cSubs
Bringing Clarity to Information Purchases

Enterprise data: one of the powerful new weapons that -- when managed effectively -- provides enormous advantages in today’s information-intensive business realm. But over the last decade the delivery of information has undergone a paradigm shift, and many companies are still running to catch up. The challenges they face—including overspending on data, duplicating user access across departments, allocating costs across geographically spread subsidiaries and divisions, and the financial and legal risks of violating publisher terms—pave the need for an innovative, intuitive solution to manage information purchases. This is what New Jersey-based cSubs offers its clients globally. With their all-in-one licensed content management service and business intelligence system, Clarity, the firm enables businesses to control their licenses, eContent, subscriptions, contracts, and user access from a single platform.

While speaking with the CIO Applications’ editorial team, David Rifkin, Chief Client Officer of cSubs, and Ken Redler, its CTO, share their insights on the company’s journey, solutions, and the value propositions that the company provides to its clients.

What are the significant challenges that you have seen faced by businesses in the space?

Like other industry verticals, the licensed content management space is not immune to challenges. The major pain points that we see stem from the disharmony between several distinct groups in organizations—technology, information/ knowledge management professionals, data managers, procurement and end-users—all of whom wish to maintain control over the purchased information. They all have valid reasons for this. For instance, end-users need to have access to all the information required for them to do their jobs. Librarians in business information centers are required to manage licenses and monitor access to these resources. Technology groups understand that information needs to be coordinated through their systems for efficient delivery within the company. Data groups also have their own requirements, including assigning, revoking and managing seats, and tracking usage. Finance needs to determine how to allocate costs across multiple users, multiple regions, often multiple currencies; how to do this when information and data providers require single payment in a single currency? And of course, there’s always the question of how to process orders, renewals, cancellations and access through the company’s eProcurement platform.

In this scenario, we provide a consolidated solution that eliminates this rift between various groups, fulfills all of their needs and enables them all to have appropriate control over access to information. Additionally, our solution helps organizations mitigate other cross-cutting concerns in the space.

Since many contracts embrace risk profiles, they expose the company in various ways, which is an ever-growing concern for enterprises. To this end, our solution allows organizations’ legal and risk groups to exert some control over the purchases, thus ensuring that all disparate groups work together to mitigate the aforementioned pain points.

Could you give us a brief overview about the value proposition offered by cSubs?

At cSubs, the value proposition is simple—we integrate the disparate elements of the information delivery process into a single platform and deliver them to our clients in an easily accessible form. To be more specific, our solutions enable users to identify and access their existing subscription resources, to submit purchase orders for new products, to manage licenses and contracts, and to save time and money in the process. This robust offering propels the delivery of relevant information, breaks down silos within organizations, and ensures that cSubs’ clients are maximizing the value of their information spend. Analyses of usage analytics also enables us to reduce client costs by helping to right-size contracts and eliminate over-buying, reduce redundancies, and utilize purchased information and data most effectively by ensuring that end users not only have access, but are aware of that access and the value of the information.

Offering this kind of streamlined information management is an advantageous value proposition, and as a result we cater to a broad swath of industries. Our client-base includes scientific and medical companies, financial and insurance organizations, entertainment firms, and other information-intensive companies.

What are the key factors that differentiate cSubs from the other players in the marketplace?

cSubs is a small, diversity-recognized, woman-owned company that holds several levels of certifications. For our clients who are committed to supporting diverse vendors, this factor means a lot. What makes us different from the normal guild of technology-based competitors is our client-centric culture and human resource that have been gained over decades of hard work.

Even though we are propelled by innovative technologies, at cSubs we specialize in designing and delivering offerings that align well with our clients’ requirements. We achieve this by analyzing and incorporating the valuable feedback we receive from our clients to make our solutions highly responsive and agile. As a small company, we possess the internal nimbleness and adaptability to deliver flexible solutions that reflect our clients’ needs, unlike some competitors with a more ossified structure. We also follow a philosophy of continuous improvement.

Looking ahead, what are the next significant steps that cSubs will take in improving the value proposition of its solution stack or even expand geographically?

We have some exciting plans on the near horizon. First, as part of our ongoing commitment to being a provider of global services, and to better serve our international clients, we are opening several offices overseas, beginning with London this fall and followed by Tokyo. cSubs already has an office in the Philippines, from which we provide customer support in Asia. Secondly, we continue to grow and strengthen our collaborations with a broad spectrum of strategic partners for RSS feeds of curated information, document delivery, federated search, and other services with a vision to expand our offerings.