Stratus Security’s Pete Soderling and BuzzData’s Pete Forde attended at the Strata Conference yesterday and held a session on the “Building and Pricing the Data Marketplace”. Their point was that there’s room for change when it comes to data marketplaces.

“But what is data, and why should we care? High value top-down data sets like stock feeds, but also ‘open source upstarts like us;’ excited by open data, hacking, Government data, and mashups. “Lots of people think data should be free… like music and movies.”

The session noted data catalogs are “probably not the future of consuming data.” They continued to discuss that around a dozen companies are working to develop Data Marketplaces top to current, not very flexible dataset-buying categories: freshness, accuracy, licensing, format, open data etc.

Consumer data was brought up as a big opportunity to explore, but privacy is the first priority before that step.  Moreover, the session also discussed potential requirements around data marketplaces as a sort of brand. The border between open and valuable data sets is blurring, and the two speakers highlighted whether or not these are even necessary for something that is technically free standalone.

The last parts of the session discussed the necessity of timely data management in context to Data-as-a-Service, and that more flexibility should be given, in terms of pricing too. However, this would increase the difficulty of utilizing the data itself.  “Delivery metrics are key”, they noted, “know who your customers are, what data they use, and how.”

We’ve been covering Strata at every turn.  Watch the live stream here, where you’ll also find our video archives.  Check out yesterday’s keynote coverage here.