August 26th, 2009

WebEx chief quits Cisco for Salesforce.com

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:35 am

Categories: CRM, Collaboration, Platform as a service, Salesforce.com, WebEx

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., WebEx Communications Inc., Collaboration, Cisco Systems Inc., Phil Wainewright

Doug Dennerline, a long-serving Cisco insider who took the reins at web conferencing leader WebEx several months after Cisco acquired it, has quit his job as senior VP and general manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group to become executive VP, enterprise sales Americas at Salesforce.com [disclosure: both WebEx and Salesforce.com are former clients].

I interviewed Dennerline in January last year, just weeks after he took up the collaboration software role at Cisco, and he outlined four priorities for that year:

• Get Cisco’s sales team selling the WebEx service
• Finish preparations for a production launch of WebEx Connect, the company’s on-demand collaboration and composite applications platform
• Harness Cisco’s partner channel to sell WebEx
• Tap Cisco’s resources to bolster research and development of new WebEx services

Although WebEx has continued to grow and has brought out some Cisco-inspired enhancements to its offerings, progress on all four points has been lukewarm and it’s no surprise Dennerline found himself tempted by the more vibrant pastures at salesforce.com. (As an aside, I’m also intrigued to see Salesforce.com hiring again at that level after cutting some senior sales management roles just six months ago — as well as wondering what Cisco, one of Salesforce.com’s banner customers, thinks about its supplier poaching one of its top executives).

To see Dennerline jump ship no doubt compounds the demoralization Read the rest of this entry »

July 1st, 2009

WebEx augurs ill for Cisco's cloud ambitions

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 1:04 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Ecosystems, Platform as a service, Utility computing, Web 2.0, WebEx

Tags: WebEx Communications Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Phil Wainewright

Color me skeptical, but I feel the detail behind yesterday and today’s Cisco Live event hasn’t matched the aspirations set out in executive keynotes. I like the vision set out by CEO John Chambers of providing a technology infrastructure that (as Oliver Marks puts it) does a better job of connecting people. I’m highly supportive when CTO Padmasree Warrior looks ahead to a future fabric of ‘intercloud’ interoperability standards — ending lock-in by individual cloud providers — and talks about ‘federation’ between cloud and on-premise. But when I look at the map of where Cisco claims to play in the cloud, I’m struck by how feeble its tenure is at each level, from the underlying foundation all the way up to both Paas and SaaS, where WebEx is its undernourished poster child, as I’ll discuss below.

First, there’s what Cisco calls the ‘IT Foundation layer’ — the underlying hardware and virtualization platforms on which cloud services run. Cisco expects to play a big role here with its Unified Computing System (UCS). I’m sure there’s a huge potential market for UCS among enterprises, telcos, IT services providers and many other established data center operators that want to transition their existing enterprise infrastructure into more of a quasi-cloud environment. But I can’t help thinking that most of them are missing the point when they try to scale up familiar enterprise technology instead of scaling out to a more web-scale architecture.

I’m also suspicious that Cisco is falling into the trap of over-engineering UCS so that it ends up too-clever-by-half to really deliver the promise of cloud computing. I would be more convinced if Cisco had productized the existing web-scale infrastructure that it acquired with WebEx. But just as Microsoft has developed its Azure cloud platform with a whole new set of design objectives rather than productizing the existing web-scale infrastructure it had already built for its Live properties, so Cisco is shoe-horning UCS Read the rest of this entry »

June 16th, 2009

Netviewer aims to outshine WebEx in Europe

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:55 am

Categories: Collaboration, Ecosystems, Europe, Software licensing, WebEx

Tags: Web, WebEx Communications Inc., Europe, Citrix Systems Inc., Online Meeting, Remote Support, Netviewer, Web Meeting, Remote Administration, Web Conferencing

With more than 15,000 customers in 55 countries, one of Europe’s largest indigenous SaaS players is Germany’s Netviewer. Its online meeting platform is a rival to well-known US names such as WebEx (part of Cisco) and the GoToMyPC/GoToMeeting products from Citrix OnLine. Already the number two web meetings player in Europe in 2007 (according to market researcher Frost & Sullivan), the company added venture backing last year from Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Online Venture Fund and European Founders Fund, the investment vehicle of Internet luminaries the Samwer brothers. I had a chance a couple of weeks ago to connect with Netviewer’s founder and CEO, Dr Andreas Schweinbenz (pictured), to find out more about the company’s plans.

It’s still early days in the growth of the European market for web meetings, he believes, and pointed to a Gartner chart on which the European market value of $378.9 million in 2008 just happens to equal the US market value of $378.2 million in 2003. Considering the total GDP of the economies are roughly equivalent, that suggests the European market is around five years behind the US.

Another interesting comparison I’d add is to look at the US players back in 2003. WebEx already had a dominant 50 percent share with revenues of $189 million, but privately-held ExpertCity, which became Citrix Online on acquisition in February 2004, made somewhere in the $20-30 million range. Netviewer is about the same size now, based on its published accounts for 2007 (the latest available under German rules for privately-held companies). It reported gross income of €14 million in 2007 (around $20 million at the prevailing exchange rate). Citrix financial statements for 2008 show that in the five years since 2003, its online services subsidiary has grown to become a $260 million-a-year business. If Netviewer can rival or better that 10x growth over the coming five years, it has a rosy future ahead of it.

Unlike Citrix Online, Netviewer has decided against continuing to focus its efforts on the remote support market — even though that’s where it started out. “We see the larger market in the future is the meeting area,” explained Schweinbenz. That choice, incidentally, avoids crossing swords with Europe’s other significant player in this sector, Spain’s NTRglobal, which is concentrating on remote support rather than Web meetings [disclosure: NTR is a recent client, WebEx has also been a client].

Netviewer is in no hurry to take its wares to the US market, either. “Let’s not get de-focused by trying to expand internationally too soon,” said Schweinbenz. Its clear target is to be the European number one in web meetings. “The online meeting business is still in its early stages,” he said, and growth is rising: “The economic crisis is pushing the market because people want to save money.”

The company has several initiatives under way to accelerate growth. The first is a partnership strategy to encourage Read the rest of this entry »

May 7th, 2009

Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge?

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:32 pm

Categories: Architecture, Rich Internet Applications, WebEx

Tags: WebEx Communications Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Cloud, Phil Wainewright

Having lambasted Microsoft for its self-serving software-plus-services rhetoric the other week, today I’m going to apparently contradict myself and make a case for (some) hybrid clouds. Bear with me, though, there’s method in this seeming madness. What irks me about Microsoft’s position is that the company’s spokespeople assume that any departure from a wholly cloud-based stance — any hint that there might be a few lines of software code running anywhere on the customer’s premises — instantly validates their entire catalog of on-premise software. I find this immensely irritating because it seems to be an argument framed to justify their existing mindset, rather than attempting to engage with the new, cloud-centric model.

At the same time, I can understand that this mindset is prevalent not only at Microsoft but throughout the conventional software industry and among many of its customers. In fact, I think we all need to be much more aware of how pervasively the old, enterprise-centric way of doing things permeates all of our thinking and habits. I’ve been mulling this a lot recently in the course of preparing a keynote presentation for next week’s Glue Conference in Denver: Gossamer and Glue: Weaving the Loosely Coupled Web, in which I’ll be discussing the tension between our desire to open up to all the resources of the connected Web, balanced against our need to govern and protect our existing assets. A constantly recurring theme in the evolution of SOA, cloud and the Web has been the misplaced imposition of trusted, existing structures onto emergent patterns of interaction. This applies with special emphasis to hybrid clouds — build them to fit with your existing, unchanged infrastructure and you’ll get little-to-no benefit. Change your enterprise to really leverage the cloud and nine times out of ten, you won’t have any further use for a hybrid model.

Let me explain what I’m getting at here by reference to Cisco’s recent announcement of an on-premise extension to the rebranded WebEx Collaboration Cloud (what WebEx used to call its Mediatone network before the Cisco acquisition). ‘Ah-ha!’ I can hear the Microsoft S+S evangelists crowing, ‘yet another SaaS poster child acknowledges the need for on-premise components.’ Look closely, though, and you’ll see that Cisco isn’t talking about Read the rest of this entry »

January 24th, 2008

Taking the reins and tending the cows at WebEx

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:37 pm

Categories: WebEx

Tags: WebEx Communications Inc., Statistic, Cisco Systems Inc., Phil Wainewright

As a direct result of rolling out web meeting capabilities across its entire organization in the past six months, Cisco has found that its travel and expense budget is down by almost a third. The statistic is an unexpected benefit of acquiring WebEx in a deal that closed last May, and will make a compelling story for its salespeople when they go calling on customers in the coming year. There’s a new book out that may help them too, called Why buy the cow? — more on that below.

Making sure that Cisco’s sales teams are motivated to sell WebEx services has just become the responsibility of a new general manager at the on-demand Web meeting provider. The sudden departure late last year of Cisco’s former chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo, who had been widely regarded as heir-apparent to succeed John Chambers, led to a rapid reshuffle of top management at Cisco. That meant promotion for Don Proctor, who’d been general manager at WebEx for just three months, and who now reports directly to Chambers on all of Cisco’s software products. Four weeks ago Doug Dennerline (pictured) took over as senior VP of the collaboration software group and thus the new general manager of WebEx.

Yesterday, I met with Dennerline for an exclusive first media interview since taking up his new role [disclosure: WebEx is also a client — I hosted a series of webcasts last year on the topic of Work 2.0 and we're currently discussing plans for a follow-up series this year].

Dennerline outlined four main priorities that he sees for WebEx this year.

• Get Cisco’s sales team selling the WebEx service
• Finish preparations for a production launch of WebEx Connect, the company’s on-demand collaboration and composite applications platform
• Harness Cisco’s partner channel to sell WebEx
• Tap Cisco’s resources to bolster research and development of new WebEx services

I dug further into his plans for encouraging both Cisco’s own sales team and its channel partners to sell WebEx. This may not be as easy as it sounds, Read the rest of this entry »

November 8th, 2007

Web collaboration: Cisco and Adobe duke it out

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 4:16 pm

Categories: Adobe, Business models, Ecosystems, WebEx

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Web, Web-based Collaboration, Software-as-a-service, WebEx Communications Inc., Collaboration, Cisco Systems Inc., Software As A Service (SaaS), Emerging Technologies, Phil Wainewright

A fascinating juxtaposition of keynotes from Cisco and Adobe have kicked off proceedings today at the SIIA On Demand Summit in San Jose, which I’m attending as a speaker [disclosure: I'm also on the steering committee for the event, but have paid my own way to be here]. These two companies’ SaaS strategies are going to have a huge influence on the future development of software as a service and on-demand applications, so getting an insight into their current intentions has been a great way to start the day.

First up, Donald Proctor, who is senior vice president of the collaboration and sofware group at Cisco — the division encompassing WebEx, acquired earlier this year, and now Securent acquired last week [further disclosure: WebEx is a client]. His primary message is really the same message that WebEx honed as an independent company: “The next wave of collaboration will be driven not in the context of intranets but in terms of [the] Internet.”

That’s already happening of course out in the real world, where organizations are already working with partners, customers and stakeholders and making increasingly intense use of subcontractors, global sourcing and other non-internal business resources. But the technology has not kept pace. When people ask him who Cisco’s competitors are in the collaboration space, Proctor says he answers with a question: “How do most people collaborate today?” To which he rhetorically replies, “Email attachments … Email is the only tool we’ve had historically for collaborating across the firewall.” That creates a huge underserved market that’s ripe for a new set of collaborative products.

Elaborating on that point, his message for the audience here — almost entirely software companies either in the SaaS business or planning to get into it — was, “The next wave of software as a service Read the rest of this entry »

March 15th, 2007

SaaS Summit reactions to Cisco buying WebEx

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:47 pm

Categories: Collaboration, WebEx

Tags:

Attendees at today's SaaS Summit in Monterey — where I arrived last night after a mammoth 19-hour journey via London underground, Virgin Atlantic and Hertz rental car — were feeling bullish but bemused at the news that Cisco has bought WebEx for $3.2 billion. Knowing that WebEx sold for close to a 10x multiple of revenues is a boost for the valuation of any SaaS vendor. "The valuation premium on recurring revenue is clear," was the verdict of one well-known ISV that has recently entered the SaaS sector.

The deal had come as a bolt from the blue, though, and no one was sure quite why it had been done. By sheer coincidence, I'll be on site at WebEx tomorrow for the first in a series of webcasts I'm recording with some of the company's customers (WebEx is a client — see disclosure page). But until the deal has formally closed, I'm not likely to find out any more than has already been publicly stated. So I may as well publish my thoughts on the acquisition tonight. I'll limit myself to three quick points.

• Look at how Cisco chooses to describe WebEx's offerings in its press release: "technologies and services that allow companies to engage in real-time and asynchronous data conferences over the Internet as well as share web-based documents and workspaces." At WebEx, 'asynchronous' is the term used for its WebOffice service — the former intranets.com offering — which, along with the new Connect platform, is where customers 'share documents and workspaces'. So I agree with Om Malik that Cisco has bought WebEx to go head-to-head against Microsoft's newly announced Sharepoint strategy (and if I were Microsoft I would be really worried today).

Read the rest of this entry »

February 2nd, 2007

Will WebEx Connect challenge SFdC's AppExchange?

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 12:57 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Ecosystems, WebEx

Tags:

Financial results from on-demand collaboration vendor WebEx got a warm welcome yesterday on Wall St, which bid up the stock price 21% over the course of the day. The reaction was probably down to simple financial metrics: WebEx maintained its growth momentum, increased its operating margins and said it expected more of the same next year. But financial analysts on the company's earnings call the previous evening were more interested in prising out fresh information about the company's recently announced WebEx Connect platform, even though CFO Mike Everett confirmed that its contribution to revenues is "not material yet" and is expected to be "very, very modest" in 2007.

The transcript of the earnings call reveals that analysts were probing to see how much of a rival Connect will be to Salesforce.com's AppExchange ecosystem. Their questions drew out some useful nuggets of information and a number of similarities to AppExchange, although of course the most glaring disparity at present is that Connect is not yet on public release and currently has just seven partners whereas AppExchange is already almost a year old and has more than 250 partners. [Disclosure: WebEx is a client of my consulting business — more here].

Based on the answers given in the call transcript, here are eleven things to know about WebEx Connect — and below, my take on the most important thing the analysts didn't ask about. Read the rest of this entry »

October 11th, 2006

Office 2.0's monopoly networks

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:34 pm

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications, Utility computing, Web 3.0, WebEx

Tags:

My posting last week about Why Office 2.0 will never go wholly online sparked quite a debate, both in TalkBack and the wider blogosphere. I ruffled some feathers, especially with my opening paragraphs, which perhaps explains why not everyone read right through to the end. Dennis Howlett (despite reading all the way through) tells me I should never say never. I think people need to keep their hats on and remember that what I actually said was, never say wholly.

As I expected, I was immediately taken to task for failing to realizeThose who want all their applications to reside in the cloud should beware of what they ask for that all the current glitches in network coverage will be resolved as soon as the technology matures, just like in the early days of electricity distribution. But as I pointed out, the electricity network is a poor analogy:

"… the Internet is already far more ubiquitous than electricity, which we have to carry around in batteries whenever we want to go mobile. It's economically feasible to deliver electricity at five-nines availability because it's only delivered to certain places. The ubiquitous Internet will always have patchier availability."

Others pointed out that even electricity cuts out from time to time. And here's another flaw with the analogy; the Internet was designed to be able to operate even when it's overloaded or disrupted. It's got far more resilience than the electricity distribution network, but it achieves that resilience by tolerating far wider variations in performance.

This leads me to think that economics are the key determining factor here: Read the rest of this entry »

September 25th, 2006

WebEx enters the Web 3.0 ecosystem wars

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:39 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Ecosystems, Web 3.0, WebEx

Tags:

Salesforce.com’s AppExchange ecosystem is an attractive prospect for ISV partners, with 25,000 customers and half a million users to target. What then will on-demand ISVs make of the new ecosystem opportunity announced today by WebEx, which offers access to 25,000 customers and two million registered users?

In San Francisco tonight, web conferencing market leader WebEx launched a new collaborative platform, WebEx Connect, which brings enterprise and on-demand applications into a collaboration-centric WebEx environment that combines instant messaging, shared documents, threaded discussions and of course web conferencing (there was a party too — see pic). [Update: Dan Farber reports the launch too]. Powered in part by SOA integration and process orchestration from composite applications specialist Cordys, the platform provides sophisticated business process mashup capabilities to knowledge workers. (Cordys is a $250 million startup led by Jan Baan, the former founder of one-time ERP giant Baan Systems).

WebEx founder and CEO Subrah Iyar is betting that knowledge workers will prefer to manage their work from the collaborative WebEx interface rather than from individual applications such as salesforce automation or enterprise resource planning. "People don’t collaborate in applications," he said at tonight’s launch. "In the midst of collaboration, they want to access applications." The Cordys-powered technology allows them Read the rest of this entry »