Andrew White

Toby Bell, a colleague of mine at Gartner, just published a note called, Get Ready for Content in the Cloud.  The note focuses on the rapid growth likely to be seen in content and services in SaaS deployment models, which exist outside of the firewall and hence in the “cloud”.  When the word “content” is mention we often need to be clear what we mean since content means different things to different people.  For many users, content is synonymous to “unstructured data” which, as my good Gartner friend Mark Beyer will attest vigorously, does not really exist.  Data can hardly be unstructured – it may have implicit structure – it is just that the data may not be understood by people, or computers.  So the real measure is of “machine readability”.  If the data is of “high machine readability” then there is a chance we can automate aspects of management and use of the data.  If machine readability were “low” then there is much less chance we can do this.  But I digress…

The Content in the cloud note really talks about content as email and records management.  There are, of course, lots of email content and records across firms.  In my part of the business, there is an awful lot of highly machine readable data also, that acts like content in that the machine readability is not as high as users would like, or worse, there are competing or alternative ways of interpreting that data.  So the note made me think of an MDM Prediction we are working on for our end of year publication.  

We stated at our recent MDM Summit, “By 2012, 20% of revenues associated with MDM will be sourced by Software as a Service (SaaS) or Cloud Computing Deployment models”.  For MDM, content is real business data that can be used to make the business work more efficiently or effectively.  And some business oriented master data is already sourced from “cloud-based” offerings.  In MDM for Customer Data there are many marketing service providers that offer actual data (think Acxiom, D&B, TDlinx, customer data) as well as services (think of cleaning up customer data files) and in MDM for Product Data there are industry oriented product catalogs (think Bighammer, 1-SYNC, Inovis) that help grease the skids of business-to-business.  So cloud-based content is not new to MDM; but there is certainly a potential for more hosted offerings, services, and data, in the cloud.

The question today is really focused on, “to what degree do firms accept, and even seek, what might be perceived as confidential information, from outside the firewall?”  Some few firms accept that some aspects of product data are NOT confidential and COULD be sourced from outside the firewall.  But when it comes to customer data, and even customer lists, that data is a tad more sensitive.  So MDM spend, related to SaaS and cloud based computing, is likely to be held back for some time.  Perhaps the 20% by 2012 was overstated at the Summit: it might be nearer 10% or even less.  What do you think?