Ideas for Maximizing Revenue and Positioning and Accelerating the Adoption of On-Demand Data and Integration as a Service

1) Publish pre-built integration components to sites, or communities such as:

a. Heroku Add-ons http://addons.heroku.com/

Reason. Developers of many types of applications, not the least of which include Facebook platform games, develop Facebook applications on the Heroku platform.



Currently some data providers sell fantasy football and other types of gaming data, yet I don't see integration components available from either firm offered in the the Heroku, Boomi,  Informatica marketplaces.

It's not just limited to games, although actually now that I start writing about it online games such as Farmville could actually benefit from large sets of weather and crop data. The idea is to get the data providers integration components in front of the developers so as to encourage consumption of these components. seems to have determined make the decisions about how and if to incorporate data feeds into their applications.

b. Saleforce.com AppExchange.

Data providers need to design an AppExchange application component for the AppExchange that serves as a service catalog, an foreign exchange lookup component, a commodities pricing component, a bank rate, or risk rate component then I can build much more intelligence into my application.

As applications move to SaaS Data Providers need to focus on the opportunity to deliver customizable data components in the style and in the context in which developers, architects imagine and build SaaS applications could greatly accelerate the adoption of “uber catalogs” of all things that stream, quote, change, price. These developers in turn will build new applications that use Data Provider catalog data in yet unimagined and useful ways.
c) Big Data. While there a lot of discussion about Big Data, Big Data creates demand for Reference Data Sets. By offering such datasets, data set providers win the hearts and minds of the developers and architects building the incredible new applications envisioned as the fruits of Big Data.

2) Twitter Firehose. This datafeed presents a number of the issues cited as problems best solved with an on-demand solution. Several small firms have tried to put their arms around this opportunity, and yet it seems unlikely that social media data needs to be kept separate from other market and pricing data. Businesses that already have built a platform on which to build this social media data solution have customers, infrastructure, and people who know how to build and market data platforms and an opportunity to bring their experience to bear on this emerging opportunity.. Social media analytics and data feeds are a logical extension of this platform. I can also imagine interesting simulations and automated trading algorithms incorporating social media data into these algorithms. Such a mash-up of social media and market data would most likely high margin, opportunity that could lead to far richer analytics and trading algorithms.

3) Integration as a Service. Dell Boomi IPaaS, Informatica for example. By packaging, featuring, or presenting data integration, enrichment, validation, or exception handling workflows / integrations on a platform like Dell Boomi, I think data providers could create more value for customers than just the ease of consumption of the data, or the ease of access to data. By including the ability to integrate data plus transforms plus workflow data providers can position their services as essential to business processes.

4) Flexible Data Subscriptions. I learned about a firm called Zuora while at All About the Cloud last year. I wonder if the ability to offer many different types of subscription-based, multi-service personalized subscription options to developers, customers, platform partners, would accelerate revenue and usage of the Data Provider catalog and or platform.

I’m publishing these thoughts now in the hopes that the act of publishing will give me new ideas on how to revise and enhance what I have written so far.

Further Reading

How the Cloud Makes Financial Data More Liquid - ReadWriteCloud
http://addons.heroku.com/
The #1 Integration Cloud | Dell Boomi
Cloud Computing, Integration on Demand, Saas Data Integration Services – Informatica Cloud
Factual Api Wiki / start
Web Service Catalog « Xignite
Data Solutions | Enterprise Solutions | Bloomberg
Online Subscription Management - Billing & Payment Solutions:

• Cloud Expo New York: The Growing Big Data Tools Landscape
• Big Data PaaS?
• Bigdata Trends in 2012
• Big Data PaaS?
• Bigdata Trends in 2012
• Big Data: Taming the Beast for Competitive Advantage