format accelerates your productivity the best.

The response to this product launch has been extraordinary. All of a sudden people who had not quite seen the potential for federated content are beginning to see the light now that the "G-word" has entered the picture. It's really quite a simple concept when you come right down to it: if people like using a particular tool to solve their problems, why not make that tool work better for them? Apparently this resonates loud and clear for many who have been frustrated with powerful solutions in enterprise markets that just don't seem to get used as much as they should. If Google is the platform that users want, and you can deliver content from all of your searchable sources and feeds through that platform, well, why not make all of your content available through it? With the All Access Connector, we're finally able to make "all" mean "all" - and in doing do we get people making the most of all of their investments in searchable content.

We're very excited by the response to the All Access Connector and we expect to be very busy this year helping people to make the most of it. It's a concept that MuseGlobal can make work through any platform, of course, not just Google - including your platform as well. Something to think about. In the meantime our thanks go out to to Erik Arnold and all of our new friends at Adhere Solutions who are making the All Access Connector a reality using our content integration technology. It's a great partnership that we expect will provide our customers with extraordinary returns on their investments in our joint capabilities.