We have been working very productively with this client for some time now. They have a number of highly-regarded, online reference and journal products available to the academic community, delivered on Semantico’s Information Publishing Platform, SIPP.

Recently, they have been using our platform to build microsites which enable them to optimise the value of their content and to showcase particular well-known publications within the wider context of their main offerings. These microsites benefit from cross-searchability, but each has its own look and feel. Quick and easy for the publisher to develop and bring to market, they can be deployed on the platform within a matter of hours, limiting the total outsourced development outlay to a matter of hundreds of pounds rather than thousands.

For all of these reasons above, the facility to offer these microsites is highly-popular with the publisher in question; however it has also led them to ask if we aren’t ’shooting ourselves in the foot’ with respect to potential lost development?

It’s a fair question …

For us, there’s no issue about providing clients with the tools to self develop. DIY is a factor of our landscape, with new free and open source tools coming on the market every day, against which we have no aspiration to compete. We see our core value for clients in helping them to find the best solution for what they need to accomplish, in ways that suit the needs of their organization and marketplace.

All our toolsets are built with scalability and flexibility in mind, and the advice we provide, if not exactly vendor-neutral, is provided with an eye not only to how they’re going to publish online today but also how they can leverage their investment with us going forward, and meet the changing needs of the business with minimal extra outlay.

So while the publisher above’s concern for our financial wellbeing is touching, he shouldn’t be too worried. It’s not altruism at work here necessarily, but the sign of a higher aspiration: we want to be not just the development partner of choice, but – more than that – the online publishing partner of choice. In a fast-developing, emerging marketspace, we feel that’s a safer place to be.

Chuck Richards of Outsell telling us that B2B users today are spending more time on search than research, clear indication that things are going badly wrong on the usability front. Publishers are paying more attention to this now than previously, but we still have a fair way to go, clearly! Chuck also revealed that marketeers spend two thirds of their budgets on their own publisher websites. It will be interesting to see how new tools such as promotional widgets, and greater use of social networking, start to change this. Online marketers are increasingly talking about taking the fight to where the customers are – i.e. on blogs and on social networking sites like MySpace et al. Will we start to see more of that spend going ‘away from home’?

Julian Ashworth, Head of Reed Elsevier Pricing Centre of Excellence talking about the importance of pricing flexibility in optimizing the value of online innovations. This is something we’re really conscious of as builders of access management systems, for fairly obvious reasons: in order to build an appropriate amount of flexibility into a pricing system it’s important to have a firm grasp of the options that might be needed. Clients, equally, need this knowledge in order to specify their requirements accurately.

Simon Ferguson, Publishing Director, RBI standing up to be counted on Virtual Worlds. Second Life and the rest may be well into ‘the trough of disillusionment’ this year, but apparently the future is (still) virtual: the top two sites visited by 12 year olds, Stardoll and Club Penguin are virtual world sites (Nielsen).

Dave Langan of Silverbear saying things that will be music to the ears of our Technical Director at Semantico in extolling the virtues of agile web development. In Dave’s view it requires more management buy-in but delivers to business requirements and to time and/or budget more effectively.