Open Password – Friday January 14, 2022
#1014
Outsell – 2022-2021 – Pandemic – Cleenup – Propriety Data – Removing Walls – Ned May – Dricing by Need – Driving by Strategic Choice – Vaccines – Variants and Waves – Beyond Ambiguity – Informa – Intelligence Division – Academic Division – LSEG – Refinitiv – Merger S&P and IHS Markit – Desk Research and Alternative Data – ProQuest – Clarivate – Wiley – Hindawi – NPD – PE – Dow Jones – Machine Intelligence – IDG – Eqifax – AWS Data Exchange – Snowflake Data Marketplace – UK Research and Innovation – Elisabeth Freeman – University of Cambridge – Octopus – ESG – Bloomberg – NetZero Pathfinder – Google – Facebook – French News Publishers – Twitter – AP – Reuters – Fact-checking Partnerships – Reliability of Information – Regulation – Content Containers – Textbook Market – Componentizing Content – Multiverse – Talent Crisis – Great Resignation – Talent Shortage – Automation – Morningstar – Robotic Content – Deep Mind – Isomophic Labs – Salesforce – Narrative Science – Work-from-Home / Work-from-Anywhere Shift – Ulrich Kämper – Zoom – Technical information from patents – DGI -Stammtisch – DGI seminars – FIZ Karlsruhe – Research data repository -RADAR – Local implementation
- Title
Outsell: 2021 Events and What They Mean for 2022 – From Driving by Need to Driving by Strategy? – ESG as the Latest Golden Child
Ulrich KämperOpportunity for newcomers with expired patents
III.
DGIVirtual regulars’ table and online seminars
FIZ Karlsruhe research data repository RADAR available as a local implementation
Outsell’s January Contribution (1)
2021 Events and What They Mean for 2022
After Corona: Cleenup will Take Many Years and
May Require a New Approach
Short Theses
By Ned May, SVP Analytic Operations
Ned May
- Amid much pandemic-related confusion, we keep waiting for the government to make its moves and wonder when we’ll face evonomic fallout.
- Providers that hunkered down in 2020 now realize that cleenup will take many years and may require a new approach.
- Outsell identified 810 deals across our industry since the start of the year – a 45% increase over 2020.
- While some companies are putting up walls around their proprietary data, others see equal opportunity in removing walls.
- Knowing how to best identify, source, and channels individuals into our workplaces will remain a critical need.
- Industry providers must make hard choices about focus. For those on the outside looking in, industry alignment means opportunity.
Outsell’s January Contribution (2)
2021 Events and What They Mean for 2022
From Driving by Need to Driving by Strategy?
ESG as the Latest Golden Child
Full Text
By Ned May, SVP Analytic Operations
As 2021 comes to a close, we find ourselves wondering what just happened to the year.
In many ways, it felt like a compressed extension of 2020, the year when all heck broke loose. Confusion over timelines is our new norm. Has the pandemic really been with us for nearly two years? And was its impact truly worse this year than last?
Is it really true that vaccines have only been around at any scale for a little over six months? How many variants and waves have we had? Amid this confusion, we keep waiting for the government to make its moves and wonder when we’ll face economic fallout. We keep telling ourselves the very real signs of inflation we see today are simply a miracle.
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Key Announcements
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With all this in mind, we press on and make sense out of the non-sense so we can keep
Moving Beyond Ambiguity — Outsell’s 2022 meta-theme. At times like this, we find
no better way of understanding our world than looking back across the multitude of announcements that data and information solutions providers made in 2021 to read the tea leaves and what they portend. Here are the most important announcements of 2021 and why they matter.
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The Pandemic’s Fallout Took Hold
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Across those information markets most directly impacted by the pandemic — think travel, events, and retail — the ramifications of COVID-19 began to have long-term effects. Providers that hunkered down in 2020 to weather the storm now realize that cleanup will take many years, and the approach necessary might be different than the one taken under more favorable skies.
We see this in Informa’s announcement that it would spin off properties across its Informa Intelligence division. The decision to divest that division might have come as a surprise to some — after all, it was the events business within its B2B Markets division that bore the brunt of a pandemic-fueled collapse. Yet, if we’ve learned anything from the COVID-19 impact, it’s to stop thinking in straight lines. Needing to sell off some assets to shore up the house, Informa had little choice but to go this route. The margins in its Academic division are simply too strong to let go, and selling B2B Markets without a recovery in events would amount to a fire sale.
The data and information providers making these hard choices must look at their own operating environments and decide if their new focus — driven by need more than
strategic choice — will require additional changes. And for those on the outside looking in, such realignment creates opportunity. Given the thirst for all things data, we anticipate that some elements of intelligence will arouse real interest and, likely, some will fall to fierce competitors. Informa is not alone in this. Across our industry, other data and information providers are starting to do the same — opening opportunities for expansion — assuming strategic buyers can afford them at the time.
This leads directly into our next essential area.
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The M&A Market Remains White Hot
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Outsell identified 810 deals across our industry since the start of the year — a 45% increase over 2020, a figure with many implications. Acquisitions like LSEG’s purchase of Refinitiv make us wonder: How big is too big? We’ll be watching to see at what point these behemoths become too bulky to move and suffer from a lack of agility. Refinitiv, with a reputation as “the largest FinTech company,” may be hard-pressed to maintain its ability to innovate. Will other deals of this size be the same? Ultimately, it will come down to how the firms involved manage the integration.
In parallel, the rationale for these deals is often strong as our industry realizes how it creates and delivers value. Take, for instance, the merger of S&P and IHS Markit, which points to the opportunity in combining complementary offerings in a way that extends the value of both (in this case, merging the power of desktop research with the wealth of alternative data). We anticipate more of this type of M&A between analytics platforms and data providers to corner particular markets with unique insights.
Another example of this trend is found in the acquisition of ProQuest by Clarivate, which positions it as a leading player in the provision of both curated content resources and enterprise software, so it can serve the entire research value chain from early-stage research onward. So, too, was Wiley’s acquisition of Hindawi to propel its OA growth.
NPD’s acquisition by PE shows the fierce competition for great data-driven assets and how rare the dying breed of a founder-led business of significant size is in the market. Like IDG, JD Power, and a few more before it, most others take the “hare” route, relying on multiple funding rounds with low or no profits and ridiculous valuations. Perhaps Bloomberg and Holtzbrinck are the last assets standing. We’ll watch FiscalNote and a few of the new breed to see whether old-fashioned financials have the last laugh.
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Opportunities Abounded for Picking Up Tuck-Ins
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Amid the realignment, assets get spun off for both greater focus and to address
regulatory concerns. Given the volume of rollups and combinations underway, this means a plethora of small spin-offs are happening today, allowing others in the industry to up their games at a lower cost. For instance, take how Dow Jones has stayed in the game by picking up key divestitures from S&P and IHS Markit, like OPIS and PetroChem. We expect similar actions circling in 2022 around Informa’s spin-outs.
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The Prominence of All Things Data Continues to Rise
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Strategically, Clarivate’s realignment is all about becoming a data business, focusing on
how data is interrogated and put into the workflow through machine intelligence rather than human research. We also saw this in the moves by B2B Media provider IDG: The company made a series of moves to put up walls around its proprietary data. The move signaled that B2B data was not going to be left to ZoomInfo, Bombora, and the other tech platforms out there. Big media was invested in keeping their data in their own walled gardens and, as such, this was the biggest announcement in the B2B media space this year.
Demonstrating that the value of data can be commercialized in many ways, we saw the likes of Demandbase acquiring InsideView and Demand Matrix to do a data, workflow, and services rollup to take on D&B and ZoomInfo. The new company’s modular go-to-market cloud approach creates multiple entry points, so customers don’t have to lock themselves into a single platform, pay for features they won’t immediately need, or toss away existing tools and data relationships. In other words, some across the industry see equal opportunity in removing walls. Providers need to look closely at their market dynamics to see which approach — closed or open — will yield the greatest value for their firms.
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Partnerships Got Creative
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As the pandemic created a host of new needs and market opportunities, we saw arise what might have first appeared as strange bedfellows. Take, for example, Equifax partnering with AWS Data Exchange and Snowflake Data Marketplace to make its unregulated data available in new ways. Why would a well-established provider of data with a long history of serving clients start directly utilizing a generic data marketplace? The company saw how its data could yield a new level of insight into consumer financial behavior for users — enhancing customer targeting, decision-making, and risk mitigation — and decided it could not get there by itself. Providers across the data and information industry must look for similar arrangements to expose their underlying data assets in new and unique ways.
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The Government Found Itself Funding ReInvention
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When the government thinks a sector needs to be reinvented, we have reached a low point,
yet we saw this occur multiple times. For instance, consider the announcement that the British government research funding body UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) had awarded a grant of £650,000 to Dr. Elizabeth Freeman at the University of Cambridge to develop Octopus, a system for publishing research articles as a searchable record of academic results. The commercial sector is seen by many as inadequate to the challenges of technology or communication, and markets are increasingly taking direction from non-commercial participants. This is happening in sectors like standards as well.
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ESG Became the Latest Golden Child
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If previous years were about making bold statements about what was being done in AI or, to
a lesser degree, blockchain, ESG became the new number one marketing hype in 2021. Fortunately for the earth, some of this hype was real.
An example was Bloomberg’s move to spearhead net zero in financial services. Bloomberg launched its NetZero Pathfinders platform to help companies play their part in supporting climate change. This was a major step in advancing ESG solutions beyond reporting on the corporate impacts on the environment and towards how companies can save it.
We saw other providers boost ESG capabilities as well; the ones that do this in meaningful ways will benefit in the coming years. Meanwhile, for those of us watching, we expect the ability to discern true advancements within ESG to be a bit more challenging near term as the hype continues to rise and the market experiences an inevitable shake-out.
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Big Tech Came in from the Cold (Sort Of)
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Google and Facebook’s copyright deal with French news publishers to pay for their news content perhaps signaled a change among the big tech firms. Could this be the start of a new direction, where aggregators pay publishers for reusing their content online? Can we expect other countries to follow?
For its part, Twitter partnered with AP and Reuters to address misinformation on its platform. Fact-checking partnerships such as this is also critically important, as this helps improve the reliability of the information consumed by millions of users daily. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, these moves remain minor ones for a group of companies that have brought many advances but also wreaked havoc in a myriad of ways. Is this a sign of change or a small token to appease? We worry that it’s the latter unless outside pressures remain, and we continue to believe that regulation has a place with these behemoths.
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The Death of Content Containers Continues to Spread
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Long under pressure, the idea that content containers could withstand digital
transformation continued to break down, even in those markets that had been relatively immune. We saw this in the education market, with Argos Education’s new Sojourner platform acting as a marketplace, providing the opportunity for any provider of educational learning objects to sell these resources on an object-by-object basis. This moves the textbook market into a position much like the journals market in that journals and textbooks are breaking down as containers, with real value coming from individual articles and data (for journals) and from learning objects (for textbooks). Componentizing content remains an imperative.
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A Crisis in Talent Spurred New Approaches
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In early 2021, Multiverse raised a $44 million Series B round (the largest venture round
ever for a UK EdTech company) and followed that up later in the year with a $130 million Series C round. The funding highlights the burgeoning opportunity to solve the talent crisis in new ways. Knowing how to best identify, source, and channel individuals into our workplaces will remain a critical need in the coming year as the pandemic-fueled Great Resignation continues to impact the industry. We expect to see startups emerge that solve this talent shortage in novel ways. In the interim, we expect greater reliance on acqui-hires: M&A driven solely by the desire to bring in talented teams.
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And the Bots Kept Marching On…
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One relief point for the talent crisis is the automation that’s well underway. Take, for example, Morningstar’s deployment of bots to create fund research. Morningstar has been using robots to create analyst ratings on thousands of small funds; now the financial information provider is scaling up its robotic content authoring to create actual fund research.
Or consider Google’s spin-off of DeepMind into a standalone company: Isomorphic Labs. Deep Mind made the news in 2020 with its powerful AI-driven technology for protein folding, which is already impacting research techniques and practices in the life sciences. Perhaps most ambitious was the Salesforce acquisition of Narrative Science, an automated authoring platform that will be bundled with its data visualization tool Tableau. The stated rationale was to drive AI-generated insights; We wonder how long it’ll be before these bots start to close sales.
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Implications for 2022
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With all these changes, we don’t expect the pace of activity to slow in 2022. Amid the
accelerated pace of digital transformation caused by the pandemic, 2021 saw dramatic changes that will only fuel more of the same. The great work-from-home / work-from-anywhere shift continues to drive changes in how we organize, produce, and monetize. The talent crisis continues to grow as wealth levels rise and tolerances shrink — and this will likely drive a greater portion of the workforce out for good. And those changing mindsets are elevating ESG to higher focus.
When will M&A be cool? We doubt it will be next year. With trillions of dollars in dry powder still out there, we only anticipate the market froth accelerating in 2022. It simply has to get spent (er, “invested”) even if rational models seem in lower supply. But if interest rates rise — and they likely will — we’ll see companies overextended where the silly money was in play.
Which brings us to the one item we are certain about: We love the work we do in supporting all of you. Here’s to a joyful, healthy, and prosperous 2022!
Ulrich Kaemper
Opportunity for newcomers
with expired patents
Dear Mr. Bredemeier,
As a reminder, next Tuesday January 18th. My next Zoom lecture “Technical information from patents – free searches in official patent databases” will take place at 11:00.
Occasionally, the age of the information is presented as a counterargument for technical information from expired patents. However, there are many examples of inventions not coming to fruition simply because the available materials did not meet the requirements. Often the market was not ready either.
In many of these cases, newcomers discovered and further developed technologies in expired patents. In fact, patents expire on average after 12-13 years.
Ignore the fee information, the 30-minute lecture is free of charge for you. Registered participants will receive the access link and meeting ID by email the day before.
Kind regards, Dipl.-Chem. Ulrich Kaemper
About the event: https://www.xing.com/events/technik-information-patenten-kostenlose-recherche-amtlichen-patentkatalogen-3678777?cce=em61f5ab16.%3AbX7Zw9a8a139jXC9_rgvAD
DGI
February 8, 2022, online, from 6:00 p.m
We warmly invite you to our virtual DGI get-together – as usual on the second Tuesday of the month. As always, the topics are wide-ranging – all about information science, practice and policy, alternative facts, knowledge management, the Internet, search engines and much more – so we won’t get bored anytime soon. For further information and reservations, please contact borchardt@dgi-info.de. We look forward to seeing you and a successful continuation of the DGI get-together!
February and March
February 16, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Universal writing workshop – From idea to medium
February 17th, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Writing workshop – Websites: Introduction and advancement in copywriting
February 22nd + 23rd, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Communication for Information Professionals
February 24th, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Rhetoric and presentation techniques
February 25th, 9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. GDPR – data protection in practice
March 1st + 2nd, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Metadata against information chaos
March 3, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Classifications, thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies
March 4th, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Document management
March 8th, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Writing workshop – blogs
March 9th, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Writing workshop – Facebook
March 10, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Writing workshop – Instagram
March 16, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Writing workshop – storytelling
March 17, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Writing workshop – essays
March 23, 9:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Social media and research – introduction
FIZ Karlsruhe
RADAR research data repository
available as a local implementation
Libraries and computer centers at universities and research institutions support scientists throughout the entire, increasingly digital research cycle. They help shape the digital change at their institutions and provide the necessary infrastructure services. Institutional research data repositories are an increasingly important component for effectively managing research data from one’s own institution and for making it publicly available in a transparent and sustainable manner. There are a variety of solutions to choose from. They range from the in-house development of a repository to operation in the cloud by an external service provider.
The University of Konstanz with its Communication, Information and Media Center (KIM) has chosen the RADAR Local repository solution. FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure takes over the technical operation of the established repository software RADAR on the IT infrastructure of the University of Excellence. The repository has been available
to Konstanz scientists for the publication of their research data since December 2021 under the name “KonDATA” under a local domain and with its own homepage in the university’s design. The key factors for the KIM’s decision were the generic usability of the RADAR software, its user-friendliness, the extensive accessibility and the flexible adaptability of the repository service to local requirements. The aspect of sustainability is particularly important. In addition to the operation of the local RADAR instance by FIZ Karlsruhe, software maintenance and its functional development are also ensured by the Leibniz Institute.
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