Pipes and Water of Content and Technology
At Outsell we talk about the “pipes” and “water”. Technology being the pipes and content, information, and data representing the water. Twice in one day, we saw more examples of the marriage of content and technology to better serve users at their point of need. The software industry has always called this stuff application software. The information industry calls it workflow solutions, but at the end of the day, the software (pipes) and the content (water) need to be brought together to become a complete solution. Very few firms in the industry have dominant positions in both. The exception here is Bloomberg. For years, it has thrived with its desktop terminal, gobs of aggregated or original content, and one-stop, one-size-fits-all predictable pricing. Salesforce owns the desktop in sales automation, but it didn’t have third-party content or original content for a long time. It finally achieved that through partnerships. Companies continue to marry their capabilities, bringing the right solution to their customers. This week, we saw more software on steroids. IBM Watson got embedded into Rocket Fuel and Thomson Reuters integrated its World-Check with SAP Business Partner Screening.
In the crazy world of AI, with SaaS being so yesterday, one thing is certain: Sometimes these seemingly ho-hum announcements speak volumes about what’s real and what matters — solutions that help customers do real work. Outsell’s partner David Worlock says it best, “We can dust off the hype cycle graph, so well proven by all sorts of events in the networked world. In its new manifestation, AI has climbed, once again, to the Peak of Exalted Expectations. On the basis that nothing succeeds in the network until it has failed, it will now plunge to the trough of disappointment. There will be failures and crashes. In time, it will climb back (but not so far) onto the plateau of systems reliability, with dependent clients who know what it can do — and what it can’t.”
But in the meantime, as Outsell maps that progress and analyzes it daily for clients, and as we remind clients about learnings from an MD Anderson/IBM Watson trough, this is certainly the second and possibly the third time AI has come through the cycle. While the VCs and technocrats pitch the exalted expectations, we find it easier to talk about machine learning and workflow enhancement to clients and marriages of those like Thomson Reuters and SAP, D&B, Salesforce, and many more. On Watson, we remain skeptical, and so we’re watching Rocket Fuel closely. Here is a software company partnering with a software company. With MD Anderson, it was human beings and the practice of medicine. That’ll snag ’em up every time.
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