IDC - Desperately Seeking Differentiation

I got a chance to attend an IDC event last week where they shared their predictions for the Software market and discussed how companies can establish differentiation in 2011 and beyond.

Key themes:

1. Cloud/Near-Cloud - Differentiation by delivery model. [Not surprising. This is a well establish trend now.]
2. Mobile apps/Platform - Differentiation by Platform. [This is a significant trend and one whose impact will be felt for a number of years as a lot of applications will be re-built for the mobile platform. And not necessarily by the original owners. This will be very disruptive.]
3. Social Business - Differentiation by business process. [This is very interesting one as long as you are willing to open your mind to ideas from other people. Very disruptive internally, because you cannot control what/when/why conversations are happening - good or bad. So for paranoid people - this isn't good. But for open, progressive orgaizations, this can be very productive.]
4. Analytics/Big Data - Differentiation by Content/Information. [This is a logical progression. With content overload a well established issue, context-sensitive information packaged appropriately will definitely be well received by employees - especially senior executives.]

We'll share our perspectives in coming weeks and in the meantime would love to hear your predictions for 2011-2014.

The Broken Web: How Smart Connectors can Help While the World Waits for Plan "B"

Well, if you're not sure that history doesn't repeat itself, you have to look no further than Vint Cerf's recent comments at the Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California. Often called "the father of the Internet" (along with other well-known fathers), Vint Cerf now is Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, a title that knits in rather nicely wih Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The Internet was supposed to solve all of our problems with connecting different sources of content through a universal standard network. Yes, the World Wide Web that rides on the Internet infrastructure has made it possible for billions of computers to communicate with one another easily, but it didn't replace every communications network in the world. Even where the Web made easy connectivity between computers, that didn't always ensure that there would be actual communications between those computers. As Vint Cerf notes from a recent article based on his SMX talk:

You build these clouds and they know about themselves and they know about their own resources, but they don't know about any other cloud. So the question is: how do you say 'send this information to this cloud over here' if there isn't any way to call it.

Of course there are many reasons why the Internet is feeling these kinds of growing pains, many of which have to do with its overwhelming success as much as its inherent weaknesses. Some are proposing to address those weaknesses by creating a new kind of Internet network design that will provide more security, privacy and ability to handle advanced kinds of content such as streaming video that were not fully anticipated at the time of its first design. This may turn out to be a good idea in the long run, but what exactly would be the long run for such a change at this point - and how good would the results be in a world in which technologies change so rapidly?

The greater truth is that network clouds have always come in different shades. Legacy networks will remain in place as long as they are cost-effective for the organizations that support them. New networks then come into place that promise to be the global standard - eventually - but in the meantime they present the same kind of incompatibility issues oftentimes as legacy networks. Even when content flows in and across network clouds, issues such as security, access control, data formats and other key obstacles to getting usable content present themselves more often than not. This cloud thing gets pretty cloudy, at times, doesn't it?

While creating a new and better Internet may be a worthwhile goal in the long term, the here-and-now problems of content connectivity are the real issues that need to be addressed for most people trying to get the content that they need. The universal problem of "bit rot" will never be solved perfectly, but MuseGlobal has been at it for more than a decade. Our Smart Connector technology has been there, done that and then some on just about every conceivable network configuration and security setup that you can imagine. Being able to bridge into the widest variety of network environments is in the very core of our content connector architecture - it's not something that got tacked on after the fact.

Once Smart Connectors have ironed out the network issues for connecting platforms to content sources, they are experts in communicating with more types of content repositories than any other source of content connectors. After more than ten years of building content connectors we've accumulated more than 6,000 different types of connectors that give us a quicker fast-start on content connectivity than any other service. Best of all, we maintain them automatically for you. Bit rot has hardly a moment to set in with your content connections with Smart Connectors on the job.

Smart Connectors go beyond simply ironing out the connectivity issues for content sources, of course. MuseGlobal is leading the way with content connectors that enable not just reading content sources through thousands of possible configurations but also with delivering content back to those sources. With MuseGlobal your clouds become truly a multi-way communications environment, leaping over networks, data formats and security issues to provide not just content but conversations between content sources and platforms.

My hat is off to Vint Cerf and other great thinkers who are pondering just how the next generation of the Internet will serve us all better. We need them focusing on this important task, to be sure. But in the meantime MuseGlobal will continue to help the thousands of organizations using our OEM technology around the world to connect to the content that they need today. To us the Web isn't broken; it just needed to get Smart Connectors to pull it all together for our clients.

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.