 Live from San Francisco, California the Cube covering Mark logic world 2015 Brought to you by Mark logic Now here are your hosts Jeff Rick head Jeff Kelly. I'm here at Mark logic world 2015 in San Francisco I'm Jeff Kelly from wiki bottom here with my co-host Jeff Rick And we're joined by our next guest Jean Bitschup. He's the vice president of technology in ALM Jean your first time on the Cube welcome. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. I appreciate it So obviously we got a lot of activity happening here at the show right now. I think cocktail hour just started so But I think it's a good segue to tell us a little bit about The show today the event and kind of what you're hearing here. What's getting you excited? Well, I think the show has been it's been terrific. The event really has been I know for One of the best parts for me is to be able to see how how others are using the technology right for a long time I seem like the only champion in my company for more logic right and Gary Vidal who was Helped us present today actually worked for ALM Back in the day and pleaded with routine. You have to use this technology. You have to use like Gary What am I gonna do? I got 19 technologies. We're looking at but I was really glad to see where he's come but where the product has come from and and to see like the problems that That we solve or we have solved at ALM and then to see what other folks are using the technology for and to solve their problems It's to me. It's fascinating. It really is technologies come such a long way So what was your favorite story from from another practitioner today? I loved I love the um The snap-on tool story where they were talking about The guy calling into the radio program about his Ford f-150 right so he calls in and he says I've got a You know a 1980 Ford f-150 and the guy The the announcer says it's the thermostat You know I didn't even tell him what it was that he was looking for but it's the thermostat You know and it was a combination of the fact that he could put all of this data together He was an expert But he had seen all the data and he knew that At a certain temperature where the guy was calling from from Maine On this on this year of of Ford f-150. It was the thermostat. That was a problem And I just thought it was is very cool. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about ALM for our audience who might not be familiar with ALM Tell us about your organization and a little bit about your role. Okay, so ALM is a ALM media It was a company that was built by acquisition There were a bunch of regional newspapers magazines websites that were put together Under the the single company of ALM It uh they they sort of Tried to standardize as much as we could on different technologies because we were putting all of these different content systems together billing systems and all that We were private equity held by private equity The wasserstein group is actually the group that held us originally sold us in uh, 2009 To a different private equity group that held an international media company as well So there were these big plans to put these two companies together and sort of have sun to sun You know this this this media giant that we were going to be two very different models for the company The apax who is the private equity holder? held on to us divested itself of incisive media and then Lo and behold last summer we were sold again back to wasserstein the company that put us that that originally invested in putting us together um, so now we're we're back to the mothership and We've been going through some acquisitions in the last two months my role at ALM. I started in 2006 as a director application support And which included enterprise applications and the help desk and then gradually as the years have gone on I've taken on more and different responsibilities Right now. I am in charge of all technology that that crosses the enterprise all of the Production applications all the development The help desk the infrastructure the networking all of that falls under what I do Last year when I was at presenting at mark logic They asked me to put a slide up of what my what I thought my role was at ALM And I used a clip from pulp fiction, which is winston wolf I kind of think of what I have to do is the cleaner winston wolf at ALM. So, uh It's it's it's fun and challenging But but you know, I sort of have to get in and look at situations sometimes you have short-term solutions You have to put in place and then at other times it's it's sort of broader You have to look sort of down the road We'll talk about some of those challenges around as a media company. You've got a lot of content You're trying to deliver that to your to your audience Talk about obviously we're here at mark logic world If you're using mark logic talk a little bit about how mark logic's helping you build applications to deliver to your Essentially to your audience Sure Well, we we used mark logic in 2006 originally just so we could put all of our content together Well, we could never produce that in in one place or time Previously, so We invested in you know a moderate investment in mark logic and called it the golden bucket It was a place where we were going to be able to put all of our content and pull it out whenever we needed to The golden bucket is great as a matter of fact I still have a version of the golden bucket in my shop and it's almost nine years later But uh what it did for us was it gave us a window into our content And and we were producing that content online in print in some of our research products And being able to put that in a single place Now gave us the opportunity to say well, maybe instead of just having it in one repository Why don't we try and build a product with it? So the next step in our evolution for mark logic was really To take that content Maybe add some other content into it and produce a product called smart litigator Which was a regionally focused research tool for small to mid-sized law firms um a nice clean sort of interface Combining the content that we created from our new york law journal product or our legal intelligence or product in philadelphia or the new jersey law journal project in product in new jersey And combining that with uh with court information and research information and uh helping Small to mid-sized law firms sort of gauge their cases Right and it wasn't sort it was not a replacement for some of the lexus nexus or the west tools But it was an embarkation point for them to be able to do research on You know a case that they were offering Well now that we started to build this product We were coming up to a licensing agreement with with some some of our in some cases competitors in some things and partners and others And a long negotiation went in to to take our archive content and provide it to A licensed vendor once the vendor was selected We had about Six weeks five to six weeks to deliver all of our archive content to that vendor In a fashion that they were that that they wanted to receive it so So now you're starting to see a pattern, right? I have a problem I have to solve I have a technology that has helped me solve those problems And now I've got another problem I have to solve with this licensing of content So we took The content in the repository Some other content that they had purchased as part of this license agreement and added it in And then developed pipelines out so that we could deliver the content Not just to that licensed partner, but now to any licensed partner we wanted to So kind of a business problem if you will let you an opportunity to to build a larger product And I'm imagining the content is in multiple formats and different styles talk a little bit about Your challenges associated with bringing all that kind of content In different formats together in a single repository. Yeah, it I think the challenge really becomes Because none of it was truly standardized even within our own organization, right? We may have been using similar content management systems, but No one was marking the content the same way So now Okay, people will say well, we got questions all the time. Jean, you have you have all of the content So why can't you just spit it out for me? Well, spitting it out means you actually have to call it the same thing Or organize it in some fashion or categorize it Put a taxonomy around it. So this way you can extract that information So some of the challenge was looking at how we built that content maybe streamlining those processes And then once we have the content in place actually putting taxonomy around it But getting the business involved to say well, what is our taxonomy, right? How do the marketing people want to use it? Do we do use a taxonomy for? Um newspaper content different than we might use for books content Well, sure you would right because we're going to be delivering it in in sort of different different formats in different stores So it became not only a learning process from a technology standpoint, but it became a learning process from the business side as well So jean talked a little bit about you know, one of the big themes we we see at a lot of shows is the the consumerization of it And really in terms of the expected behavior of applications based on my interface with facebook and amazon and google And how really you know kind of that there's before google and after google and the expected behavior to be able to Get that information as you just said well, of course Can I just search and find it and how has that changed the way you guys do business? How does that change your customer expectations and how are you? You know adapting to that kind of I assume a much higher Kind of an expected value or expected performance to get that data out more easily Well, I think what you realize is that you can you can spend a lot of time You can spend a lot of time on the details of each piece of content, right? But you'll miss the big picture for for the value that the content can really provide And I think the first time that we tried to do taxonomy We sort of looked at it and said oh, we have to get it right We have to get it completely right right away. So we put a three month project together and we built a taxonomy and it was awful It was just awful right focused on a very narrow portion of our business Um, so we took a different approach that said you know what? Let's sort of look across our businesses Because I have to provide it You know, I'm going to have to provide this content not just the internal marketers But I have to provide it to what my customers want that content to be And I want to be able to build products For new products for what those customers are going to ask us for So now you talk about sort of raising the bar on it, right? You look at the old content that we had and say well, all right So this is the value that I can get out of that old content. I can go back. I can retag it Sort of taught me about what we had to do for enrichment against our content Things that we do manually In process and then things that we can do sort of automatically after process Um, but it it became how can we enrich the content so that when I when I when I pull it up Because I want to be able to um to do product offerings I want to be able to do recommendations for content, right? And all of that is based on this google world, right this amazon marketplace of hey, you looked at this Now how about this right? Well, we want to do that too. Um, and I think the With the way that we apply sort of the underlying technologies The foundation that we have with mark logic and then being able to couple all of that And then deliver content in new ways and in in new formats Accurately right to reflect What law firm someone works for how many you know maybe maybe someone works for do we cheat them and how Right and and we wrote four articles on do we cheat them and how in the last month or so Well, if I've got if you're logging in and I know you're part of do we cheat them and how Hey, these are the last four articles we wrote about do we cheat them and how right so it it It makes it makes what it makes the content that we generate more valuable Right, but it also makes the experience of the user more valuable right more personalized So I think what we've learned over the course of time is that The more refined we can be about our content and the more personalized we can get with our content The more applicable that content becomes for an end user and then for an entity that that end user may work for right whether it's a court Or a law firm or a company Now the other interesting Table that you're seed at the table that you've had for your whole career Is you know, it's about digital transformation of business and obviously immediate business and the print business Before you had content management systems to manage the print Now you've seen that transformation where it's not only To create the output But the digital asset itself and then those content management systems to now be delivered on a number of formats a number of Of methods so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the evolution You know of that digital assets not to drive the production of a newspaper or a journal or whatever But actually to be a core asset in and of itself that might be Dispursed or re-aggregated or recolated in a number of different ways. Well, I mean that's you know I think the the golden rule in media is reuse Right because you don't want to have to touch the content so many times You touch it so many times to publish it that if you can get it and reuse it in whatever format it is That uh, you're going to get more value out of that content, right now When I was talking about personalization before If I start to build an archive of that content and I can enrich that content and then surface that content again and again and again Well now I've I've crossed that threshold into into more value for it, right? The other part of of sort of any of those digital assets Is that it not only plays into the products that you're building sort of right now But we learned it in licensing right now all of a sudden I provide it online and I do it I I do it in print and online And now that license content becomes a product in and of itself With value right so the more that I can even connect The pieces of what's in that digital asset management system to the content management that's over here Maybe to the customer that's over there I think you got something pretty good, right, you know and and I don't think you really get to start to do that until you make the connections between the pieces of content and the relationships For search and and and just uh, sort of surfacing what uh, what those categories can be out of that content Well, we've really got time for one more question. So If you had to give one piece of advice of practitioners out there We talked about this in the panel. I'll put you on the spot again, but one piece of advice to practitioners who are even struggling with You know the data the different varieties they've got to deal with What would it be in terms of their either their approach maybe a technology piece of advice or even a cultural piece of advice What would you what would you share with the audience? Well, um I think what I said in the panel was you know, don't limit yourself And I'll also think you know, I think there's a piece of of information that came out that said you want to know Where the end of the bridge is right and I think that that's important But don't be so committed to the end of the bridge That that you're not willing to change how you get there, right? I mean you really I think for us If there's one thing that I've learned about mark logic really one thing is that um, you can't You can't focus on just the fact that it's an xml document repository Right, it serves me in so many different ways and it has done it for me Up through the licensing piece right up until what we're doing today, right the whole idea of building an mdm solution around You know our content Not just our customer, but around our customer and our content and our products Wow, I start to look at the power that's involved in that in thinking well Now I can do analysis and create other products just around the fact that i'm putting all of that together So who to thunk Right that if I was building a golden repository a golden bucket right in 2006 You know no matter how great or fantastic the dreams might have been That I could really put that in place right now. I didn't do it all at one time So the other piece of advice is be willing to take bites out of it Right, don't don't think you got to solve the whole nut all at one time, right, right, you know because you because You may frustrate yourself. Yeah, absolutely with very good advice Jean thanks so much for coming on the queue. We appreciate it. I hope I'll have you back again soon I'd love to come back. It was really great to be here. You guys are terrific. Thank you so much And thanks for being here and thank you for watching. So stick around We're going to be right back with our next guest here live at mark logic world 2015 right after this