While the FIMA conference was distracted by the ongoing clash of civilizations between centralized and decentralized approaches to data management, back in the real world Goldensource’s Gert Raeves offered an esoteric argument for what’s become the status quo.

Kicking off with a mash-up remix by Too Many DJs of Salt n Pepa’s Push It and Iggy Pop’s No Fun, Raeves offered a series of examples of non-reference data market instances where thinking outside the box has changed the business model. His conclusion was that there are many tools available for data managers to use to increase the value of data by giving it some structure, while reducing the cost by taking advantage of some emerging sources.

The concept isn’t necessarily revolutionary, and neither is the end result: users taking on their own data management techniques to create their own internal products in order to gain competitive edge. It’s what Goldensource and its competitors do for a living. But the range of new tools, and the way they’re impacting business models, was. Raeves compared Bloomberg (closed, proprietary, controlling) with iTunes, and suggested that Spotify (content on demand, yet with the same digital rights management governance in place) might shake up Apple’s world. Who, he asked, is our Spotify?

Reference data Spotify (Datafy?) or not, the business models of content providers is being shaken up, sometimes driven by political concerns (www.data.gov), sometimes by commercial ones (free availability of Bats Exchange market data). He pointed to the XBRL initiative as an example of a standard that has made waves, to the Freebase project that seeks to extract data in a structured format from essentially unstructured publicly available sources, and to Thomson Reuters’ Calais product, which places a set of metadata around information from disparate sources. Nasdaq OMX’s MarkReply service, he showed, offers a depth of data unthinkable just a few years ago and at very low cost.

As this technological revolution is going on, so is a geopolitical one. Raeves pointed to the shift of power away from the West, as Asia starts to realize it’s true potential. Half of all websites, he said, will be in Mandarin fives year from now.

What does it all mean?

According to Raeves, the reference data industry has a “tremendous future” in adding to data quality while reducing data cost. He acknowledged the ongoing trist between a centralized utility approach – as espoused by the ECB – and the need for individual market practitioners to differentiate themselves by creating their own ‘products’ based on data.

Each firm, he said, has the tools at its disposal to create its own golden copy; remixing, he called it, hence the Iggy Pop/Salt n Peppa intro. Until there is certainty about the way forward – and we’ve been listening to calls for centralized and standardized data services for the past 20 years – Raeves reckons firms will continue to remix in order to find their competitive edge.