Avoid re-inventing wheels

Here’s a question for all product marketing people, have you ever of a really good idea for a new product or service, committed a budget to it and then learned, when some way down the development path, that some other company has already done it? If so, here is a cloud service that might just be of some value.

Colorado-based IHS has introduced two cloud-delivered versions of its existing Goldfire Software, a major source of information and analytics. Both IHS Goldfire Cloud, and IHS Standards Expert with Goldfire, are designed to help engineers, scientists, researchers, product management and marketing make informed decisions in support of developing, producing and maintaining products.

Both solutions offer advanced research and knowledge discovery tools, and access to the one of the most comprehensive collection of authoritative content for technical professionals. By being cloud-delivered, not only do these services reduce the IT resource budget for a company, but add the flexibility of making information available via any computer, tablet or smartphone.

Goldfire Cloud gives product development, management and marketing teams a single point-of-entry to the critical information they need in order to make confident decisions on new product developments and the like.

It includes patented semantic search technology providing precise access to answers in the more than 90 million scientific and technical `must have’ documents curated by IHS. This aggregated, pre-indexed collection spans patents, premium IHS content sources, trusted third-party content providers, and the Deep Web.

The ability to semantically index and research across any desired web-accessible information such as competitive or supplier websites, social media platforms and RSS feeds – give these documents the potential to become strategic knowledge assets for many businesses.

It has more than 70 concept lenses that promote rapid research, browsing and filtering of related results sets. These enable engineers to explore a concept’s definitions, applications, advantages, disadvantages and more.

Insights into consumer sentiment giving strategy, product management and marketing teams the ability to recognise customer opinions, perceptions, attitudes, habits and expectations – relative to their own brands and to those of their partners’ and competitors’ – as expressed in social media and on the Web.

With IHS Goldfire Cloud can be used with both large and small enterprises. Large organisations can  deploy it broadly across the enterprise, while small- to medium-sized companies which lack the infrastructure to deploy a platform in-house can now derive the same decision support benefits without the upfront costs.

Used by 600,000 businesses worldwide, IHS Standards Expert standards management platform is designed to simplify search and access to engineering standards. However, most of these users can struggle to find related information such as reference books, handbooks, journals and research papers that are needed to get their questions answered and their jobs done.

Standards Expert with Goldfire uses the IHS question-answering technology to provide unified access to standards and related technical knowledge. It includes semantic access to more than 50 million industry and technical documents covering worldwide patents; content sources such as IHS ESDU, IHS Chemical, IHS CyberRegs and IHS Energy; Standards Development Organisations like ASM International, ASTM International, SAE International and IEEE; and publications from respected third-party content providers like McGraw-Hill, NASA TechBriefs, MIT DSpace, and ArXiv.org, as well as Deep Web sites and other authoritative content sources.

It also includes advanced knowledge discovery tools, including the 70 unique concept lenses tuned to product development.

“Customers are drawn to IHS Goldfire because it simplifies the task of finding the best answer to the toughest engineering problems,” said Chad Hawkinson, vice president, IHS Product Design. “Customers requested that we provide more flexible deployment options and ever-improving user experience. We delivered both with IHS Goldfire Cloud. By embedding this same Goldfire technology into IHS Standards Expert, we have now made this technology available where the world’s engineers already go to get critical engineering information.”