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 Today's eWeek online version, 2012-02-20, contains a story, Cloud Computing and Data Integration: 10 Trends to Watch, within its "Cloud" section seemingly written around the capabilities of Muse. Or, perhaps MuseGlobal has been developing capabilities within its flagship software platform which fit the "waves of the future" now starting to break on the shore of today's business needs.
The story is one of the familiar 10 slide shows in which they distill the wisdom of their in-house experts and those of external tech watchers – in this case some Gartner – and an interested developer, to gaze into a particular tech crystal ball. This one is focused on business needs and the cloud. In their own words:
Increasingly, large organizations are discovering and using enterprise information with the objective of growing or transforming their business as they seek more holistic approaches to their data integration and data management practices. This is all in an effort to address the challenges associated with the growing volume, variety, velocity and complexity of information. ... intensifying expectations for cloud data integration and data management as a part of a company's information infrastructure. ... to enable a more agile, quicker and more cost-effective response to business needs. ...eWEEK spoke to Robert Fox, of Liaison Technologies.
So what are the trends (details in the eWeek article)? And how does Muse fit in those trends?
EAI in the Cloud
Muse provides a cloud based service enabling standards based systems and those with proprietary messaging protocols to communicate with each other. This is a hub-and-spoke architecture, so once an application has its Connector written, it can communicate with ALL the other applications working with that Muse hub.
B2C Will Drive B2B Agility
Not so obvious here, but Muse has Connectors for access to the major, and quite a few minor, social platforms, so including their information and practices in the B2B world should be that much easier.
Data as a Service in the Cloud
Where service providers gather information and data from disparate sources, merge it, de-dupe it, cleanse it, and hand it on the service user, Muse is an obvious platform with all of these capabilities baked in from the first batch. Increasing numbers of data providers and the rise of the data brokers, means Muse has a niche as the functional platform for these new providers.
Integration Platform as a Service
"Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) allows companies to create data transformation and translation in the cloud ..." I couldn't have put it closer to the core of what Muse does, if I had said it myself!
Master Data Management in the Cloud
Aggregation, de-duplication, transformation, normalization, conformance to standards (local and International), consistency, identification of differences, enrichment, delivery – this could again be a description of a Muse harvesting service. Right here when needed.
Data Governance in the Cloud
Not directly a Muse function, but its transaction and processing logs make provenance and quality of data easier to report on and find the areas of weakness.
Data Security in the Cloud
Secure communications, a sophisticated range of authentication options, encryption when needed, and NO intermediate storage of the data means that Muse as a transaction service is not the weak security link in the chain.
Business Process Modeling in the Cloud
Not a core strength of Muse – can't win them all. But complex data manipulation processes can be handled through scripting within Muse. Connection to and from external service platforms means that they can be allowed to control the modeling and allow Muse to deal with the data.
Business Activity Monitoring in the Cloud
Tie Muse's aggregation and data cleansing to a link with your favorite BI service and monitoring became rather easier. Because Muse links to systems, it will work with virtually any BI system and place the raw data and analyses wherever they are needed for review.
Cloud Services Brokerage
If this sounds like your business (or one you want to get into), then a look at the Muse platform could save a lot of time and effort to get a superior service up and running. As the technology behind a CSB it takes some beating!
So how did Muse do? Seven right on the money and three near misses seems like a pretty high score to us.
 Excellent chart published today by eMarketer that shows the different platforms preferred by different age groups to get news. IMO, the duo-platform mode (both traditional print and new digital platforms) is indicative of the transition phase that we are going through right now. In an year or two, more of us (even if we are not 21 years old) will let drop the habit of "traditional" platforms. I am trying to kick the habit of reading a newspaper in the morning and simply catching up on the news on my laptop, iPhone or my wife's iPad. (iPad is by far the most convenient platform - especially before the morning coffee kicks in). Take the Wikileaks story. Its almost a waste of time to keep abreast of this interesting story in a newspaper. The videos, documentaries, documents themselves - compel you to follow the story from your nearest browser. Our increasing tendency to get and share news with our trusted friends will only drive us further away from "static" traditional platforms like newspapers and magazines. What do you think - are you ready to "kick" the habit? I am trying hard.
TMI - Too Much Information, Too Much Content, Too Much Data - are all here to stay with us. There will be more of everything that we will pull and more of everything that will be pushed to us. On my BART ride last week (yes - very green of me), I read an interesting article ( http://bit.ly/cHG21g) in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine on RIM CEOs failing to communicate their vision/strategy to the market. 99.9% of all the CEOs in the world will come out 2 nd best when compared with Steve Jobs, but there was a particular comment made by Jim Balsille (RIM Co-CEO) that made me realize that R IM's market share and mind share in smartphones could erode faster than Motorola's or Nokia's: Balsille thinks the world is wrong about apps. Many are just
glorified bookmarks, he argues, that aren't necessary if you can connect
customers to the Web. Apple has 250,000 apps because most of them are serving a critical need of presenting content in a form that can be consumed very easily - especially on a mobile device. Yes - you can browse the web and search for whatever you need - but that does not help the TMI syndrome. If anything it exacerbates it. The apps are making it easy for iPhone, iPad or Android users to filter and consume the content available all over the Web. Even Google has embraced the app paradigm - even though "googling" for content is good for Google's ad revenues. Gus Hunt, CTO for CIA, who is building a " peta" scale infrastructure to handle the data and computing requirements said at Cloud Expo last week that he wants any data to be used by any application. He does not want to invest in building applications that are dependent on a particular data set or a particular data set being created for a specific application. The days of consolidating all the data into a single repository are long gone and never coming back. Question is What To Do about TMI? First - Leverage technology that can reference data from any source in any format. It isn't feasible to try and standardize the legacy content repositories. Data will stay federated, so your content integration strategy should account for it as well. Speed and agility in accessing new content sources is a competitive advantage for today's businesses. Second - Ensure that data cleansing can be automated. This will allow you to work with incomplete or partial data - especially when working with a large number of data sources. Third - Focus on normalizing the aggregated data, so that the consuming applications can work independent of data sources. This will allow you to serve content to a variety of consuming applications and end devices - especially the constrained mobile devices that need additional filtering or formatting. This will also allow the content creators to focus on creating content and not to worry about the device/platform battles that are being waged on the other side of the value chain. More to come on the innovation in these areas.....
 It's certainly no news these days that the economy could be a lot better, but a recent survey from Gartner points to both the scale of the cutbacks affecting enterprise technology providers and how they are being hit by those cutbacks. According to Gartner 42 percent of the surveyed CIOs had cut back their budgets in Q109, and 90 percent of CIOs had made budget changes opting for cutbacks. While the average overall decline was about 4.2 percent among the surveyed CIOs, those cutting back were averaging about 7.2 percent.
Of more concern to information services providers, though, is how these cutbacks are impacting the vendors servicing these CIOs and their organizations. The two most popular methods for dealing with budget cutbacks this year mentioned in the Gartner survey have been to reduce headcount and to renegotiate contracts with vendors. So although information services providers may not be getting the axe, they're certainly getting that pared-down feeling in many instances. Of course, their clients still expect them to deliver outstanding service for those lower prices. Goodbye margins, hello aspirin. It's going to be a bumpy stretch.
There's no magic wand that can help an information services company avoid these cutbacks, but there are strategies that you can deploy which just might help to make the difference between pain and gain during challenging times. One key strategy is to use cutbacks as an opportunity to open a dialogue with your customers about aggregating information services. With different departments and work roles using different information services, oftentimes with overlapping functions and content sources, helping your customers to reduce the number of interfaces into those services can wind up being a cost-saving move for them that may create new revenue opportunities for you. In other words, instead of customers being forced to choose between one information service over another, help them to deliver the information from as many of them as possible under one more easily supported service.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if that aggregator who helped your client to solve their budget problems while improving information access was your company? Well, it certainly can be you - especially if you're a MuseGlobal OEM partner. MuseGlobal's MuseConnect content integration services enable any information technology and services provider to provide well-integrated access to any number of searchable information sources rapidly and reliably. Instead of looking at all of the other platforms in use at your clients as potential competitors for budget, they can become the sources of content that can be fed into an integrated solution that your own platform champions.
You can use MuseConnect to bring content from other platforms into your own platform using our exclusive Smart Connector technologies or create a custom interface that combines information from both your platforms and others exactly the way that your clients want to see it. And with MuseConnect's built-in management of network security, user administration and content source updating the complexities of bringing multiple platforms under one access point will turn out not to be so complex at all. Client support costs go down, their productivity goes up. So when push comes to shove on which platforms will get the lion's share of whatever budget is left, you can put yourself at the head of the line for getting a fat cut of that budget.
Our MuseConnect technologies are a key enabler for such dramatic turns because of their ability to provide reliable content integration at the drop of a hat. With more than 6,000 pre-built and easily configured Smart Connectors at your disposal, MuseConnect makes it easy to move rapidly from "We can help you" discussions to "We're ready to show you" discussions that can help to turn around budget discussions from a paring down to a win-win save - or more. And as always, since our Smart Connectors are maintained around the clock as a part of your MuseConnect service, your support costs for these victories are factored in easily to your bottom line.
So as you're wrestling with clients who are trying to eke their way through tougher times, remember that there can be great opportunities in these times to turn the tables on your competitors and to be the first to step forward as the aggregation solution that helped to save your clients money and to wind up improving information access all at the same time. Hopefully that will be enough to get your clients through the next year or so - and to put you in the driver's seat for when times get better.
 One of the great challenges in confronting the value of the open Web is that many of the most popular and timely sources of information are not being produced by traditional publishers. Who would have thought, for example, that a simple text messaging service like Twitter would explode into a major conduit for alerting people to breaking news and insights produced by millions of people? Yes, there's the "I just put peanut butter on my sandwich" kind of "breaking news" in that mix, but then, if you make peanut butter, perhaps that's news if you're trying to understand the quickly shifting world of consumer habits. Of course there's also a healthy mix of other sources in the stream of Twitter messages, including breaking headlines and comments from major news organizations, politicians, celebrities and just about anyone else who can pump out information 140 characters at a time on a moment's notice on their PCs and mobile devices. If Twitter represents the cutting edge of "real-time" information on the Web, then it's an edge with a powerful force behind it.
Yet for all of the recent excitement about Twitter, it's hardly the only source of important real-time information from online sources. The truth of the matter is that any information source can be a real-time source of information - if it's information that's important to you as soon as it's updated and you can access it in time for that information to be immediately relevant. It's important to factor in access to sources like Twitter into your strategy for real-time information awareness, but these other sources of information - what you might call "the dark real-time Web" - can provide you with insights and advantages that others will be missing in their search for real-time relevance. If it's important to your decision-making process and it's out there, you need it now.
This concept of engineering real-time relevance is nothing new to MuseGlobal, of course. Our MuseConnect technologies have been used for harvesting on-demand information from our thousands of Smart Connectors for more than a decade. MuseConnect is particularly well suited for extracting real-time relevance from any number of content sources because it's been designed from the outset to pass through updates and alerts from the freshest and most relevant information it can find from any content source. Instead of building a massive database of potentially out-of-date information from many sources, our Smart Connectors can go out and get fresh information from each and every source that matters to you and deliver it to you on any information platform where it's needed in whatever normalized data formats suit your operations.
In other words, it's important to have software that monitors Twitter if you want to be aware of real-time opinions, news and events, but why stop there? Other social media services, videos, GPS-enabled applications, corporate Web sites, subscription databases, government and public databases, catalogs and, most importantly, your clients' own internal databases - all of these are potential sources of real-time relevance for the services that publishers and technology companies provide to clients. If you wait for a search engine crawl to find the nuggets of value in those sources that you need, they could be hours, days or more out of date, and that's if they're even crawled, of course. If you rely only on data harvesting tools, you could find yourself waiting for those tools to be repaired when a source's data formats change and break down your ability to provide real-time relevance, while missing out on thousands of sources that are beyond the reach of typical harvesters.
So getting the most valuable information in real-time is not just as simple as parking a Twitter feed into a piece of software. It's about getting every bit of the freshest and best-organized information that you can use in the right format at the right time on the right platforms, day in and day out - and being able to return the favor of providing fresh updates to the sources that supply your own platforms. That's a much, much bigger picture for real-time than many publishers and technology companies may have put their arms around, but it's the picture that MuseGlobal's OEM partners have been embracing for years. Because we sell our MuseConnect technologies as a service, it's a picture that keeps on getting refreshed. We keep our partner's content connectors up-to-date every day, so that their thousands of installations around the world can have real-time information all the time.
The buzz on "real-time" is bound to build as more and more applications are built to take advantage of emerging fast-updating sources like Twitter, which means that you have to be ready to focus on the final products of your real-time automated editorial efforts as much as possible - instead of the infrastructure that brings that content from any number of sources of real-time information updates to your platform. And that's where MuseConnect and its Smart Connector technology comes in. We connect to the freshest sources of information and make sure that keeping connectivity to real-time information is the least of your concerns.
 The author Mark Twain once scoffed at reporters who had been writing stories about his having passed away by saying at a public appearance, "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Well, perhaps the buzz that the global economy is dying is also a bit premature, as well. While things are still pretty tough out there, we're picking up a lot of signs recently that companies are starting to bounce back and seize great opportunities for information products and services that beckon around the world.
The key to many of these opportunities, though, is the time and the cost of execution. With lean product development staffs and leaner client budgets, getting a client to "yes" means being able to turn ideas into actions as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. In the information industry, this often means that you have to be able to demonstrate a new concept for a product or service as rapidly as possible. The good news for many information technology and services companies is that today's software development environments enable companies to cobble together some great new application demos very quickly. A common sticking point, though, is that the content that would make those demo apps look best is not quite what clients were looking for - or just not available. Canned data and pages may get you past a few quick moments with a client, but when you want them to pull the string on the revenue-generating phase of a client relationship it generally takes more than that to build a high level of confidence.
This is where MuseGlobal has really helped our clients to shine in recent years, and even more in today's tough economy. Our MuseConnect content integration technologies offer information services developers truly amazing turnaround times in assembling content from any number of internal and external information sources. Having developed more than 6,000 Smart Connectors for MuseConnect through the years means that your ideas for assembling as much valuable content as possible in a new or enhanced information product or service can appear more rapidly than you may imagine. Since MuseGlobal maintains its own development staging services for our clients, we have the ability to start streaming updates from content sources to your development environment whenever you're ready to receive them. Sometimes within just a few hours of having spoken about an idea your development staff can be working with live data from the key information sources that they need to accelerate their efforts.
This can make an enormous difference in jump-starting innovation and product development from many perspectives. Instead of waiting weeks or months to get content from databases, subscription services, file services and search engines flowing into prototype applications, you can eliminate content connectivity and availability as a bottleneck for developing and testing new software and services. Besides shortening the product development cycle in general, it also means that you'll spend more time looking at "real-world" information flowing through your new applications that will put it through its paces. The result will be more reliable and useful applications that encounter fewer surprises once they hit your clients' production environments. Time-to-market issues get solved more rapidly and efficiently, which means that more revenues come more quickly. In an economy in which anything that can help a sales cycle to shorten is critical to meeting sales goals, you might say that MuseGlobal's Smart Connectors are like found money.
Once you do sell and install your new applications, the even better news is that MuseGlobal Smart Connectors will continue to be reliable for you and your clients all on their own. That's because MuseGlobal delivers its Smart Connectors as a service to you through MuseConnect's unique content integration architecture. Whether it's pre-existing content source connectors or connectors tailored to your specific needs, MuseGlobal will be testing your content connectors constantly - and ensuring that they keep on working for your clients. Instead of client teams having to focus on maintenance issues that are annoying your key accounts they can be focusing on the next great opportunities for your products and services to be solving valuable problems.
There are no perfect answers to bouncing back from the effects of a tough economy, of course, but we've discovered in these times that our MuseConnect OEM content integration solutions can help more answers to be tried, tested and delivered to more of our clients' customers - an advantage that can turn a tough sales environment into one in which you can have the edge through rapid innovation. I hope that we can help you and your teams to see how MuseGlobal technologies and services can put your own organization on the path to innovative information products and services soon - and to keep them running smoothly and cost-effectively for years to come.
 There was a time when Sun Microsystems was a rising, shining force in Silicon Valley, parlaying its variation of the Unix operating system running on its proprietary hardware into quite a tidy empire of servers, workstations and software services for many major enterprises and Web publishers. Topping off Sun's holdings was the promising Java platform-independent applications environment, which enabled more than a decade's worth of software on many platform's beyond Sun's own. And recently Sun's acquisition of MySQL gave them a key component in Web-oriented database development. Great stuff, but not great enough to drive Sun into a more competitive position against giants such as Microsoft and IBM.
It makes perfect sense, then, for Oracle to have picked up Sun to offer them more leverage against those same giants. With cloud computing and other forces commoditizing network server hardware, the pressure is on for most technology companies to add more value further up the technology "stack" as cost-effectively as possible. Be it MySQL, Oracle's own database offerings or a cross-platform programming environment such as Java, it takes a very full kit of technology offerings these days to be able to devise solutions that command premium investments from most enterprises. Sun's traditional hardware and systems assets may be of some use to Oracle to protect its databases running on those platforms, but the far greater value to Oracle is to give it components that will enable it to attach its databases and value-add services to the applications development environments that allow for rapid, cost-effective services development.
In other words, having excellent software is a good thing, but these days it's more important to help your clients to have excellent solutions. Increasingly this means ensuring that you have every resource at your disposal that could contribute to those solutions. That includes, of course, access to all of the content sources that they need to deliver the right information at the right time in the right applications on the right platforms. It's simply no longer possible to capture all of those content sources in a single database or Web server. There are too many legacy platforms and databases and too many new and rapidly changing technologies collecting new sources of content to risk any technology company's future on a handful of content assets. Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems is a key acknowledgment that the future of computing technology makes effective content integration an absolute necessity.
No wonder, then, that MuseGlobal finds itself a certified Oracle partner. Our MuseConnect for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search uses our world-leading OEM content integration technologies to enable content from key databases, subscription information services and search engines to integrate with all of the sources already accessible via Oracle's own Secure Enterprise Search software. The MuseGlobal technologies behind MuseConnect for Oracle Secure Enterprise search have enabled hundreds of technology companies and publishers to connect their technology platforms to the content sources that they need at thousands of installations around the world. With over 6,000 Smart Connectors to a very wide variety of content types and sources, MuseGlobal enables any content-delivering platform to push its way up the technology "stack" to higher levels of value rapidly and very cost-effectively.
Certainly Oracle's acquisition of Sun bodes well for a marketplace that needs more powerful and cost-effective publishing solutions that can be delivered on a wider array of enterprise, home and mobile platforms than ever before. It's nice to know, though, that MuseGlobal's content connector solutions are a key component in just about every imaginable major information publishing platform available today. I expect that we'll be seeing a lot more healthy competition amongst the technology giants with this key move by Oracle. In the meantime, we're glad here at MuseGlobal that our rapidly deployed and highly cost-effective Smart Connector content solutions help them all to compete more effectively.
 The SIIA 2009 Information Industry Summit was a great event for MuseGlobal. Maybe it's our improved messaging or maybe it's just good timing, but people who we were speaking to at the IIS really seemed to "get" our positioning as a company that can connect content sources to software applications and platforms more efficiently than any other OEM supplier. To some in the publishing and content industries this may not seem to be the most glamorous side of the business, but it's what is really creating enormous value for our enterprise, government, and media-oriented clients. Certainly the IIS provided a lot of the more glamorous side of publishing in its presentations and panels. From the opening keynote from Marjorie Scardino, Chief Executive of Pearson, to the ending keynote from Stephanie George, Executive Vice President of Time Inc., I heard a lot of good speakers - and some pretty flashy ones, too. Stephanie George's presentation was capped with a very dynamic slide deck with lots of multimedia showing how Time brands were being strengthened on the Web through their investment in technologies that made it easier for their editorial resources to appeal to their audiences. Fun to watch, of course, and I don't doubt that Time is getting good mileage out of these efforts. But in our experience, the brands of MuseGlobal customers that do best are the ones that focus on what a brand really does for its customers. The presentation by Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University on "Frictionless Information" captured this "doing" brand concept pretty well for me. His "Make my Page" concept was nothing radically new, but it was a good example of how to pull together highly customized pages assembled automatically from numerous sources of content on the fly on a topic into an aggregated document. This "content is as content does" approach to publishing may lack the pizazz of many traditional brand publications, but it seems to be where the real action is with our clients. Yes, publications finished by an editorial team certainly still matter in a big way, and we supply content connectors to many of the publications that do this, but the more efficiently that you can do the heavy lifting to assemble and to integrate all of the content sources that are needed to satisfy them, the more that you'll be able to focus on delivering the exact content and features that can build your brand's unique value. Enterprise publishers and technology companies certainly understand the importance of this "heavy lifting" for their brands, but it's easier said than done. Most I.T. teams are either way too busy to focus effectively on building enough connectors to the content sources that can really make a difference to their clients or will find that to do a robust job of connecting to content sources will turn out to be far more expensive and time-consuming than they can afford to do in a tight economy. Everyone's customers are pleading for more and more content from published sources and from their own sources that's well-organized, integrated, and all in once place, but it's just not that easy to pull it all together cost-effectively. I guess that's another way of saying that MuseGlobal is going to be very busy this year, because our highly scalable Smart Connector OEM technology is the most cost-effective and reliable way to get the heavy lifting done for connecting content to brand-name content and technology services. Instead of having to say "no" to clients and senior executives, MuseGlobal gives our clients the ability to say "yes" more quickly to getting new and better content into their products. If a brand is all about saying "yes" to your clients - then it's clear to us at MuseGlobal that fewer things can help to build a brand better than the ability to connect to content rapidly through our Smart Connectors. Be it in online media, enterprise subscription services or content integration services, I think that it's worth us chatting with you about how your brand can benefit from the heavy lifting that MuseGlobal technology can put in place for you today. I hope that you enjoyed IIS. SIIA conferences are great value, and MuseGlobal will be at SIIA's NetGain in San Francisco in May.
 MuseGlobal's new partnership with professional services firm Capgemini is off to a rousing start. Our world-class content connectors are being recognized widely now for their ability to deliver mission-critical content from (and to) key sources of enterprise and Web content. No surprise, then, that Capgemini Government Solutions approached us when they were faced with the challenge of integrating more intelligence and background data that would allow public officials to connect, collaborate on, analyze, investigate and identify public safety risks for government agencies in the U.S. Can't say more about the client at this point, of course (you understand), but Gapgemini needed to expand their vision for providing a broad array of information sources to law enforcement officials that would not be compromised by the typical challenges of content integration and applications development. Do you recall how at the time of the 9/11 attacks the F.B.I. had an information system that could respond only to single-word search queries? Security-oriented government information services have improved a lot since those dark days, but in doing so there has arisen a galaxy of repositories that need to be pulled together to have truly effective information services - just as major government budget constraints begin to kick in. Capgemini had a vision as to how to pull these services together, one that needed to be done rapidly, cost-effectively and reliably. Hello, MuseGlobal? You mean, you can connect us to that content now? You mean, you can implement this when? Before you know it, the Capgemini Intelligence Grid was extended, integrating content from all of the key sources that law enforcement officials need to catch the bad folks using MuseGlobal's exclusive MuseConnect architecture. MuseGlobal Smart Connectors truly were the key to this project. Unlike other content connectors, which are very limited in their ability to be configured and maintained easily, MuseConnect content connectors are readily adapted to any content source quickly and encompass a library of more than 6,000 pre-configured content connectors for the most likely sources and platforms that content integrators require for robust federated content applications. Also unlike other content connectors, our Smart Connectors are maintained by MuseGlobal automatically, so you can keep your entire range of sources normalized through MuseConnect acting as one unified source of content. We're very excited by this new relationship with Capgemini, which demonstrates how well professional services organizations can use MuseGlobal to turn their powerful content integration ideas into real applications. It's one thing to promise sophisticated and reliable content connectivity, and quite another to deliver it in a timely and cost-effective fasion to your clients. Fortunately Capgemini decided to go with the world leader in content connectivity and brought a key expansion of available content to their dream service for law enforcement. Our thanks to our Capgemini partners in relying on MuseGlobal to unify everything that's needed for security intelligence for our nation's law enforcement professionals. What a better way to show the value of unified content.
 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.
 We had a good time at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale this year, our first time at this event. Certainly there were many familiar faces from the content industry there, including Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, who gave what I thought was probably the most insightful presentation of the conference. Y.S. highlighted how the content industry needs to focus more on developing valuable "experiences" than more content. What did he mean by this? Well, certainly Y.S. had in mind many of the workflow-oriented tools that publishers are beginning to emphasize in trying to add value to long-established database services. And I would think that it might also include some of the advanced social media projects that Elsevier and other major scientific publishers are embarking on that enable scientists to collaborate on building valuable reference content and research. But I think that Y.S. was also pointing towards one of the key factors that makes publishing so hard for many established companies these days: owning content is not as important oftentimes as getting content to do something useful for people. If content can be thought of as the raw materials of publishing, then getting content from point "A" to point "B" is no longer such a great business to be in now that the Web and corporate intranets make the A-B value proposition pretty low on the value totem pole. Search engines that publishers put on top of their own content collections help to find those raw materials more easily, but the value of those searchable services is considered high only when they are able to locate all of the possible content that applies to a given problem or task. Leaving content out of the equation means that you have only part of what you need to build a valuable experience. That's kind of like building a fantastic roller coaster but leaving out a few hundred feet of track. Sometimes doing just part of the job very well is just not enough. The traditional solution that publishers would use to address the "missing track" issue would be to license more content or to create it themselves. That worked pretty well when there were relatively few sources of licensed content and relatively few people willing to create it themselves. But most sizable enterprises have very sophisticated sources of internal content as well as a growing array of sources that are generated by their peers in other companies or universities that help them to meet their goals. Add in Web sites that are growing sources of fresh information about businesses and key trends and it's not so easy to fill in that missing track. It's as if the roller coaster that the customer wants keeps growing far faster than the publsihers' ability to fill the gap. In the experience economy that Y.S. references it's all about anticipating the gaps and finding more innovative ways to fill them more quickly than someone else, so that the raw materials of content can be transformed into experiences as efficiently as possible. Well, if the value of experiences is so high, then why do publishers still place so much emphasis on getting content integrated into the back end of databases when it's greatest value is found outside of a database? In other words, why not push the point of content integration as close to the point at which content is experienced? This will enable more sources to be brought together from more places more easily and efficiently. Well, not surprisingly that's the key to what MuseGlobal does with content. The Muse Content Machine is a content integration platform that enables a publisher to assemble more searchable sources of content more quickly and more effectively than any one else. Instead of trying to create one master database with one login and one search engine The Muse Content Machine can enable a publisher to build applications that access multiple searchable sources from a single query. To your customers it will look like you've built a rich application from one commonly indexed database. But behind the scenes The Muse Content Machine federates content from thousands of different types of content sources and delivers the freshest and most relevant content from each source. Nasty details such as multiple source logins, different data formats and different types of content sources - search engines, databases, Web harvesting, feeds, video and audio, catalogs - are all ironed out very neatly and efficiently by The Muse Content Machine. The Muse Content Machine lets publishers focus on getting the right content into the experiences that their customers want, regardless of whether those sources are in their key databases, at the customer's site or available from the Web. With thousands of different types of content sources already integrated into The Muse Content Engine our answer to "can you integrate this?" is usually "been there, done that." Best of all, when changes to a source occur The Muse Content Machine makes it easy to respond to those changes and keep all of your sources working together. To your customers it will be just one big powerful experience - but to you it will be the miracle of the most advanced content integration capabilities making everything that's not unified appear to be a unified source of content. The result: you'll have spent a lot less on developing content and a lot more on developing the experiences that will bring in higher revenues with lower maintenance costs. Keep your eye on Elsevier as they begin to take advantage of Y.S. Chi's vision - and keep an eye on MuseGlobal as we help publishers, software companies and other media players to create more realizable value from unified content.
 Kudos to Dow Jones Enterprise Media for announcing their acquisition of Generate, the online business information harvesting service that has been a center of much buzz for the past several months. What made Generate such a hot topic of discussion? While there are a lot of companies out there involved in harvesting content from the Web, Generate was taking this content, brushing up its quality and enabling it to shine in high-end business applications that help sales and marketing professionals to understand quickly how to translate Web content into sales and business development opportunities. Instead of focusing just on the mass markets Generate was the first company that tried to turn harvested Web content into a high-end business information application. A great story, but if it was so great why go the acquisition route now? I see two factors that made this a good time for Generate to cash in with Dow Jones. First, Dow Jones brings the Generate team a much larger and entrenched sales force already selling Factiva and Dow Jones feeds, products which have proven themselves but which are not likely to make huge new sales strides in a rougher economy. Adding Generate to their sales kit will enable them to penetrate more accounts more quickly without the "will this startup survive or not" question hanging over their heads. The second factor, though, is probably more important: having corralled all of the Web content that they could get their hands on through Web harvesting, how was Generate going to add more value to the product? Well, inevitably the answer would have been to add more content from licensed databases and from client databases. Adding Factiva content to the Generate quiver of content sources is certain to give a boost to their value-add analysis capabilities. The question is, how many more sources can be integrated quickly with Generate's platform - or any other Web harvesting platform, for that matter. Web harvesting is a highly potent way to gather great business information - it's something that MuseGlobal does as well - but it's hardly the end point for making a great workflow application for today's enterprises as quickly as possible. Internal databases, subscription databases, file management platforms, Web site content management systems - all of these need to be sources for enterprise applications that are going to deliver the most valuable answers to today's professionals. Web harvesting is tuned to do just that - to get the most important content out of Web pages as efficiently as possible. Integrating content in from other sources, including real-time feeds, is not necessarily Web harvesting's strength. Web harvesting engines are essentially Web search engine crawlers with special processing to extract specific fields of content from Web pages. That's great for what it is, but that's not necessarily going to get you timely content from other sources such as document servers, databases and datafeeds. Access methods, protocols, update cycles, security and logins, proprietary data formats - all these and more can make it difficult or downright impossible to use the same software that you use for Web harvesting to access other content sources and return the freshest information available. Our ten years of experience in developing content integration technology shows that it's a far better approach to let Web mining do what it does best and to use other techniques to integrate content from other sources into applications driven by federated content sources. This is where content integration technology from MuseGlobal can help Web harvesting applications to shine. Instead of trying to get Web harvesting software to integrate other sources, why not use The Muse Content Machine to let Web harvesting do what it does best in a content integration architecture that's already able to integrate both Web harvesting and thousands of other types of content sources? The Muse Content Machine will enable you to take search engines, subscription databases, Muse Web harvesting or your own Web harvesting technologies, client databases, real-time news and data feeds and any other content source you need and get them to produce rich, federated content for your Web sites and client applications quickly and effectively. We can configure The Muse Content Machine to integrate all of the content sources that you need and return results from a single query into a single or multiple streams of updates or alerts tailored to your specifications - or build front-end applications with easy-to-use Muse application development tools that can federate content from all of your key content sources into rapidly developed user applications. So our hats are off to Dow Jones for picking one of the most valuable up-and-coming companies harvesting insights from Web content. Generate's Web harvesting and semantic analysis combined with Dow Jones databases is sure to accelerate the power of business information in today's major enterprises. The Muse Content Machine can help these kinds of integrations of Web harvesting to move from concept to reality far faster than you may imagine. Then again, if you're familiar with track record as the leader in OEM content integration, perhaps you can imagine it.
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Today's eWeek online version, 2012-02-20, contains a story, Cloud Computing and Data Integration: 10 Trends to Watch, within its "Cloud" section seemingly written around the capabilities of Muse. Or, perhaps MuseGlobal has been developing capabilities within its flagship software platform which fit the "waves of the future" now starting to break on the shore of today's business needs.
