Data. Broadcast Yourself.

2005 is not such a long time ago, but it feels that services such as YouTube have been with us forever. The ability to publish, view and share videos online seems now to be a clear extension of the internet's capabilities, but as with most great ideas, they only seem obvious once you cannot imagine a world where the service or product did not exist. Want to see that great moment from your favorite sporting event? Go to YouTube. Want to find out how to fix practically any piece of machinery? Go to YouTube, someone wants to show you how. Missed an episode of your favorite TV show? YouTube. Want to create your own version or parody of your favorite comedy or drama? Publish on YouTube! Create content, publish content, consume content, rate content, derive content, share content. Repeat.

Disruptive Path
So what has YouTube got to do with financial markets? Not a lot directly, but it does illuminate a disruptive path for how financial markets will publish, consume and share data in future years. For YouTube, it took roughly a decade for the technology infrastructure of the internet to be in place to support its widespread growth and functionality. For data delivery and consumption vehicles, that same transformation in the technology infrastructure has taken place.
Elastic cloud and scale-out database technologies have eliminated the need for firms to invest tens of millions of dollars to create proprietary infrastructure for capturing, cleansing, publishing and distributing data. Nor do any of your clients need proprietary delivery tools or investment in local infrastructure to receive data. To use another analogy, TV companies are slowly and reluctantly accepting that the value of their delivery infrastructure is rapidly approaching zero for most consumers, and Netflix-type internet delivery and consumption is the new normal. The value is in content, not the way content is delivered.

Next Generation
Talking of content, the next generation of consumers doesn't want pre-packaged TV programming that they are forced to pay for regardless of whether they watch or not. The same applies to data. They want to consume what they want, when they want, and wherever they want. They want to search for content that might exist, find it, buy or subscribe to it, rate it, and tell others where to find it.
Consumers rating content brings me not quite to the "wisdom of crowds," but maybe more accurately the "innovation of crowds." Imagine the type of data usage and analytics innovation that could be unleashed if it were far easier to pull datasets together to derive other content or build other services? What sources of data might be valuable if it were easy to publish and make money from the data you own? Managed services and data utilities are currently in vogue but even their commercial added value is subsumed by a world-wide crowd of people reviewing, validating and rating data. And let's not forget the value of providing the tools for users to analyze and display data in a way that they themselves can share easily with others, and potentially make money from allowing others to use the analytics and digital dashboards they have created. All without one single line of code being written.

Commercial Friction
In the current environment there is a lot of commercial "friction" around data financial markets, even if the technical friction is no longer an issue. Major data vendors must focus on the value in their content and what it adds to their clients if they are to both survive and benefit from the changes to come. In addition, the opportunities for data and service innovation for both large and small players should be enormous. Just as when internet database technologies knocked financial markets database technology off its pedestal, we could be in for a similar awakening from other industries in terms of how we should deliver, consume, share and make money out of data.

Brian Sentance is CEO of Xenomorph Software, a provider of analytics and data management solutions to the financial markets.

Elastic cloud and scale-out database technologies have eliminated the need for firms to invest tens of millions of dollars to create proprietary infrastructure for capturing, cleansing, publishing and distributing data.