NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Up the Gap: How Enterprises are Leading the Way Towards DRM for Premium Content
			John Blossom
			6 July 2004
SUMMARY:			Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been engaged aggressively not only by consumer media companies but increasingly by the enterprises who have lots of content to keep tabs on for to their own managers and for regulators keeping an eye on monitoring corporate operations. About the only ones not playing the DRM game aggressively at this point are the premium content providers servicing enterprises. They may have their reasons and there are plenty of pieces still falling in to place with DRM, but  it's no longer a capability that premium publishers can afford to avoid. Expect companies that are willing to embrace DRM aggressively for premium professional content to come out ahead in today's solutions-oriented vContent environment.

I haven't had much of an opportunity this year to get to the baseball park with my son, so it was a pleasure last Thursday night to work our way through the traffic and street vendors to our local Major League team's field to watch a great contest. With hope all but gone for pulling out a win a persistent batter for our team stroked the ball weakly along the grass, sending it dribbling up between two players who, try as they might, just couldn't reach the ball. The next batter stroked a mighty blow to score a tying run, and soon thereafter our team pulled out a come-from-behind victory that had the home fans rejoicing in "who would have thought" disbelief. Sports in general reminds us that we really do never know what will happen next and that oftentimes it's the little plays executed well that open the door to stunning successes.

We see digital rights management's quiet but persistent progress in the realm of enterprise content as just such a table-turning play that is ready to change how premium content is distributed and managed for business. This progress owes little if anything to premium publishers and aggregators, however. Still wedded to search engines on top of premium content databases of a scope that appears to be increasingly narrow in comparison to the wealth of content being indexed around them, premium publishers and aggregators are still focused on defending their products' value via gatekeeping mechanisms to protect large content sets. Instead of publishers leading the charge it's the institutions themselves that are embracing DRM to manage content that needs to respond to the needs of corporate compliance and securities regulations. Not wanting to have a shred of evidence of wrongdoing unaccounted for or a single secret dribbling into the wrong hands via a multiplicity of platforms and storage options, DRM is allowing institutions to define tight parameters around the use and distribution of the most critical enterprise content. And unlike earlier attempts DRM the latest efforts, today's tools and methods, such as Digital Containers' recently patented content usage tracking mechanism,  emphasize transparency and ease of use that are more likely to ensure DRM's widespread use and utility in many environments. No wonder that recent forecasts see enterprise DRM spending growing seven-fold by 2008.

Between enterprises and individuals working at their institutions who are increasingly adept at downloading rights-protected consumer content about the only ones who are not intent on playing the DRM game are the premium content providers who are supposed to be keeping themselves on the cutting edge of vContent for their clients' sake. What's likely to happen in enterprise DRM as this routine play for infrastructure turns into a major scoring opportunity for content players? Here are a few thoughts as to where this may be leading sooner rather than later:

• Search engines overtake aggregators as key content distributors. Be it via enterprise installations or public Web portals, the technology and breadth of content that can be located effectively by today's search engine technology is generally leagues ahead of that employed by today's publishers and aggregators - or used by them to prop up their own technology efforts. Relying on password-oriented controlled access to content database collections has been the "front door" to most premium content products for too long. As more mainstream publishers of premium professional publications and databases begin to understand and exploit the capabilities of new search technologies combined with DRM access controls, institutional audiences will find themselves more able to use premium content in the same context as other valued content sources far more easily - even as publishers' rights are protected.
• Individuals bring more content to the equation. Time was when a bookshelf in one's office was a knowledge repository with limited institutional leverage - sometimes on purpose, but oftentimes out of lack of viable means of managing the integration of personal content with institutional needs. But individuals and departments with their own subscriptions and licenses are a more important part of the institutional picture for premium content, becoming not just individual users but jumping-off points for introducing enterprise use to their materials via rights-protected distribution through enterprise search engines. This may at the same time make it easier for institutions to recognize when there are redundant resources that need to be rationalized, but in the end it will maximize the value of every drop of premium content  in the same way that institutions are getting a hold of every other content asset in their domain - increasingly with DRM controls.
• Workflows become more easily supported by premium content. With lines between institutional content and publishers' content in workflow applications becoming more blurred in the eyes of users, DRM that focuses on entitling highly portable content objects may be the kind of control that will allow publishers to manage the dissemination  of content via Web services and other development-oriented distribution channels in a manner that will eliminate much of the sales overhead needed today to complete the integration of premium content into institutional portals and applications. Companies such as Thomson that specialize increasingly in workflow integration may be able to continue changing their profiles to be able to keep adding value on the front end of both their DRM-protected content and institutional content, but may also find themselves pushed to the sidelines as other players with more technical depth add more custom value to content where it's needed most.

There are lots of kinks to be worked out for the effective integration of premium content in institutions via DRM - security and anonymity management are two major hurdles for institutions to consider - but as these institutions begin to see the bottom-line value of getting content out of foreign databases and into their own DRM-enabled environments more cost-effectively, the pressure on publishers to provide these capabilities can be expected to grow quickly. DRM may look like a little inconsequential factor today in institutional content sales,  but expect this little squibber to be setting up some major scoring opportunities in the next few years. Batter up!

- John Blossom

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