Digital River Flows into Search
January 31, 2010
The Seeking Alpha transcript of Digital River’s “analyst call” signaled a shift in enterprise search offerings. Here’s what executives of Digital River (a network services firm that is now an ecommerce, marketing, and online services outfit) said, according to “Digital River, Inc. Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript”:
In 2010, we plan to further drive the adoption and monetization of these new product investments and shift our focus from expanding the breadth of enhancing the products to the depth of our product portfolio. This means continuing to focus on areas where our clients have indicated they have significant interest. Our 2010 plans including going even deeper into remote control by offering an easy to deploy shopping cart and more options for enterprises to speed their time to market. We also intend to expand our merchandising and product management capabilities for our B-to-B offering, enhance our enterprise search and global business intelligence capabilities, make end customer and administrative performance improvements, and introduce more localized payments and currencies to support our expansion into rapidly growing emerging markets.
I find this interesting because companies like Digital River have been commodity providers in my opinion. The shift to complex, value-added solutions such as search and business intelligence is an interesting development. The assumption is that Digital River will have sufficient bandwidth to index an organization’s content, update the index, and deliver results with the same aplomb that Google has condition the 20 somethings to accept as the status quo. The business intelligence angle is interesting as well because that adds another lay of complexity because end users need reports. Canned reports make great demos but they often fail to answer the specific question at hand. The more years a query has to cover, the more crunching and disc access are needed.
My hunch is that the move will be an interesting one to watch, but when it comes to commodity services in the cloud like search and business intelligence, it will be tough to compete with subsidized business models or bundling. In short, the words sound great, but the delivery might be a bit trickier than the MBA wizards on the call understood. And not a peep about the guts of the search technology.
Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2010
This “hope springs eternal” write up was a freebie. I shall report this sad fact to the SEC, the US government’s hope specialists.
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woowww amazing thank you..