Company Profiled: Ozmosys
www.ozmosys.com
CEO & Co-Founder: Eric Gross
No. Employees: 8
Founded: 1999

But as we all know, the problem of info glut has, in many cases, superceded the benefits of today's seemingly limited access to content. Thus, a number of smart companies have set their sites on not only taming the beast, but finding a way to channel its energies into helping information and business professionals best put information to work. Privately held Ozmosys, founded in 1999, prefers the Cambridge International Dictionary of English's definition of osmosis: "the way in which ideas and information gradually spread between people." Interestingly, Ozmosys hardly seems content to let information do anything gradually.

In fact, Ozmosys acts as an intermediary between content aggregators and the inboxes of information seekers, delivering a sort of daily-digest compilation of fee-based information services, aggregated content, information from the open Web, and content from other proprietary third party publishers via an email or directly into a portal. So, if your firm subscribes to content from a variety of sources to better inform employees, recognizes that these same employees probably hit a number of Web sites on a regular basis in search of other information, and wants to save them time, Ozmosys offers a delivery method worth considering.

CEO and company co-founder Eric Gross (who did want to use the traditional spelling for the company name originally, but found it was the name of a spa) defines osmosis as "more the feeling that you know something, and you're not exactly sure where you found it out." Of course this should not be construed as a lack of citation in source materials (all sources are delivered as titled links to content at its original source). In fact, Gross believes that understanding and respecting the property rights of publishers is the key to success in his business. And in the hazy world of digital content rights, respect seems like a good place to start.

Follow the Money
Undoubtedly, the fact that Gross worked as an attorney at Prudential Securities contributes to his respect for intellectual property rights. But his background working with financial institutions—including Morgan Stanley—implementing first generation portals and championing intelligent agents lead to the foundation of Ozmosys. Originally, in his dealings with various groups and business units, he discovered they needed a simple content submission tool and then they needed simple search. But Gross found that, "as these initiatives grew, companies found they wanted to include external as well as internal content" and also found that companies had to dedicate a number of staff to being on the lookout for essential information at hundreds of places on the Web. So he developed relationships with newswires and content aggregators and came to understand the issues surrounding publisher's rights.

"At that time," says Gross, "I saw a trend in the portal world and developed a different view on where things were going. So I left and focused on structuring unstructured content and working with the portals and intranets to do this. Everybody used My Yahoo!, so I asked, ‘How do you create My Yahoo! in a professional environment so that they get the information they want and need?'

"When I worked with information executives," he says, "I found that Investment Banks had hundreds and hundreds of sources coming in and they didn't have enough people to manage all of it so it became a burden. My thought was to invert everything in the way that you'd get one trusted email that would put all of their electronic sources into one email in the morning as a daily briefing."

Content Control
Now, Gross sees that "information executives are getting more control and understanding of content so that they get the right information to the right people at the right time."

According to Gross, tools like these are needed to prevent information overload and overlook as well as to maximize the information executive's skills. "They are the ones that understand the needs of the professionals," he says. "So, through Ozmosys, they can drill down so that individuals get only the information that they need to do their work because our email contains everything they need to know for that day." The system also includes a reporting system that tells when users log in or add information sources. "We know that subscription management is a nightmare," says Gross who says his company works with clients to go beyond click-through counts to develop more sophisticated usage tracking tools.

Gross sees that information professionals can spend hours a day combing through information and funneling it to the individuals within their organizations. Now, he says, they can set up their system so that "the professionals each get their information directly. Everybody gets access to the information faster because it doesn't have to be filtered by an info pro first."

He also believes that his tools can actually help promote deployment of external content within organizations. He says, "What we've seen is that a lot of these premium services were getting bottlenecked and not making it to the right people. Because we are quasi-push, we allow this information get to the people that need it so they can use it." Ozmosys can also help provide reportage to content providers as well.

Gross does emphasize that tools like Ozmosys aren't intended to eliminate the role of info pro, "Because of what we do and how we do it," he says, "we are transforming the roles of these information executives. We aid them in getting to the next level in touching the professional."

Personalization Means You
But the personalization of content delivery shouldn't be limited to the info pro, according to Gross. Individuals need control at the desktop to help customize the order in which content is viewed and to request additional information sources. "I think there's a trend right now to try to automate everything," says Gross. "My thoughts about this are that you are the best person to decide what information is useful to you. People are in particular units and areas of specialties, so with us an info pro can create alert groups and attach it to a distribution list, and then it gets even more granular because the user themselves can pick the pieces."

To date, Ozmosys has focused on the financial and legal content markets (which given Gross' background isn't all that surprising.) According to Gross, however, part of the reason for the emphasis was because, "We wanted to build a knowledge base and they were the information centers. We saw the advantages of working with these places because many information initiatives start there."

But there's always room for growth. "We're going to grow into other industries; they are already knocking on our door. We want to make sure we have controlled growth. We know we need to be good at what we do now, and our core needs to be strong."