I am very pleased to announce, as voted by our membership, the recipient of our 2011 Leadership Award. The award goes to Richard Brandt from Quark. Richard Chairs our Emerging Technology Working Group and has brought a great deal of energy and creativity to potential Research packaging/distribution discussions given the emergence of new technology toolsets. Our members also cited his work toward our new schema release production process, his work in forwarding our schema in the mobile platforms and that he brings a fresh perspective in identifying ways to bring RIXML into creative cutting edge distribution technologies. Richard has worked tirelessly to further our cause in the marketplace. We are grateful for his contributions. Formal recognition among his peers is well deserved.

Sal Restivo, Chairman, RIXML.org Standards Committee

We’ve advanced the new production process from a pre-alpha state to almost-beta – an early-stage proof-of-concept. The new process is now capable of blending static preamble content with auto-generated schema detail and a table-of-contents, plus prepared images. The software behind the new process reads the schema XSD files and transforms them into a PDF-formatted output document. The schema itself has been modified to contain the preamble content and references to the prepared images. Image handling needs some additional research for generating object model images from XML-Spy. Some additional style sheet work remains in order to ensure all the content is present, in the desired order, and reflecting the desired appearance.

Optimism is high for the new process. We expect to present the work-in-progress User Guide PDF at this Quarterly Meeting, as well as the components of the process itself. Our intention is to stretch the legs of the new process during the next schema release. We will likely produce the release using both the existing and new processes, in parallel. Once the output of the new process is agreed to be acceptable by the membership, we will make the switch.

Richard Brandt, Chairman, RIXML.org Emerging Technology Working Group

Research 2.0 is the label we’re using to describe the various use-cases related to the intersection of research content and client interaction via social media. We’ve developed a template to uniformly document use-case descriptions and identify tagging strategies and RIXML opportunities. The template is structured into the following sections: Heading, Opportunity, Description, Tag Usage, Tag Implementation, and Best Practices Recommendations.

The Heading shows the use-case name, date of the document, and author. The Opportunity section is about identifying the business problem, which will largely focus on reaching a more mobile audience. The Description section explains the use-case and its defining traits. It includes role and location information, and tries to maintain independence from specific delivery technologies and devices.

The Tag Usage section provides examples of tags that would add value to the use-case and offer guidance toward element and attribute names, as well as relevant vocabulary. The Tag Implementation section indicates where in the existing schema the putative tags could be placed, and provides some examples of how they might be populated. And, lastly, the Best Practices Recommendations section provides thoughts on how to use them in a rigorous fashion in an instance document.

Use-Case Roster:

• Blog w/RSS Feed
• Mixed-Media
• Podcast
• Video Postings
• Multi-Channel Distribution
• Twitter Posts
• Quick Response Codes
• Spot Tags
• Sidecar Schemas

Jack Roehrig, Chairman, Schema Build Out Working Group

Overall Goals:

• Build consensus for the tags to include in our next RIXML schema release.
• Firm-up the enhanced schema production/release process.
• Address the notion of "optional" tags in the schema.
• Address tag "extensions".

• Near term review of enumerated tags for Fixed Income expansion.
• Develop side-car schemas or schema wrappers
• analyst roster
• coverage list
• Build the vision for RIXML v3
• architectural review of schema releases
• empower members to directly influence future releases
• explore the notion of a centralized registry to access enumerated values
• Expand rich media tagging to optimize event-driven research content.
• Leverage FTSE’s industry/sector classifications and Fixed Income offerings within the working group and amongst the broad membership
• Explore componentization opportunities
• build use-cases
• evangelize, including differentiated product suites (metadata) offered through differentiated channels(smart devices)
• Leverage re-vamped schema production tools – a more nimble approach.
• Examine potential model for straight-through processing of tags at the point of authoring -- level vis-à-vis having to map tag structures further down production chain.
• Explore tagging conditional scenarios around events and nimble meta data sets.

• Building critical mass for analyst roster and coverage list formats across sell-side publishers.
• Comparison of enumerated tags against current 2.3.1 tag set and build consensus.
• Removing the current production process bottleneck
• counterparties and versioning issues
• need to flesh-out in much greater detail
• new production tool to lead discussion
• Striking the right balance between bottom-up (enumerated values changes) and top-down (empowering users)
• can we learn from other industries?
• Leveraging the work done within the Emerging Technology Committee
• overlap?

Companies love to use the term “cloud” when hyping their internet-based services. But what do technology executives really think about the cloud?

With our exclusive conference on cloud computing, CloudBeat 2011, starting today, we decided to ask.

VentureBeat commissioned an exclusive survey of technology executives at companies of at least 250 employees. The results show that, yes, the push to cloud services is gaining momentum: It’s already playing a significant role in IT executives’ decisions about what technologies to deploy, and many large companies are already embracing cloud services to a significant degree.

The main reasons for embracing the cloud are cost reduction, cost control and agility of deployment.

However, companies are holding back on hosting their most critical business applications in the cloud. Concerns over security, regulatory compliance and the difficulty of integrating complex apps into a new, internet-based infrastructure are the big concerns. There’s also some reluctance to commit business applications to a cloud provider that might suffer from occasional outages or that could be affected if legal actions target another one of the provider’s clients.

What cloud providers need to do to win over the next wave of customers seems clear: Ensure the security and reliability of services, facilitate integration and migration of existing apps, and provide assurances that customers will be able to move their apps and data elsewhere if need be.

We created a simple questionnaire with free-form answers to three key questions: Why are you using (or considering) cloud services, in what cases aren’t you considering using it, and what needs to change in the next year to speed adoption of cloud services.

We used Maven, a network of qualified domain experts that are available for “micro-consulting” (basically answering questions like these) in exchange for fees. Maven directed our questionnaire to a set of IT executives working at companies of 250 employees or more.

Of the 25 respondents, 64% were chief information officers, vice presidents or a similar executive title, while the remainder were senior managers or IT directors. 40 percent were at companies of 250-1,000 employees, and 28 percent were at companies with more than 10,000 employees. All have had decision-making responsibilities for choosing cloud-based technologies within the past 6 months.

For Further Details, refer to:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/30/cloud-computing-survey/

PLEASE NOTE: This viewpoint is entirely my own and neither the official viewpoint of RIXML.org nor the viewpoint of any of its member organizations.

RIXML.org in 2011: New Tools Usher in New Strategies

This year, the discussions within our organization took on a new level of creativity and energy, particularly, as buy-side consumer models rapidly evolve around the "new world" technology tools of the trade. I continue to be encouraged(and impressed!) by the "out of the box" thinking and contribution from our working group members. Many of the topics we embrace in those working groups, were nowhere on the radar screen just a year or two ago. I am convinced we can leverage the rapid content packaging/distribution developments on the consumer side---which can only spawn exciting new strategies for Research content structure/tagging...stay tuned...2012 could well prove to be a "watershed" year for your organization.

To highlight a few 2011 trends:

>In 2011, we have witnessed a greater sense of urgency amongst Research publishers to ensure they are paid for their proprietary content. RIXML.org, as a tagging standard, is having greater industry impact to serve as an enabler, for members' research to make it to buy-side clients' "playlists", bringing "content in context" to fruition.

>Through our recently formed Emerging Technology working group, we have energized discussions around packaging content across the PDAs, iPad, Smartphone, Social Networks, et al, to the buy-side and these discussions have implications for tagging/research structure. Topics, including Research componentization, Cloud Computing, others, will be opportunistic as additional topics to explore in 2012.

>Through the efforts of our Schema Build Out Working Group, we will be unveiling a new release of our taxonomy(anticipated to be version 2.4) in the new year, likely 1st quarter. The emphasis for expansion is around Fixed Income, Credit, Ratings and Commodities tag sets. The contribution to this expanded tag set from our members has been outstanding.

Throughout 2011, particularly at our quarterly members' meetings, we have been fortunate to have prominent representatives of our industry address our members and give us a useful perspective on the "business of research." To that end, I would like to acknowledge and thank Michael Mayhew of Integrity Research, Tim Baker of Thomson Reuters and Neal Hannon of XBRL.org/The Gilbane Group for their contributions to our organization in 2011.

I would also like to recognize the ongoing efforts and support from our Program Office, led by Kathy McGovern and Tom Jordan, from Jordan & Jordan. Many Thanks.

Best Wishes to you and your family for the upcoming holidays and in the New Year !