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Thomson Reuters unveils commercial version of Calais

In a move that should surprise no one who has been paying attention, Thomson Reuters today announced commercial pricing for their Calais offering.Calais' Tom Tague was quick to stress that this is in addition to the current free service, and that a free Open Calais is not going away.
Written by Paul Miller, Contributor

In a move that should surprise no one who has been paying attention, Thomson Reuters today announced commercial pricing for their Calais offering.

Calais' Tom Tague was quick to stress that this is in addition to the current free service, and that a free Open Calais is not going away.

Quoted in the company's press release, Tague said;

"The commercial options were designed specifically in response to demand from users that require enhanced service levels or on-site installation to support their business models. We are pleased to provide them with the customization, scalability and peace of mind they need in order to build Calais into their networks, sites and services."

Calais Professional remains hosted, in the same way as the current Open Calais. It costs $2,000 per month, and raises transaction levels to more than double the level permitted with the free version. Far more importantly, according to Tague, Calais Professional comes with the Service Level Agreements that many enterprises require before depending upon third party services. For many of these, $2,000 per month is not a lot to pay for a bit of legalese. As Tague noted,

"This is not meant to be a big revenue thing for us."

There is already one (unnamed) customer for Calais Professional, and Tague expects several more in the next few months.

Calais Enterprise is a self-contained and local install of the Calais software and knowledge base. This product is aimed at those who currently bombard Open Calais with dummy queries in order to disguise their areas of interest. It's aimed at those who feel unable - for whatever reason - to pass data back and forth across the network. Thomson Reuters will periodically make refreshed capabilities available for download to the local server, but no data passes back to the wider Calais pool of knowledge. Pricing is on a case-by-case basis, but significantly higher than for Calais Professional. This is an interesting example of something that will probably become an increasingly prevalent trend; silos powered by resources grown on the open web, prepared to pay a premium not to participate in turn. Freebase, Twine and others will presumably move in a similar direction in due course.

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