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| Shore's
Research, Commentary and Consulting Receives Prestigious
Recognition.
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Content as a Service: The Crowded
Intersection of Enterprise Content and Technology |
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6 March 2006 |
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The move towards technology providers packaging software as
a service (SaaS) is attracting an increasing number of
enterprise and media content companies determined to
provide more functional solutions to their audiences. Some
such as LexisNexis go all out and partner with major SaaS
infrastructure providers to engineer complete
subscription-based solutions that combine internal and
external content into a useful whole. Others take a more
modular approach and provide premium content solutions
within existing SaaS platforms. Both approaches have their
advantages and precedents, but for content companies the
one choice that's not on the table is ignoring the power of
this growing movement. |
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The concept of
Software as a Service (SaaS) is hot stuff for many
venturesome companies these days. The term was popularized as a
marketing concept as
Salesforce.com's subscription-based online CRM service
began to penetrate corporate accounts, triggering other service
models for a wide variety of business functions. Salesforce.com
extended the power of its own SaaS model with its
AppExchange suite of subscription-based add-ons for SF.com
that include both functionality extensions and premium content
from other vendors tightly integrated into their services. SaaS
promises the convenience of an online content service combined
with the ability to manage an enterprise's content assets to
eliminate a huge amount of I.T. overhead and hassle best
endured for more mission-specific applications. .
Many enterprise and media content suppliers must be
chuckling as their friends from I.T. catch up with the
"radical" idea of service subscriptions providing a high level
of value to their clients. The subscription database business
has been churning along for decades while high-power services
in finance, legal and other knowledge-intensive industries have
long featured the integration of enterprise and external
content via a service-driven infrastructure as a goal for high
levels of vendor revenue. Given these long-standing
capabilities there may be as many content suppliers that are
trying to position their operations to benefit from SaaS in
enterprise markets as there are publishers that are just
beginning to decipher the acronym.
For example
LexisNexis
recently
announced its alliance with
NetDocuments, an infrastructure provider specializing in
document management and collaboration services that will
facilitate deep integration of client content and LexisNexis
content. In addition to providing integration of the LexisNexis
TotalSearch service that provides combined views of in-house
and subscription legal documents the NetDocuments solution will
provide legal firms of all sizes with document and email
management services with built-in extranet capability, disaster
recovery, archival and records management services. This goes
beyond mere hosting services to becoming an ongoing
subscription service providing premium content within a
client-oriented framework that is focused on being a true
end-to-end solution to managing intellectual property at legal
firms - and a much different business than many publishers and
aggregators have pursued to date.
SaaS provides an arena for extending a content brand and its
services into one that looks client solutions truly from the
enterprise's goals on out rather than a content set on in. But
it's also one of those acronyms which challenges enterprise and
media content providers to think carefully about where they can
provide the most value in a potentially complex range of
services. Here are a few things to think about as you consider
what role your organization should play in the SaaS mix:
- The underlying basis for subscriptions can change
radically via SaaS. One of the key advantages that
content companies offer to enterprises in their market
sectors is the ability to manage a wide range of products and
services within a unified subscription framework.
Historically many vendors have equated this with a database
or other central source and its distribution throughout an
enterprise organization, and therefore have centered
subscription services around the content in that database.
But the key opportunity offered by SaaS is the potential to
begin to walk away from licensing content stored in a
database as the core of a subscription proposition. From the
client's perspective, any range of services that provides a
total business solution which has measurable and ongoing
benefit to an organization is what will attract subscription
dollars. In this sense, enterprise-oriented content companies
are transforming themselves into supply chain management
experts for a much broader range of intellectual property
assets. Similar administrative infrastructure, to be sure,
but with much, much broader and dynamic markets at their
disposal.
- The services game has been played before. Learn from
earlier lessons. In the securities industry content
companies such as
Reuters
and infrastructure services providers such as
Macgregor
as well as major securities exchanges have mixed the
supplying of securities trading infrastructure and financial
content on a subscription basis for many years. While there
is good money in this business, there comes a time when the
infrastructure side of these plays seems inevitably to pose
pricing challenges to the publishing side. Clients come to
value the total solution and its impact on the bottom line
more than they do the ability of premium content to influence
the top line via a handful of productive users. If you're
ready to provide complete solutions of all kinds for your
clients, then this is the game for you. If you're hoping to
use SaaS plays to funnel in more content subscription
revenues, the choice is more complex.
- But there are many ways to play this game. As
Salesforce.com's AppExchange demonstrates with its widening
choice of plug-in premium content solutions there are ways in
which content providers can play in SaaS without having to
chase the whole infrastructure pie. SaaS has become
synonymous with outsourcing of large chunks of
infrastructure, but over time there is going to be more
high-margin value in providing much more focused solutions
combining content and functionality within enterprises that
can be added to a desktop or an enterprise portal as easily
as opening an email or clicking on a Web page link. The
more sophisticated that content services become with
embedded, downloadable and tailored functionality the easier
it becomes for content services to create highly personalized
value similar to the traditional publishing business' core
proposition but leveraging software services heavily.
With enormous opportunities to provide much more efficient
and normalized services for enterprises through SaaS
capabilities this is a movement that is only at the very
beginning of its gestation. Content providers will need
to assess where the opportunities lie to capture specific
vertical or horizontal segments of their markets via SaaS
capabilities, but they will also have to understand where they
are better off adapting to this changing landscape and
tailoring content services for ready adaptation within SaaS
infrastructures as efficiently as possible. Either way, content
as a service will thrive when its core value proposition
centers around meeting the needs of its audiences in venues
that they value.
-
John Blossom
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