I had the opportunity to find out what producers are talking about when I joined a couple hundred industry executives for the keynote-studded 2002 NFAIS Annual Conference, held February 24­27. This yearly pilgrimage to Philadelphia is attended by companies like Elsevier Science, ISI, Engineering Information, BIOSIS, and lots of other for-profit, nonprofit, and government agencies that supply digital content for research communities.

These are the players who produce the stuff that Tim Judd, from FAST Search & Transfer's Internet Division, described as "deep and proprietary content." If you tried to get to it using a Web search engine, he said: "You couldn't find it if you wanted to. Our spiders can't get to it."

When these "secondary publishers," "electronic information services providers," "aggregators," "enterprise-solution companies," or whatever they are calling themselves this week get together, they do like to talk. And this year they had plenty to say, especially about the conference theme, "Integrating @ Internet Speed."
 

State of the Market
For those in this group who were once print publishers, revenues have long since gone digital. And keynoters were tossing out numbers that would wow many other branches of the publishing industry:

• "Sales at Thomson Corp. are now 50-percent electronic-based, 30-percent non-U.S., and $1 billion was derived from Internet services in 2001, growing at 15 percent per year."—Ronald H. Schlosser, CEO of Thomson Scientific & Healthcare

 
• "CAS's revenues are mainly electronic: 45 percent from traditional online, 45 percent from services aimed at end-users, 9 percent print sales, and 1 percent other."—Robert Massie, CAS's director

• "We are seeing a few sectors up, but overall the industry is down a couple of percentage points for 2002 over 2001," reported David Curle of Outsell, Inc., who was talking broadly about business and academic sectors.

 
• "We see growth in the market of 4 to 7 percent," said Mark Capaldini of MCG Capital, who was talking about companies that specialize in professional information sold on a subscription basis via online or other means.

Customers in the Driver's Seat
Speaker after speaker extolled the virtues of understanding customers and building services to meet their needs.

How has Thomson managed to take $1 billion out of the Internet money pit? The key, said Schlosser, is "Thomson-omics." Its formula for success: Depth of Content + Technology and Applications + Customer Relations = Integrated Value-Added Information Solutions. In human terms that means doing what customers want in the way they want it.

Schlosser went on to describe how in the wake ofSeptember 11, Thomson companies scrambled to respond to the need for on-site information at Ground Zero by delivering needed data over hand-held devices.

How has CAS come to earn 45 percent of its income from those elusive end-user chemists? "When was the last time you had a systematic conversation with your best customers?" exhorted Massie. CAS put content on the desktop of researchers in a way that it can be used as they conduct their research.

That's exactly what Mark Walter of Seybold Publications told the other providers to do next. "Aggregators have something to bring together, but they need to take itdeeper into the user environment to solve problems. The number-one issue is how to broaden content use in the context of a business process. There is a trend toward Web services (content management systems). Internal and external information is being integrated in this way."
 

Integrating Content
The need to integrate content and bring it into the context of a useful application was precisely the theme of this conference—exactly as billed. As one executive, analyst, and venture capitalist after another took the stage, their recurring mantra was the same: Give today's customers what they want. For example:

• Nstein president Randall Marcinko said, "We provide solutions to fit into the work flow of our clients."

 
• Bette Brunelle, executive vice president of Ovid Technologies, said: "Our customers are building portals. They don't care about the difference between internal and external information."

 
• Curle said: "There is a movement toward a model of virtual integration. The content companies are not there. A job and opportunity exists for a company to take on the role of content integrator. The quest is not for a super aggregator, but an integrator—someone who can get all the pieces together.... There's a decreasing value perceived for content alone—content by itself has less value (certain information may be 'good enough'). And there is an increasing value for convenience, accuracy, and integration."

 
• Capaldini, who is funding the next generation of information services, told those who would like some of his venture capital to "provide services embedded into an end-user work flow that allows a task to be completed.Answer the need to be provider of the information in the system where the information is put to use."

 
• Jim Krzywicki, of divine Information Services (formerly RoweCom), said: "The new territory that we see today is more than content, it's the interaction ... collaboration ... knowledge services ... it's not just getting the content, but managing it, and then Web services (the transparent agent) by which we extend the enterprise.... There's a pressure to integrate with systems inside the company."

Appropriately enough, Pat Sabosik, vice president of global marketing at Factiva, concluded the conference by rattling off all kindsof numbers about KM markets, including that 80 percent of the world's largest companies have a KM effort underway and that 75 percent of the Global 3500 will have enterprise portals by 2006 or will have a KM intranet soon. What she didn't say is that KM has recently become of rapidly increasing interest to government agencies as well and is starting to roll out to smaller enterprises too.

Where information buyers go, can producers be far behind?

This NFAIS meeting was the first conference I've attended in quite a while where I got the impression that everyone was operating on the same wavelength. So I would say that you can conclude there's integration in your future.
 
 

Dick Kaser is vice president of content at Information Today, Inc. and a former executive director ofNFAIS. His e-mail address is kaser@infotoday.com.