In Context

I missed this post on Life Management Platforms (LMPs) by KuppingerCole a year ago. Martin writes:

Life Management Platforms will be among the biggest things in IT within the next ten years. They are different from “Personal Data Stores” in the sense of adding what we call “apps” to the data stores and being able to work with different personal data stores. So they allow to securely working with personal data by using such apps which consume but not unveil that data – in contrast to a data store which just could provide or allow access to personal data. They thus are more active and will allow every one of us to deal with his personal data while enforcing privacy and security. Regarding “Personal Clouds”, that might be or become Life Management Platforms. However I struggle with that term given that it is used for so many different things. I thus prefer to avoid it. Both today’s personal data stores and personal clouds have a clear potential to evolve towards Life Management Platforms – let’s wait and see. I’ve recently written a report on Life Management Platforms, describing the basic concepts and looking at several aspects like business cases. This report is available for free.

The key sentence is:

“They are different from “Personal Data Stores” in the sense of adding what we call “apps” to the data stores”

I agree with this need to add apps to PDSes. This is similar to what we worked on back in the heady Information Card days. In 2009 when we saw that getting adoption of pure InfoCards was going to be a long march, we tried to add the concept of “apps” to the data held in the InfoCard (or better yet “pointed to it by an r-card). We called them app-cards–a superset of InfoCards. We decided to integrate Kynetx‘s KRL technology to implement these apps. Which means the apps got executed in the cloud.