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Thomson Reuters Transforms Big Data Into Big Business

Oracle

Part of the Thomson Reuters "intelligent information" family (Wikipedia)

Thomson Reuters chief operating officer for Technology Rick King says his company’s mission is simple—not easy, but simple: create intelligent information for businesspeople and get it to them faster and within richer context than anyone else can offer.

The key, King says, is to be able to identify, package, and serve up not just data or information, but intelligent information for the bankers, lawyers, scientists, and investment managers whose livelihoods are increasingly based on not just the quality of their insights, but also the speed and relevance and adaptability of those insights.

And that incessant appetite for speed and insight and optimized decision-making—that appetite for intelligent information—has required King and his technology team at Thomson Reuters to find new ways to create these increasingly intelligent information factories without having to spend more money on IT each year.

“A few years ago, the notion of having all of this data, and being able to search it reasonably and provide a pretty precise answer, was actually enough—to be really good at that was enough,” said King in a recent interview at Thomson Reuters’ largest campus outside Minneapolis.

But today’s environment—and surely tomorrow’s—will require a dramatically different approach to be able to blend together Big Data, precise analytics, social media, intelligent search, and blazingly fast infrastructure.

“I think as information has grown exponentially, it’s not even possible to have all the information anymore, so what you need to be able to do now is take what you have, and look at what other people have, and then combine it in a search format where you don’t care where the information is stored, what format it’s in or who owns it—you just need to be able to search over a bigger and bigger corpus of information that’s relevant to whatever your users are doing,” King said.

“The goal is for search results to be vastly more precise answer than they were before, and returned at roughly the same speed.”

“So you end up with more precision, searching 100x the data you used to search through, and it still comes back at the same speed—this is where you get into why you need the hardware technology to adapt to that.”

To achieve the levels of speed and power necessary to meet the needs of Thomson Reuters customers around the globe, King and his team have begun standardizing on Oracle Database and the Exadata Database Machine. And in so doing, King and Thomson Reuters have forged a unique relationship with Oracle: one that’s built on collaborative engineering, shared risks and rewards, and perhaps most important of all a deep and abiding sense of trust forged during some challenging situations that tested both companies.

King noted that as Thomson Reuters began spending a significant portion of its IT budget with Oracle in a sweeping range of projects that replaced many instances of IBM DB2 with Oracle Database, a moment of truth arose for both companies:

“Business partnerships are tested by the ups and downs – we rely on our partners to be there for us through it all. And the relationship gets tested when you hit a bad moment, and for us that occurred 7 years ago when our Oracle Databases went down” said King, whose affable nature coexists comfortably with the relentless drive and discipline required to run a highly innovative information-services company.

“I still remember the place where I was standing when ‘the bad’ happened, some issues we had with the Oracle Database product. And I think as it turned out, we were using the product in a way that the people who developed it didn’t really ever consider—I think to us it looked like there were bugs, and to them it looked like everything worked fine.

“Yet, we were having trouble with our main application, and I was getting hate-mail from customers and hate-calls, because we were having databases go down, so it was a really bad, black thing. But Oracle stayed with us and we solved the thing—we got Oracle engineering much more involved with our engineers, and we had people come here and see how we’re using things and when they saw what we were doing they said, ‘Oh, wow, we never thought of doing that—so we need to tune this this way, and that that way’—and things have been running quite well since. And ever since then, the engineering teams have been much more closely aligned.”

(You can also see King discuss innovation at Thomson Reuters in a video that’s part of the “Innovator’s Playbook” series from Oracle.)

In a recent “Innovation Showcase” event at company headquarters, King and other Thomson Reuters executives hosted about 75 leaders from more than 30 other companies eager to understand more about the innovative business approaches Thomson Reuters has developed, and to learn more about the strategic partnership that exists between the intelligent-information company and Oracle.

At that Innovation Showcase event, King noted that “we have tons of IT vendors, but we have very few strategic partnerships—Oracle is one of them.”

To understand why King said that, and what he means by that, it’s best to hear from King in his own words because the stories he told during a gray and blustery day at his office offer unique insights into so many of the issues business leaders are wrestling with today:

  • how to create a culture of innovation;
  • how to create new products that offer greater value and utility to customers;
  • how to navigate an increasingly complex IT landscape to deliver great business results; and,
  • just what does a “strategic partnership” with Oracle look like.

Here’s King on the early stages of the Thomson Reuters/Oracle relationship:

“When it all started out—and that would have been around 2004—we were ready to jump off a  big DB2 estate, and I think our analysis at the time was that Oracle had the best technology, but some of our people who came from different places in the world were not quite as enthused. You see, in their experiences, they did not see Oracle as a strong business partner – too slanted.

“And I knew what they meant because I’ve been around a while – I’ve seen it all. But we needed to look at the full spectrum of the partnership and trust what they were saying. The Oracle guys told us what they can do with the full backing of their sales executives. And I believed them and I believed it was time.

“Our people were able to get around the corner, mainly on the technology side, because the rest of the deal was kind of a bet—and it’s been the best bet we could have made. The technology was what we thought it would be, and it’s been that way successively as we’ve added more and it’s been that way as we’ve added brand-new products. The dedication we’ve seen from Oracle on the support and development side has been great.”

Here’s King on the question of “vendor lock-in” and whether that’s been an issue with his huge and growing use of Oracle products:

“I get asked about it a lot, and I tell people that the  risk of the lock-in is much less than the benefits we’re getting from the relationship.

“Three factors: number one, if they’re predatory in pricing, we’ve got a problem. Number two, if they fall behind in technology, we’ve got a problem. Number three, if they don’t provide service and support properly, we’ve got a problem. Now, on all three of those fronts, Oracle has been fine—people worry more about pricing when they talk about lock-in.

“But the other side of the coin is that we have a lot of leverage—so I think there’s a little reverse lock-in, if you want to call it that. Oracle’s a lot bigger than we are, but I don’t think they want us to be an unhappy client.

“And we have good relationships with lots of other people at all kinds of levels within Oracle, and so far what we’ve seen is that the new executive sponsor is dedicated to continuing the path.”

King on the innovation Thomson Reuters receives from Oracle and particularly Exadata:

“We rely on companies like Oracle to be a big part of our innovation. We don’t really produce technology, we use other people’s technology in a way that brings together our content and delivers it in a different way. We need players like Oracle to be really innovative in their space to ensure we can be innovative in ours.

“The Oracle Exadata box, as an example, is a good example of us putting our collective heads together - because we have products where we’re keeping large indexes in memory where the speed of search is very important. When you start talking about Exadata and the relationship of all the technologies being embedded here—even though there’s a lock-in threat with that, too—the response time is going to be so much better that you do the calculus on what kind of searches you’re doing. And in a lot of cases where you need the speed, this is a really good way to go.

King on the emerging Thomson Reuters business of truly intelligent information, built on mining and recombining Big Data:

“If the list is really big, and we know which one you want on that list, then shouldn’t we make an educated guess and try to help you out? That’s the question. Which tools do we bring to the table to help make the search more precise for you? And that’s the difference between a search and an intelligent search. You’re leaving your search footprints all around—shouldn’t we learn from that within the constraints of a legal search, or one in the financial market?

“We can understand that this is the type of case you’re working on, so maybe you care about the laws that that case is based on, and who the judges were, and who the expert witnesses are—and we can put all of that on a little sidebar for you even though you didn’t ask for it. So rather than you even having to think about asking for that, here they are. In doing those earlier searches, you told us what you’re interested in—and based on us understanding that, we can say then that it’s likely you’re also interested in this. You might not need it right away but you can save it in your folder and come back to look at it later. And then when you search on one of those, it’ll spider out to other relationships. And over time you can tighten it or expand it and so forth. That’s intelligent information.

“So for me, what’s changed over the years is that we don’t just return the answer—we’re starting to predict what you actually want and give it to you before you ask for it.”

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