Thanks and Happy New Year

As I sit in snowy Tahoe with a glass of pinot noir in hand (and some Veuve Clicquot chilling for midnight) I thought I'd take a moment to say "thank you" to all.

• Thanks to Mark Logic customers for having faith in us and for trusting us with your business.

• Thanks to Mark Logic employees for delivering a record year, driving strong growth in 2008, and -- despite a chilling economic environment -- record fourth-quarter sales
  

• Thanks to the Mark Logic board and investors for your continuing support.
  

• Thanks to readers of the Mark Logic CEO Blog. Subscription and site visits are at record numbers, and I've had some major recognition for the blog this year -- including the recent kudos from the ReadWriteWeb -- which makes the time spent feel worthwhile and the atypical approach seem validated.

Happy New Year!

Best,
Dave

VCs Say 2009 Will Be a Tough Year

In keeping with my predictions series, here are the results of a recently released survey by the National Venture Capital Association featuring predictions about venture capital in 2009. The survey includes responses from more than 400 venture capitalists and was taken between 11/24 and 12/12/08. Some takeaways:

• 92% of VCs think 2009 funding will decrease compared to 2008
• Clean Tech and Biotech were seen as the biggest growth areas
• Media and Semiconductors were seen as the biggest shrinkage areas
  
• More than 60% of VCs predict a slowdown in seed and early-stage financing
  
• 72% of VCs think the IPO market will re-open in 2010 or thereafter (i.e., not in 2009)
• VCs are indirectly predicting a shake-out: 96% say that more VC firms will not be able to raise money.
• 92% agree that venture returns will drop over the next 5 years
• In a rare bit of optimism, only 56% of VCs think the economy will worsen in 2009. 19% actually think it will improve.
  

There are also some good historical stats in the back of the presentation. Takeaways:

• VC fundraising peaked in 2000 at $104B
  
• The minimum in the last decade was 2002 at $3.8B
• The last three years have averaged around $30B
  

Here is the press release: Venture Capitalists Predict a Difficult 2009 (PDF). Here are the survey slides (also PDF), which I've also embedded below via Slideshare.

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2008: The Year Internet Surpassed Newspapers

See this Cnet article by Dan Farber entitled Print News is Fading, But the Content Lives On. Among other things, he presents the result of a recent Pew Research survey that showed the Internet passing newspapers in 2008 in response to the question: "where do you get most of your national and international news?"

From Farber's article:

Most newspapers have figured out that you create content for the Web first and that the print edition is a byproduct of that output. Television programming can be viewed on a TV, PC, smartphone, or digital billboard. But as NBC's Jeff Zucker said recently, "People had been counting on digital exposure. I had been trying to talk about the fact that even as it grew, it was not necessarily the big growth engine for legacy media companies that were trading those analog dollars for digital dimes. We're now up to dimes. That's an improvement. It's still not a dollar for a dime kind of business that I would like to be in."

I love the quote about trading "dollars for dimes." I think it captures the problem perfectly. (Much as the 2000-era quote "selling dollars for 90 cents" captured the essence of most Internet business models.)

I believe we are still very much in transition between Internet and print models because the Internet crowd is getting a "free ride" from the major news organizations. I'm not sure how it's going to work out in the end, but I've learned that Innovator's Dilemma style transitions can take decades to play out.

First, you need to damage the disrupted badly enough to force them to change, which can take years. Second, you need the disrupted to either go out of business or change before you reach steady state, because there can be a long "free ride" period where the disrupted is enabling the disruptors.

For example, what would Google news be if there were no New York Times, AP, CNN, and AFP? You can only give away something that exists and someone is somehow going to have to pay -- either directly or indirectly -- for the creation of "free" content.

Only when newspapers stop bleeding and start dying (in numbers) will we be able to see how things look when there is no free ride to enjoy.

By analogy, it's a bit like the situation in consumer electronics. If I want to get educated on home theatre, I can visit a Magnolia store and speak to a highly knowledgeable salesperson and play with different units. Then I can buy the system at Costco for 30% less. Magnolia has given me a free education, but if it were not for Magnolia, Costco might not have gotten the sale because I might have simply remained a non-consumer due to confusion.

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FBI Issues Code-Breaking Challenge

As they did last year, the FBI has again issued a code-breaking challenge. But this year, they say, the code is slightly more difficult.


For assistance, they offer up a primer entitled Analysis of Criminal Codes and Ciphers.

Marketers Beware: Even Dilbert Says Everything is a Platform

Thanks to a post by Darren Cunningham on LucidEra's blog I found this wonderful Dilbert cartoon which concludes that EVERYTHING IS A PLATFORM.

I was happy to find this because tech marketers have so thoroughly over-used the word "platform" that I now rarely use it myself -- even when I think it would have been appropriate.

More thoughts:

• Using "platform" to avoid "product." Product is not a four-letter word. I'm amazed at the number of companies that try to use any word other than product to describe their offering. Example: "Well, our platform does XYZ."

• Using "solution" to avoid "product." I'm similarly amazed at the number of companies who do a global find/replace on the word "product" with the word "solution" in their marketing. Example: "Our drill-bit solutions do XYZ." Just say "our products do XYZ" or more simply "our drill bits do XYZ."

• The intent of solutions marketing is not to replace the word product with the word solution; it's to lead your sales and marketing by talking about problems that customers worry about solving instead of your product's features. Example: talk about vendor-managed inventory to retailers (a problem) instead of aggregate awareness (a BI tool performance feature).

• Use of platform to sound "strategic." One of my pet peeves if when people use platform as a synonym for product because it sounds more strategic.
  

In reality, a platform is something you build upon. So if you don't have some sort of API then you can't be a platform.

I remember in the early days of Business Objects, most people considered "tool" a four-letter word (which technically it is, but you get the idea). People wanted to say "anything but tool" because "tools were cheap" and "tools were not strategic." Over time, BI did in fact become a platform but only after APIs were added (and then fixed) and slowly people started building applications on top.

Similarly, in its early days Salesforce was most certainly not a platform, but an application delivered as a service. Today, however, that's different because they offer Force on a platform as a service (PaaS) basis and people build on it.

Net/net: if no one's building on top, it's not a platform. So, marketers, figure out what your offering is, and then be proud to call it that. Don't call it a platform when it's not a platform because you think it sounds strategic. You'll only confuse yourself and your customers in turn.

ReadWriteWeb on the Mark Logic CEO Blog

The only thing better than the snowy, Lake Tahoe views this morning was finding this reference to the Mark Logic CEO Blog on one of the top Internet blogs, ReadWriteWeb.

Here's an excerpt from the post, entitled 2009 Predictions Across the Web.

Dave Kellogg Advises Corporate Bloggers to Get Real

Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, suggests that many corporations have latched onto the blogging phenomenon as a means to regurgitate their standard corporate messages. Blogging this way doesn't work and if you're considering doing it - don't. As a CEO who has been blogging for over three years, Dave's words are well worth noting. His blogging style is also well worth emulating.

Dave's recommendations:

• If you're going to make a corporate blog, go real or go home.
• There is no point in ghost-written or PR-written blogs.
• In my view, corporate blogs shouldn't exist. If you want a corporate blog, go find a few corporate bloggers instead.
• Encourage those bloggers to write openly and honestly about your industry.
• Let them ramble off-topic once in a while. You might discover something.

Surowiecki on Newspapers

Continuing my recent rants about newspapers, please see this interesting story in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, entitled News You Can Lose.

On the source of the problems:

There’s no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year. For most of the past decade, newspaper companies had profit margins that were the envy of other industries. This year, they have been happy just to stay in the black. Many traditional advertisers, like big department stores, are struggling, and the bursting of the housing bubble has devastated real-estate advertising. Even online ads, which were supposed to rescue the business, have declined lately, and they are, in any case, nowhere near as lucrative as their print counterparts.

While I've always seen publishers, and newspapers in particular, as challenged with The Innovator's Dilemma, before reading this article for some reason I'd never associated them with another of my favorite essays, Marketing Myopia (PDF for sale), by Harvard marketing guru Theodore Levitt.

From Surowiecki:

Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

While I love Levitt's thoughts on marketing, the usual objection to Marketing Myopia is: say Penn Central Railroads had fully envisioned the future -- just because they successfully ran a railroad, do you actually believe that Penn Central Airlines would have been a big success? Even fully informed, can you get there from here? Put differently, seeing the future and having the core competencies to compete in the future are two different things.

I have a similar objection on behalf of newspapers. It's one thing to anticipate the whittling away of your classified ad business. It's quite another to have the skillset and Internet savvy to come up with Craigslist. In fact, if you could travel back in time and tell the Tribune Company about their future, how much do think they could have changed?

I hate to be fatalistic here and yes, they wouldn't have let themselves get involved in a highly leveraged buy-out -- but financing strategy aside -- do you think it would have changed much? Even with a fully informed visitor from the future whispering in their ear, do you think they ever could have made a Tribuneslist successful? And even if they could, what about economics. Craigslist runs a nationwide classified advertising platform and does it with about 25 staff.

Back to Surowiecki:

The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it.

He continues with a great soundbite:

The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us.

We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.

This argument is right in line with the "free ride" concept that I blogged about a few days ago. He concludes:

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is

The complete New Yorker story is here.

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E-Books Starting to Take Off

I'm a big fan of my Kindle, so I'm not surprised that e-books are starting to take off. To use what will quickly become a tired analogy: Amazon has done for e-books what Apple did for e-music with iTunes. With Amazon and the Kindle, you have:

• A online store to buy content
• A wireless connection to that store (one-upping the iPod which still requires connecting to your computer)
  
• An attractive price point (most e-books are $9.95)
• And, of course, a quality device with high resolution, lots of storage, and good battery life

I'll consider the adjustable font size (a big plus for my aging eyes) and the ability to buy single editions of international newspapers (e.g., Le Monde) gravy.

From The New York Times article:

“The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven’t done anything,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. “But it’s happening now. This is really starting to take off.”

On Kindle sales:

It is difficult to quantify the success of the Kindle, since Amazon will not disclose how many it has sold and analysts’ estimates vary widely. Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company, said he believed Amazon had sold as many as 260,000 units through the beginning of October, before Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement. Others say the number could be as high as a million.

On the future:

“E-books will become the go-to-first format for an ever-expanding group of readers who are newly discovering how much they enjoy reading books on a screen,” said Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books.

While it's easy to dispute the above point with the case of a specific book (e.g,. my daughter is going to read Twilight whether it's on the Kindle or not) but in more generic cases Kindle-availability will drive the purchase.

Thus far, in three cases I have first decided that I wanted to read something on the Kindle and then only considered Kindle books for purchase (the categories were income taxes, search engine optimization, and an action novel).

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IEEE Data Engineering Special XQuery Edition

Database, search, and information management geeks should check out the IEEE Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering Special Issue on XQuery, which includes an article by by Mark Logic's own Mary Holstege, PhD entitled Big, Fast XQuery: Enabling Content Applications.

From the editor-in-chief's introduction:

The database community has witnessed, over the past several years, a substantial number of papers exploring query processing as it applies to the XML data model. There continues to be research in this area and research papers, though they are no longer in the same numbers as earlier. This suggests that XML technology is maturing. So where has this left us?

The current issue explores the still very active XML and XQuery technological evolution not only in the research community but also in the commercial world. Indeed, both in the XQuery standards area and in the deployment commercially of support for it, XML technology is increasingly pervasive.

Mary's paper starts with a counter-intuitive insight:

Documents are often described as “unstructured” or “semi-structured” but the problem with documents, from a relational point of view, is not that there is too little structure, but that there is too much. Consider a medical document that describes the course of treatment for a patient, with procedures, observations, and actions indicated.

She then goes on to describe some of the characteristics of content applications (e.g., potentially large documents, potentially large numbers of documents, bulk loading, the need for both update and selection, fine-grained retrieval).

She then provides an overview of MarkLogic Server architecture, beginning with:

Query language functionality is only part of the puzzle for enabling content applications. Efficient execution of the query language at scale is important for real-world content applications. The architecture of the MarkLogic Server [2] enables such efficient execution at scale, by optimizing for the characteristics of content applications and taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by the features of XQuery. As [4] and [5] point out, special-purpose databases tuned for particular kinds of problems can easily out-perform general purpose relational databases in their problem domain by factors of 10 or more.

She then does a pretty deep dive on how the system works, concluding with:

The divide between “content” and “data” is not a hard and fast one. However, content applications do tend to have different characteristics than relational database applications. Representing content with XML, operating on it with XQuery, and executing on an architecture optimized for such operations can open up the possibility manipulating large content bases at a fine-grained level to create new and interesting applications. It provides for a middle path between simply identifying documents that meet certain full-text criteria on the one hand, and losing the overall complex hierarchical and narrative flow of documents on the other.

NORAD Tracks Santa

NORAD is best known for tracking ICBMs with its state-of-the-art command center depicted in the 1983 movie War Games. Perhaps you don't know that NORAD also tracks Santa Claus, this year in partnership with Google.

If you're mobile on Christmas Eve, as many folks are (including the big guy himself), then you will be pleased to know there's a new mobile interface and that this year you can also track Santa with Twitter via @noradsanta.

From a Computerworld story:

"The partnership between Google and NORAD to bring the NORAD Tracks Santa Program to children around the world has been a perfect fit," said Stacia Reddish, a NORAD Tracks Santa program manager. "Google has the server power needed for the program, and the fabulous people required in the mapping arena to ensure children know where Santa will be as he makes his trek around the globe."

While this isn't the first time that Google has helped people track Santa's big trip, this is the first year that they can follow him via their mobile phones with Google Maps for Mobile, and using Twitter by adding @noradsanta.

If you wonder why they do this, the noradsanta site, actually offers an explanation, including a fascinating bit of history of how the tradition started:

For more than 50 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s Christmas Eve flight.

The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief's operations "hotline." The Director of Operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tradition was born. To listen to Colonel Shoup talk about the experience, click here.

Finally, NORAD actually weighs in on the weighty issue of whether Santa Claus is real, including a link to Virginia's famous letter to The Sun.

O'Reilly Test Drives MarkLogic Server 4.0

Kurt Cagle, managing editor of O'Reilly Media's XML.com site, did a review a few weeks back of MarkLogic Server entitled Test Driving MarkLogic 4.0 XML Server.

Here are a few excerpts, the first ego-centric:

Dave Kellogg, the CEO of MarkLogic, came aboard in 2003 after serving as Senior Vice President at Business Objects, and was driven similarly by the realization that the potential market for content databases was huge and mostly untapped. He was attracted to MarkLogic by the sophistication that he saw in the MarkLogic XML Server, and has been a big driving factor in the evolution of both MarkLogic and XML databases in general since then. Kellogg also set up one of the first CEO blogs at http://marklogic.blogspot.com/, and to this day blogs vociferously about the state of the industry and of programming in general.

And another:

I had a chance recently to "get under the hood" and spend some time evaluating the MarkLogic Server 4.0 release. I was impressed by the product; it was both feature rich and satisfyingly fast, though there were a few facets of the server that I felt could have used some improvement. Overall, however, it is easy to see why MarkLogic holds the place in the XML database space that it does.

He then gives us a rough time for what I'd call the installation and orientation process. This sparked a discussion within the company and I believe the summary is that our documentation is quite good from a reference viewpoint but not so good from a tutorial one. I've personally heard from customers completely bimodal feedback on our doc -- some rave, some rant. It appears the distinguishing factor is the degree of training the person has had on the system before getting the doc. Thanks to Kurt (and a few others) we recognize this and will be working on improving the first-time user / downloader experience.

He then gives us some praise for a core strength:

After a year and a half of the XQuery specification being finalized, XQuery support is de rigour in an XML database, and MarkLogic definitely exceeds expectations here. The core XQuery function set is fast and, in my initial tests anyway, seem to work flawlessly.

I get another reference:

A major point of Dave Kellogg's keynote address at the MarkLogic 2008 conference in San Francisco was the importance of content in databases. Relational databases do not hold content. They hold linear collections of properties. As a consequence, complex structure can only be built via inference within a relational database – you have to explicitly build that structure via SQL, and even there what you can build is highly limited by the degree to which you have extended SQL to cover such structure.

He then reacts favorably to the new entity enrichment feature in 4.0:

One of the more compelling uses of the CPF is in an area called Entity Enrichment. Enrichment can be thought of as a semantic "process" – it scans a document for lexically "interesting" terms, compares these words or terms with its own map of terms and then wraps semantic information around the term itself – looking for additional context within the sample to determine which of potentially several usages are implies.

He starts to wrap up with some nice compliments and a seemingly deserved gripe about the first-time documentation user experience:

MarkLogic has easily established itself as the market leader in the XML Database space, with good reason. The MarkLogic engine handles scaling well (and includes an extensive API in order to provide scaling across multiple systems), is perhaps the fastest of the XML databases, and provides an extensive standards compliant approach to its XQuery implementation. While there are a few weak spots – the documentation could be better integrated into the system itself and a better "introductory" UI could help immensely, and the lack of support for an XSLT transformation capability or an explicit ODBC SQL bridge is disappointing but hardly crippling – none of these significant detract from the fact that MarkLogic Server 4.0 is an impressive product, one that could easily make its way into a company's content management strategy, especially given the strong support that they have given their clients.

We strive to listen at Mark Logic and, without flipping over too many cards, I suspect Kurt will be happy with our product directions.

He ends with perhaps the best compliment of all:

Overall, MarkLogic is definitely worth a look if you're in the market for an XML Database, and in this day and age, if you aren't you should be.

The complete article is here.

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My 10 Predictions for The Content Wrangler

When I said it was prediction season, I wasn't kidding. No sooner did I post on CMS Watch's 12 predictions for 2009 than The Content Wrangler came along and invited me to make some of my own.

Here's the summary of my 10 content-related predictions for 2009:

• Component-based authoring moves beyond techpubs
• Microsoft SharePoint continues strong march
• Enterprise XML repositories emerge
• Content goes offense
• Cloud confusion will end
• Power, space, and cooling become "hot" items
• XML will be dubbed an overnight success
• Metadata will continue to rise in importance
• Markup goes inline
• Enterprise search engines caught between a rock and a hard place

Check out the full post here.

StartWithXML Early Survey Results

I've previously blogged about the StartWithXML project that O'Reilly is working on with the folks at Idea Logical.

Overall, the project reminds me of the California Milk Advisory Board: get a bunch of diary farmers together to push an idea they can all agree on -- eat California cheese. (Which, by the way, was articulated in my favorite way through the famous Grandma commercial.)

Here, instead of dairy farmers, it's content and publishing vendors (e.g., codeMantra, Jouve / Publishing Dimensions, Klopotek, Firebrand, and Really Strategies). But the idea is similar -- get a bunch of vendors together who can agree on one thing -- in this case, starting with XML -- and go push that idea.

Towards that end, the project is doing a few things. First, they're hosting a one-day forum in New York City on January 13, 2009. They've recently run an educational webcast entitled Essential Tools of an XML Workflow, slides below.

They've run a survey and are producing a research report as well. Below are some slides that highlight selected results from the survey.

Some takeaways:

• Remember that "trade" publishers in this context means book publishers
  

• Note that digital publishing is "very important" to 40% of non-trade publishers, but only 18% of trade publishers. This is scary on both sides. It's a bit sobering to think that it's 2009 and only 1 in 5 book publishers thinks digital is very important.
  

• 43% of trade publishers say they are trying to "understand the importance" of digital publishing. Another yikes.

• Trade publishers are twice as likely to ignore downstream use and twice as likely to edit with a print focus.

• Trade publishers are half as likely as others to use XML in the production process
  

Now, none of this is a big surprise to those who work with the information and media market. The clear leaders in XML adoption were STM publishers (e.g., Elsevier), followed by those in other segments like education and B2B trade. At the mid tier, you see folks like legal, tax, and regulatory publishers and market researchers. Bringing up the rear you have consumer magazines, news, and trade publishers.

While some trade publishers (e.g., Simon and Schuster) are strong adopters of XML, it seems that most others are way behind. This will get increasingly dangerous as the Kindle takes off (I'm a user and a big fan) and the Google Books settlement turns Google into an Amazon-rival online bookseller, overnight.

If a publisher can't output for the Kindle, pretty soon a lot of people won't be buying your books. Right now, a quick search reveals about 200K titles for the Kindle out of 24M total on Amazon, but that number will be increasing fast. And if you can't output in the appropriate format for Google Books to ingest your content, then for many customers, your books won't even exist.

Trade publishers need to get moving to enable flexible output to both different print (e.g., large print, library editions) and e-book formats. The good news? 46% of trade publishers believe their business will benefit by publishing in more e-book formats and nearly 70% say print-to-web processes are problematic or need to be fixed soon.

I wonder if moving from scrolls to paper was as difficult. Well, I suppose it was.

'Twas the Night Before the Big Demo

Here's a fun software industry rendition of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas by Peter Cohan of marketing / demo consultancy The Second Derivative, entitled 'Twas the Night Before the Big Demo.

Here's my favorite excerpt, from the middle of the poem:

“Your deal is in trouble and I’ll tell you now,
Your demo’s confusing, complex and lacks ‘Wow!’
It’s riddled with features and functions and more,
And too many cool things, mouse clicks galore,

Don’t flog them with features and other neat stuff,
Stick with the substance, stay away from the fluff,
The more that you show is not always nice,
Customers may say, ‘Please lower the price!’

The Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary list,
Are words, I’m afraid, that are better-off missed,
Not Flexible, nor Powerful, nor Easy-to-Use,
Not Robust, nor Seamlessly Integrated abuse,

And no corporate overview, please don’t do that,
After ten minutes they’re grabbing their hats,
Present as a team, so if things get hairy,
Sales folks aren’t lost in the back with Blackberry.

Enjoy.

Is Information Architected for Smart Delivery?

Check out this post by Carl Frappaolo, author of several books on knowledge management and co-founder of consultancy Information Architected, Inc., which he recently created with long-time colleague Dan Keldsen.

The post, entitled Is Information Architected for Smart Distribution? Survey Says Not Yet, discusses some recent research done by Carl and makes many analogies between enterprise content management and, of all things, the movie business. Excerpt:

In my last post I provided evidence that from a capture standpoint we are moving forward. There is momentum building in viewing "content" not just as words and pictures, but also sound, video, and albeit much further in the future, smell, touch and taste. But what "special effects" are we adding to the content upon publishing? Technology from vendors such as Mark Logic and Thunderhead, who partially underwrote the research, enables organizations to virtually customize content each time it is used, evaluating the current reason for access and the person accessing it. Leveraging content "chunking" approaches such as XML, and a series of rules and processes, content can "self-assemble" to provide the highest level of personalization and effectiveness.

I like the metaphor of MarkLogic applying special effects to content.

But, as Carl points out, while the vision is there, the reality in most enterprises is not. See this survey result, a response to the question: to what extent is content re-purposed / recombined to make new forms of output?


For more information, see the full MarketIQ report on which Carl worked.

Here is a copy I uploaded to Scribd:

Market Iq Ml

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Web 2.0 Technology content repurposing content delivery

Dancing Startups: First Round Capital's Video Holiday Card

Venture firm First Round Capital's video holiday card is just silly and simple enough to be perfect viral material. It's a getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere so I though I'd share it here.

Two items of note:

• It really is just startups dancing followed by VCs dancing, so don't watch if you're waiting for the twist at the end -- there isn't one.
• Isn't that former Business Objects marketer Steve Wooledge with the guitar in the Aster Data clip at 2:39?

If you like the song, it's called Praan by Gary Schyman and was popularized by the Where the Hell is Matt phenomenon (and website), which was clearly the inspiration for First Round Capital's card.

CMS Watch 12 Predictions for 2009

Well, it's that time of the year: prediction season. As we traverse it, I'll highlight some of the better predictions lists that I encounter. The first one I'll pick comes from CMS Watch.

Here are their predictions (the bolded points are their predictions, quoted excerpts of the copy beneath each prediction are theirs, and my commentary appears prefaced by DK):

1. Open source ECM players get an initial boost

DK: I agree. I think Alfresco is leading the way here, bringing an elegant and simple approach to a market that's overloaded with complexity. It's telling that the Wikipedia entry for ECM is a disorganized, kitchen-sink list of features, which includes BPM which in turn includes BI (suggesting absurdly that BI is part of ECM), and is prefaced by: "All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear."

2. Office14 casts long shadow on SharePoint

The build up to the next major release of SharePoint -- hitting beta perhaps as early as the end of 2009 -- will rightly focus on its deep relationship with Office 14, but will also yield a collective pause among customers as the year progresses. Those that have run wild with SharePoint as a potential ECM replacement throughout the enterprise during 2007 and 2008 will be reassessing their strategies.

DK: I'm more bullish on the replacement of classical ECM systems, such as EMC Documentum, with cheap and cheerful alternatives like SharePoint. To me, ECM is a classic bloatware market, with too much functionality, too much complexity, too many failed projects, and too many unhappy customers. I think it's begging for a return to simplicity and a focus on what matters: dynamic delivery of content to users (or, to cliche it, delivering the right content to the right person at the right time).

3. "Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!"

You should be able to get to information the way you want, which may be different from your colleague's approach. We still need controlled vocabularies. We still need to tag content. Text mining and auto-tagging software is gradually improving, and extracted terms can be applied as metadata. But that metadata needs to be a lot more fluid, cloud-like, and by no means fixed in a single hierarchy.

DK: we love metadata and we think XML is the right way to represent it. And we think that rich XML content is stored in no better place than MarkLogic Server. By the way, aren't taxonomies just one form of metadata?

4. Regulatory-compliance concerns reignited

5. Renewed interest in pro-active e-discovery

6. SaaS vendors expand offerings

Many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customers across a variety of content technology segments -- from WCM to social software to e-mail archiving and document management -- are asking for more than just technical services from their SaaS providers. Customers will continue to view SaaS vendors as extensions of their internal teams and will increasingly look to them more as one-stop consulting services, rather than just the system used to manage their content and visitor interaction.

DK: I like SaaS and I think both SaaS and perpetual software play a role in the future. Using Geoffrey Moore's terminlogy, SaaS is for "context" and custom apps built on perpetually-licensed platforms are for "core." See more of my thoughts in this post: To SaaS or Not To SaaS.

7. Oracle falls behind in battle for knowledge workers

But 2009 will expose Oracle's weakness with front-office applications at a time when Microsoft, IBM, and many smaller players are fighting for the hearts and minds of knowledge workers.

Customers are already feeling indigestion, as different Oracle teams market overlapping and often incomplete solutions. For example, Oracle is struggling to combine four different enterprise portal offerings, and many customers are chafing at the financial and architectural challenges of aligning with the putative winner, Oracle WebCenter Suite (OWS).

DK: In the spirt of one of my favorite quotes, "when did we become our parents," let me ask: "when did Oracle become CA?" It's happened over the last 5 years, almost without noticing. First, they put bankers in charge. Then, what we saw as a new era of software consolidation was in reality little more than a CA replay: Oracle did for the client/server era companies what CA did for the mainframe era ones.

In the end, I think "indigestion" greatly understates the massive integration problem that Oracle has signed up for. A friend once quipped: "I met the chief architect at CA, and that must be one hell of a job, ..."

Today, you could say the same of Oracle. In reality, I don't think they'll ever integrate. They'll simply ride the maintenance revenue streams into the sunset and, once a given stream becomes unprofitable, they'll force migration to a related one.

8. New emphasis on application search

In a world where system users increasingly evaluate the efficacy of their applications by the quality of the underlying search mechanism, vendors have to make adjustments.

"Faceted search" will become an RFP checkbox feature and this, among other things, will cause Web CMS, Portal, and ECM vendors to reassess their bundled search solutions. Expect to see OEM partner relationships get juggled around. For example, some existing OEM deals with FAST and Autonomy might not get renewed.

DK: I agree, and I'd note that Mark Logic's OEM business is booming. MarkLogic easily enables the features described above (e.g., faceted navigation) and, particularly where the content is stored in XML, MarkLogic can be an ideal enterprise search alternative.

So I'd add MarkLogic on the XML side, and Lucene on the open-source side, to the list of competitors vying for replacement of traditional enterprise search engines, such as Verity, in OEM -- and for matter, SaaS --applications.

9. Social computing diffuses into the enterprise

There is a growing debate about the relevance and advisability of enterprise investments in social software during an economic downturn that is supposed to focus everyone back on "the basics." Yet, social software will not fade away, adoption will continue regardless of enterprise policies.

DK: I think social softare is here to stay. While Mark Logic is not currently focused on Enterprise 2.0 applications, we do most certainly make it easy to build web 2.0 style apps (e.g., tagging, annotation) which most of our Information/Media and Government customers do.

Simply put, public websites now set the expectations for functionality and user interface for most classes of software.

10. Long-awaited consolidation comes to the WCM space

11. Mobile and multimedia web analytics become key requirements...and disrupters

DK: Sitemeter, Feedburner, and Google Analytics work just fine for me.

12. Buyers remain in driver’s seat

In the current economic conditions, this leverage of the buyer will remain stronger than ever in 2009. Buyers will be placing more emphasis on researching the vendors and products. There will be a renewed emphasis on identifying a vendor and product's associated levels of risk.

DK: I have mixed feelings on this one. While the economy suggests reduced IT spending which in turn should increase buyer leverage, let's not forget the other side of the equation: consolidation greatly reduces buyer leverage. Let's not forget that both effects are at work.

For example, if you're a pure Oracle shop and you want ECM, then you are either (1) going to use Oracle offerings or (2) use someone else's (e.g., IBM, Microsoft) but increase entropy by bringing in another supplier. Since mega-sellers know that most CIOs are (perhaps wrongly) trying to reduce entropy by cutting the number of their suppliers, the net effect might well be to increase seller leverage.

I've been noodling on this idea for a while because the herd mentality of IT tends to reduce buyer leverage in the aggregate over time. For example, early on, buyers had quite some leverage on Salesforce. But now, if Salesforce came along and wanted to increase rates 30%, what exactly would you do about it? Other than hold your breath and get angry, you don't have many alternatives. And the reason you don't is that everyone else did what you did.

Similarly, if you're a pure Documentum shop and EMC wants to give you xDB "for free" as part of a big enterprise license, have you (1) gotten a good deal on an piece of technology or (2) reduced your buyer leverage with EMC by increasing your dependency on them and condemned yourself to use an inferior XML Server at the same time?

I think I'll do a future post on this topic.

Win Yourself a Trip to Davos for the World Economic Forum

Hurry up! There's only a bit more than a month left to enter The Davos Debates, a YouTube-based video contest that encourages normal folk to weigh in on lofty World Economic Forum topics including the economy, ethics, government, and politics.

To enter, you'll need to create and upload a video that addresses one of these four questions:

• Are you confident that global growth will be restored in 2009?
• Should company executives have a code of conduct similar to doctors and lawyers?
• Will the environment lose out to the economy in 2009?
• Will the Obama adminstration impove the state of the world in 2009?
  

(Mark Logic CEO Blog readers can benefit from this free answer key: no, yes, yes, yes.)

For more information, watch this video or go here:

30-Year Low in IPOs Suggests Pent-Up Demand

See this article on Bloomberg, entitled Fewest US IPOs Since 1979 Mean Pent-Up Demand.

Excerpt:

The chart of the day shows the number of initial share sales of more than $50 million completed each year in the past decade, according to data compiled by Renaissance. This year’s total, 43, is the lowest since 1979.

More than 200 U.S. companies are planning to go public, according to the firm. Only two, Home Bancorp Inc. and Grand Canyon Education Inc., have done so this quarter.

While I hate to be Pollyanna, I do firmly believe that the IPO market is highly cyclical and thus that one of the best indicators of a future open IPO window is the closure of the present one. And, while I don't have data to support it, I'd generally agree with the elastic rebound theory idea that the longer the window has been closed the more companies will flow through it when it opens.

In my experience, it takes two things to go public:

• Above-bar financials. There is typically some bar (usually found by examing recent deals) which would-be public companies must surpass regarding financial performance. For example, I think the current bar is roughly 75/50/0 -- i.e., $75M+ in trailing twelve months revenues, 50%+ in growth rate, and 0% EBITDA.

• An open IPO window.
  

The trick is, of course, having both at the same time.

Norm Walsh Making The Case For XQuery

Mark Logic's Norm Walsh recently wrote an article for the Data Conversion Labs website, entitled Making the Case for XQuery. Excerpt:

But now that you have an XML repository, what are you going to do with it? What and how may you deploy it? Simply having large masses of XML converted data doesn't necessarily mean that the data in this form is even useful.

Enter XQuery.

Norm then explains the problem with using other languages with XML documentbases

The problem with other programming languages isn't that they aren't able to process XML, it's that they aren't able to process XML efficiently. Data has to be converted from XML to the language's native data structures. Once converted, it must be manipulated with functions that don't understand the underlying model and are, consequently, not always a good fit. This "impedance mismatch" causes confusion and can introduce errors. Finally, the programming language structures have to be converted back into XML. Each of these steps is tedious, time consuming, and introduces the possibility of errors. In a sophisticated application, this process may have to occur several times for each XML resource.

If all this looks interesting, the full article is here.

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Michael Lewis Portfolio Article: The End

A friend recently posted a link to this superb article in Portfolio by Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball) entitled simply: The End.

The article is about the end of an era on Wall Street, an era that lasted about 20 years longer than Lewis thought it would when he quit his job at Salomon Brothers in 1988. The article is long (nearly 10,000 words, i.e., 20 pages) so I'd recommend printing the article and reading it when you have some quiet time.

I've read two of Lewis's books and seen him speak once. He's a delightful writer and a dynamic speaker, high on energy and low on ego. I highly recommend Moneyball, particularly for those in the BI community, focused on business metrics.

For those who follow Wall Street, The End is a must read. Rather than writing a review, I'll just try to hook you with this excerpt, the first two paragraphs of the article:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

Corporate Blogging: Go Real or Go Home

As frequent readers know, I'm a contrarian when it comes to most things, including corporate blogging. Most companies, it seems, want corporate blogs that are written by junior PR people, repackage corporate good news, and recycle standard corporate messages.

Validating my suspicions, a few months back I had a few inquiries from former marketing teammates asking: "Hey Dave, you seem to know something about CEO / corporate blogging -- so should my CEO have a ghost-written blog?"

My answer was a vehement no!

With the standard approach, most corporate blogs are easily identified by would-be readers as "marketing" and accordingly avoided. In fact, according to a recent study by Forrester (subscription required), only 16% of consumers trust corporate blogs, ranking dead last in trust among information channels surveyed.

See this post by corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil, entitled No News Here: Forrester Says Users Don't Trust Corporate Blogs. Excerpt:

Many corporate blogs are A. boring and B. not credible. They're written in corporate speak. And they gush about the company or its products or services (what I call widgets). Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff blogs about his new report, encouraging companies "to be thoughtful in how and why you blog."

And that's precisely the point I make in my book: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR WIDGETS!

Unless, of course, your widgets happen to be XML Servers. (Just kidding.) More:

Secondly, saying that consumers don't trust corporate blogs is kind of like saying that people don't trust advertising. Well, duh. We've been talking about that (cf the Cluetrain Manifesto) for a decade now.

It's a shame that marketing is becoming a synonym for truthiness. I've lamented before about the state of marketing, particularly in software.

My advice:

• If you're going to make a corporate blog, go real or go home.
  
• There is no point in ghost-written or PR-written blogs.
  
• In my view, corporate blogs shouldn't exist. If you want a corporate blog, go find a few corporate bloggers instead.
  
• Encourage those bloggers to write openly and honestly about your industry.
  
• Let them ramble off-topic once in a while. You might discover something.
  

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Convera Run-Rate Dips Below $1M

Convera reported its third quarter FY09 results yesterday with revenues of $0.239M for the period ending 10/31/08. This means Convera's run-rate (4x the most recent quarter revenues), has now dipped below $1M.

Here's a chart of Convera's revenues from continuing operations for the past 7 quarters (recall that they sold Retrievalware in April, 2007):


Overall, I'd say the burn-the-ships attempt at transition (covered previously here and also again here) from a Federally-focused enterprise search vendor to a hosted ad-sharing-driven vertical search platform is not going well.

In previous reports, the company has said that it derives a high proportion of revenues from a single (unidentified) customer. It seems perhaps that customer is no longer happy:

The decline in revenue is due to a contractual dispute with a significant customer. Revenues from providing services to this significant customer for the three months ended October 31, 2007 included $234,000 of minimum revenues and $270,000 of minimum revenues for the three months ended July 31, 2008. As a consequence of this dispute, we recorded no revenue from the customer during the three months ended October 31, 2008.

Viewed differently, even if that customer were happy, revenues would have been $0.519M, a new record, but nevertheless a small number both in an absolute sense and, more importantly, when compared to operating expenses which came to $6.3M for the quarter.

The company has burned almost $10M in cash since 1/31/08 (i.e., about $1M/month) and ended the quarter with $26.8M in cash. During the same period, the stock has fallen from about $2.12/share to $0.34/share, an 84% drop.

As of this moment, Yahoo!Finance reports a market cap of $19.7M, suggesting an enterprise value of -$7.1M, making Convera worth about 74% of its cash on hand.

AIP's Scitation C³ Launches at London Online

Just a quick post to highlight this press release from Mark Logic customer American Institute of Physics, entitled Scitation Introduces C³, its Evolving Next-Generation Online Platform.

I heard great things about Scitation from some of the folks I met with in London during the show.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

C³ incorporates two critical pieces of infrastructure – an XML content server, with powerful content storage, access, product development and enrichment capabilities, and a robust web content management system, with strong presentational, contextual, and connection capabilities. Together they will provide an extensible platform that connects users with meaningful content in the context they choose and deliver the tools they need to integrate with that content.

The new platform emerging from the C³ initiative will begin taking shape in 2009 as AIP's and other publisher sites are migrated to the new infrastructure. Moving forward, additional enhancements to features and functionality will be added, including advanced tagging and categorization, greater integration with popular web applications to accommodate features such as mash ups and geographic tracking, flexible publisher tools for adding and controlling content in real time, and enriching the functionality of non-journal content such as books, standards, magazines and newsletters.

Scitation currently hosts more than 1.5M articles from more than 185 scholarly publications for 30 society publishers.

Mark Logic at Cutting Edge of New Trillion Dollar Market According to Head of Gartner Research?

What do I think about this post's headline?

• Sensationalist? Yes.
• Technically accurate? I think so.
• One I'd recommend writing? No.
• Basically misleading? Yes.
• Logically correct? I suppose so.
  

In fact, my headline is an almost verbatim copy of an Autonomy press release put out yesterday: Autonomy at the Cutting Edge of New Multi-Trillion Dollar Sector According to Head of Gartner Research. And, as far as I can tell from reading their press release, they have pretty much the same right to make that claim as I do.

What's my beef? I think they're doing a transitive closure of second-hand facts.

First, far as I can tell, the whole press release is about this article in the Business Spectactor (a Australian publication of which I've never heard).

Second, while this may seem like a nuance to those out of PR, the article never double-quotes Sondergaard. Journalists are pretty meticulous about the difference between direct and indirect quotes. If you say: "I love tomatoes," then they will write Kellogg said: "I love tomatoes." If they ask: "Do you love tomatoes?" and you say "yes" then they will write Kellogg said that he loved tomatoes.

So the absence of double quotes and the whole feel of the article gives me the strong sense that it's not based on an interview with Sondergaard, but rather based on watching him give a speech, most likely this speech, in Sydney on 11/11/08 (photo).

So, in all likelihood, we have Autonomy running a corporate press release based not on a direct quote from Sondergaard, but on an editorial (the article calls itself "commentary") written in an Australian publication based on a journalist watching a speech. That opens up lots of wiggle room, because now they're effectively citing Sondergaard through an Australian journalist who's not even double-quoting him.

Third, if you're Autonomy and you're hell-bent to make the claim, I think they got lucky. Tony Boyd, the author of the article gives them the following tidbits:

Sondergaard says the next quantum leap in productivity will come from the use of IT systems that analyse structured and unstructured data sitting within organisations. [...]

Sondergaard says the new trend is much broader than enterprise information management. In fact, he thinks we are potentially at the end of the ERP system era that has dominated IT budgets and IT thinking for decades. [...]

Sondergaard says the British company Autonomy is at the cutting edge of the new search technology. He believes this sector of the IT industry will ultimately earn multi-trillion dollar revenues.

In short, there's enough facts in there to make this closure if you so desire. Sondergaard says:

• The next big thing is uniting structured and unstructured information
• Autonomy is at the cutting edge of search technology
• This new sector will generate trillions of dollars of revenue
• Ergo, (Sondergaard says) that Autonomy is on the edge of a trillion dollar market.
• QED
  

But, credibility-wise the whole thing doesn't fly.

First, I have a pretty good grasp of how Gartner works. I have a huge amount of trouble believing that any Gartner analyst would make such a statement about a vendor. That is, they'll generally say:

• We think market X will be a $YB market
• Vendor Z has cutting-edge technology in market X

But, they're not financial analysts. They generally do not make (and usually painstakingly avoid) the closure: Vendor Y will do $XB.

Second, there is wiggle room between "search technology," "this new sector," and "uniting structured and unstructured information." Frankly, unless the journalist specializes in search-related IT (which does not appear to be the case) he himself could easily have gotten confused.

Why? Because this closure is invalid:

• Next big thing is unstructured meets structured
• Autonomy has cutting-edge search
• Ergo, Autonomy is next big thing
• QED
  

It presumes that search is the technology through which unstructured meets structured, which -- as someone with considerable expertise in the area -- I don't believe to be the case. In fact, I think it's the opposite. Search engines have grown into a moderately successful market (order of magnitude size $1B ) because of the failings of database management systems (order of magnitude market size $40B).

Given relative size and power, I'd bet on the DBMS to be the system that integrates structured and unstructured information, and not the enterprise search engine. To be concrete, Oracle did $22B in its FY08, Autonomy did $343M. Yes, there's some applications and other non-DBMS revenue in Oracle's $22B, but they are nevertheless 64x Autonomy's size.

What's more, credibility wise, I have a huge problem with the whole trillions thing. In their most recent fiscal years, Microsoft did $60B in revenue. Oracle did $22B. SAP did around $10B. Those are the giants of the software industry and they are doing order of magnitude $100B after decades of growth. And if you (imho) incorrectly think that Internet search is a better proxy than enterprise software, Google did $16B.

PR people, and the companies who employ them, need both to develop a sense of the scale of the numbers they are talking about and to understand the nature of size/share claims. Business-wise, both of the following statements are equally dumb:

• If we can get 1% of a $1B market, we can be a $10M company
• If we can get 1% of a $1T market, we can be a $10B company

Industry-leading $10B companies don't have 1% market share. Those targeting 1% market usually end up with 0%. Market leaders end up with 30-60% share in general, and sometimes more.

So if Autonomy is trying to claim that they will be a leader in this new multi-trillion dollar sector, then, mathematically, they're saying that they are going to do $900B or so in revenues in the next five or ten years. ($3T * 30% = $900B.) Bon courage.

So, to close this out, does Mark Logic has just as much right to make this claim as Autonomy? Perhaps not, because we were not cited as cutting-edge in search. But, given all the other holes, I'd say we had roughly the same right.

But, more importantly, is it a claim worth making? Should a company run a press release leading with this claim? No.

It's based on an editorial about a speech, with second-hand facts written by a non-IT person, with lots of room for holes and misinterpretation. Neither the math nor the business logic behind it flies. And, overall, it's not credible.

Rise Early, Work Hard, and Strike Oil

I was reading Worth Magazine the other day and stumbled into a one-page interview with Gordon Getty, son of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty. Perhaps I'm the last guy on the planet to hear this quote, but I thought it was too good not to share.

Dad said, "Rise early, work hard, and strike oil."

Increasingly, if you read books like Fooled by Randomness, you begin to believe that the luck part of the equation is indeed essential. That is, luck compounded by the increasing returns of leadership complemented by competence may indeed produce far superior results to good, old-fashioned hard work.

If that sounds obtuse, read my review of Fooled by Randomness here. As an example of the concept, let's examine one of my favorite industries, venture capital.

• Two otherwise-identical VC firms, A and B, are founded in year X
  
• Both produce identical IRRs on their first 29 investments
• On investment 30, firm A has a giant hit, producing an overall IRR of 39% as opposed to B's 25%

So, in every respect but one, the firms are identical. And let's say the difference resulted from blind luck: firm B missed the giant hit not because they passed on the investment opportunity, but because of a random, non-business-related event.

What happens next?

• Firm A is seen as more skilled than firm B in the market by investors, entrepreneurs, and other venture capitalists
  
• Firm A can raise money more easily than firm B
• Firm A can attract higher-quality new partners than firm B
• Firm A can often invest, ceteris paribus, at lower valuations than firm B
• Firm A therefore yields, ceteris paribus, a higher IRR than firm B
  

In essence, a self-fulfilling prophecy results, catalyzed by a random event.

Now, I'm not saying that the VC business is pure luck. To pass the ceteris paribus test with top VCs you must assemble a team of very smart people to pick investments and sit on boards. And VCs provide very different levels of marketing support to their companies (a strong point of Sequoia, by the way). And VCs provide very different network benefits in terms of introductions to suppliers, customers, partners, and potential acquirers. I believe those benefits are real and do explain some of the variance in outcomes amongst VC firms.

I am saying, however, that the VC business is most certainly not pure skill, either. I believe that both luck and increasing returns most certainly play a part, the extent of which neither I nor, unfortunately for most investors, anyone else actually knows.

To wrap up, let's turn back to Jean Paul Getty. Half a century before Fooled by Randomness was written, I think he captured the idea nicely: rise early, work hard, and strike oil.

Which, on an optimistic note, brings to mind the famous Samuel Goldwyn quote: "the harder I work, the luckier I get."

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Gartner Names "Specialized Systems" A Top 10 Strategic Technology

Leading IT analyst firm Gartner has named "specialized systems" to its list of top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. While I'm sure Gartner wasn't thinking specifically of Mark Logic (for, among other reasons, that we've not spoken with David Cearley though I do know him from my Business Objects days), I would indeed argue that Mark Logic fits perfectly into this trend.

Here's what Gartner says about specialized systems:

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

While this is a generalized description, the point is clear: for high-performance computing, you will increasingly partition your workload amongst a heterogeneous network of servers each designed and optimized for a specific task. For MarkLogic Server, that task is high-performance XQuery evaluation against large XML databases, documentbases, and/or contentbases.

I'd also say that this argument is similar to one that Mike Stonebraker makes: that as you partition your workload against various, specialized (database) servers (e.g., OLTP, data warehousing, stream processing, XML processing, scientific data processing) you will find that, by elimination, there is no apparent need for a general-purpose database. That is, that every purpose a DBMS serves is a special purpose and we will therefore soon see the end of the era dominated by the general-purpose DBMS.

By the way, I'd also argue that Mark Logic has a role in one of Gartner's other top 10 trends, web-oriented architectures.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles. The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

As I've said here before, once a customer starts to use MarkLogic as a platform / repository / search engine for their XML, they soon realize that it's easier to write web applications in a pure top-to-bottom XML fashion than in the dual mapping from an XML-oriented browser to a object-oriented Java layer to a table-oriented (relational) DBMS. That's the subject of a different post. If you're interested in top-to-bottom XML, then go here.

Gartner's top 10 list of strategic technologies for 2009 is here.

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Mark Logic Named to 2008 E-Content 100

I'm happy to announce that Mark Logic has again been named to the E-Content 100 list of companies that matter in the category of content delivery.

More information on the judging team, which included Barbara Brynko, Tony Byrne, Michelle Manafy, Theresa Regli, Steve Sieck, and Martin White is here.

Many Mark Logic partners also made the list, including: Adobe, Alfresco, Basis Technology, Facebook (loosely speaking; we connect via the API), Ingram Digital (customer), Innodata Isogen, John Wiley & Sons (customer), McGraw-Hill (customer), O'Reilly (customer), Quark, Reed Elsevier (customer), and Springer (customer).

The E-Content 100 list is here. Mark Logic's press release is here.

Excerpt from the company's press release:

“We're thrilled to have been selected for the fourth year in a row by EContent magazine as one of the 100 companies that matter most,” said Tracy Eiler, vice president of marketing for Mark Logic Corporation. “By vastly expanding our market leadership with the release of MarkLogic Server 4.0, being named the fourth fastest growing Silicon Valley software company by Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Program, and our continued success with customers, 2008 is proving to be a banner year for Mark Logic.”

E-Content 100 winners will be honored at the Buying & Selling E-Content 2009 conference being held April 5-7, 2009 in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Two Peoples Separated By A Common Language

I'm in the UK this week, ostensibly for London Online, but have been so busy that I've yet to make it to the show. Digging through email this morning, I took a brief break, headed over to Facebook to check for personal messages, and was greeted by the following, hilarious dialog box.

It brought to mind the old George Bernard Shaw quote about the English and the Americans: "two peoples separated by a common language."

A few technology-related points:

• While I applaud Facebook's efforts at translation they clearly should not be trying to "translate" content from US to UK English, however tempting that may be.
  

• Language recognition software is readily available, so they could easily have used it to determine that my profile and status updates are all in English
  

• If they were really clever, looking at the locations of my friends and the language of their status updates, they could tell that I speak both French and English

• And if they simply used metadata, they could have accessed the Languages I Speak Facebook application, and see that I speak English, French, and Latin (6 years).

Sometimes the answer is indeed hiding in plain sight.