ICE Executive Summit

GCARI and the ICE Authoring Group held the first of the ICE Summit in New York at the Marriott Eastside on May 17. The two day business and technical summit was attended by 60 leading executives representing publishers and others interested in making the shift to doing business on the Web. The opening keynote presentation was provided by Don DePalma from Sensible Systems (formerly from Forrester Group). Don provided the group with a brief introduction to ICE and the business rationale for this specification.

Mr. DePalma was followed by a panel of three analysts. Each presented their assessment of the value/impact of ICE and then answered questions from the attendees.

Mary LaPlante, Fastwater

Mary LaPlante, an analyst with Fastwater examined ICE in terms of its applicability to emerging Web-based eCommerce. According to Mary there are several areas of ICE applicability.

Mary began by stating the obvious, "the Web will change everything." According to Mary a major change will be to the commerce model. Our current electronic commerce is EDI-based. EDI, by its nature, is a point to point business interaction. Today, the Web provides a fundamental shift to a network model, and according to Mary, this shift will impact how commerce is done.

First Mary discussed "sell side" commerce. On the Web, sell side is based on bringing customers to a site. There are two basic models to do this, but syndication is critical to both. Syndication has a primary motivation as a revenue generator. But syndicated content is not just a revenue generator. It can also link back to the initial source and can bring customers to a site as well. Linking also means that affiliate networks are evolving from simple links to linked storefronts. Transactions may actually done via affiliates rather than on the primary site. (syndication / affiliates)

On the "buy side" of electronic commerce, the focus is on electronic procurement systems. First generation procurement systems are simply looking to bring efficiencies by automating the current processes. The next generation will bring value by leveraging supplier relationships. According to Mary, catalog content aggregation will be big. Horizontal procurement is an example where the procurement systems will be open to others in their buying family. Marriott is one example where the Marriott online reservation system has been opened to provide purchasing for other hotels in the Marriott family. Arriba consolidates customer's purchasing power. Other examples of buying groups are trade associations that are able to negotiate better agreements to a group of buyers. Automated content exchange is critical on both the buy and sell sides (multiple sellers/ multiple buyers).

Mary then discussed the dire warnings that Web-based commerce would result in disintermediation. In her opinion, disintermediation has occurred somewhat. But the trend is toward the development of open distribution networks as the new intermediaries. These new intermediaries bring in complimentary suppliers to create a market place. GE Aircraft has done this to service airline companies. The model is to have large groups of buyers and sellers interact. Other vertical market places are also being formed. Here new information channels are created to ease the buying/selling process. VerticalNet is one example. They make $$ from advertising and lead generation. Again content is critical . (new intermediaries multiple buyers/sellers).

Mary concluded by observing that companies appear to be backing into the new business models. She is concerned about the ability of this approach to scale since it is based on 1 to 1 business relationships. Automatic content interchange among a network of partners will be critical to success in the electronic marketplace, and here is the value of ICE. XML plays two roles in this process. First, XML facilitates the process of ICE interchange. Second, XML is needed to facilitate the semantics of data to be interchanged (cXML for example). Both are required for syndication to work.

Victor Votsch; Seybold

Victor addressed the specific area of syndication and publishing. He says this is clearly a natural fit. In the ideal world we would author our own data. But in the real world, aggregating data is a good way to gather trustworthy data. Now how do we do this? In the past, it required great effort not only to set up the infrastructure, but also to be sure content delivery would be reliable. ICE can streamline the business of the syndication "feed." There is also an economy of scale when we have a standardized way to interchange data rather than develop the on-off systems.

Victor also mentioned that ICE is based on the HTTP protocol. He believes this is a good thing, due to security issues that make other forms of interchange inaccessible. Also the robust transfer and acknowledgement features will help tremendously.

In addition to publishing, syndication of data within an organization is critical according to Victor. In publishing there have been and continue to be a great number of acquisitions. ICE could enable owners of distributed publications to aggregate material and share it among their "imprints." ICE can also enable these companies to assimilate newly acquired imprints in a much-more straightforward fashion.

Rita Knox; Gartner Group

Rita addressed the issue of ICE as a foundation to build on. She likened ICE to the Oxford English Dictionary. The dictionary is a catalog for describing what language is about and providing a way for language to evolve. As a foundation, Rita gives ICE a thumbs up.

Rita also likes to classify each new "buzz word." Some buzz words are clearly core technologies upon which other things are built. XML is one of these. Then there are vocabularies. We can build applications from vocabularies (XML/EDI, HL7, and OFX to name a few).

So where does ICE fit? ICE is about syndication. ICE is the encapsulator. ICE is the transaction layer. B2B, Corba, are all in the transaction layer, and the transaction layer, itself is made of layers.

In summary, Rita believes ICE seems to be usable and can work with other applications. In fact, one factor likely to lead to the success of ICE, is that it does not appear to have competitors. But Rita warns us that alone ICE cannot work. It must somehow function with a linguistic piece than enables us to specify which content will be delivered using the ICE package. This moves into the realm of metadata or some sort of mechanism to identify content by topic.

Next ICE Summit in Chicago on July 11

GCARI and the ICE Authoring Group will be holding the second in a series of ICE Executive Summits at the Drake Hotel in Chicago on July 11 and July 12. You can find more information and register for this summit here.