November 12th, 2008

JobBlogs: Facebook for business

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Facebook, Software-as-a-service, File Server, Workspace, File Servers, Software As A Service (SaaS), Team Management, Cloud Computing, Blogging, Storage Management

I’ve been a little busy over the last few weeks, but it hasn’t all been drinking and partying. I’ve been looking into JobBlogs, which has a highly innovative SaaS appliance, which blends together customer relation management and project management, with social media within business as a main selling point, into one central application. As they so delicately describe it:

“It serves up an intuitive, comprehensive and fast workspace tailored to meet universal team challenges. Contacts, plans, activities, tasks, documents and schedules, are easily organized and tracked throughout the work flow.”

But it’s not just that. It feels, from the very beginning of using this application, like an online operating system; a mesh for the masses, or a screen away from your computer. The user interface is fantastic. It has a very Windows-style feel to it, making sure the user feels safe and comforted knowing the environment even before they use it. You can even customise the wallpaper that you have - a very un-business like quality, but gives it that edge over other competing products.

It’s a fresh way to look at things; integrated blog management to keep on track of projects and let others know how things are stewing. You can create and manage workspaces, tags, business processes - someone even quoted this as being “like Facebook for business”. It also boasts:

“…customer relationship management (CRM), intranet, contact database, content management system and file server requirements.”

It runs within your browser with a SaaS element to it, is incredibly easy to set up and worth the cheap cost to run it all. This could well be a user integral part of any organisation - keeping people connected, up to date, understanding and safe knowing their storage is secure.

It’s worth looking into at very least. This’ll be something I’ll personally be keeping in my bookmarks for a later date.

October 29th, 2008

LinkedIn's apps: good idea but...

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:46 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Network, LinkedIn, Larry, Tripit, Networking, Dennis Howlett

Larry Dignan offers his view on the announcement that LinkedIn has added in a bundle of applications designed to enhance the platform. Larry is mildly dismissive, suggesting that:

I wouldn’t call these applications exactly enterprise class, but could be useful in the corporate environment.

If we’re equating ‘enterprise’ to the 1,000 person up business then yes, Larry has a good point but if we’re talking about the individual, looking to establish a personal business network then I disagree. Huddle for instance is a great application for the kind of crowdsourcing we’re seeing in niche networks. Tripit is useful for connecting with those you may have in your network when on the road. From a regional viewpoint, I would have preferred to see Dopplr. But Wordpress.com inclusion just seems lame. What’s wrong with Wordpress.org?

I’d like to think this will work but I’m not convinced. I installed some of the apps to my profile and found that there is no discovery process that automatically links to my profiles in other applications. OK - so maybe I need a touch of ’security’ to ensure I’m linking to the right ’stuff.’ And yes, there are the to be expected performance glitches that a couple of my colleagues have picked up.

But the real downside for me is that LinkedIn requires me to use it as a portal of sorts. That means another application I need keep open on the desktop and probably in its own window. The advantage is that I can aggregate other apps I might use into one place but in reality I don’t believe I am going to do that.

I’d like to be proven wrong because LinkedIn is starting to mature into the kind of personal work-life tool that professionals will want to use. As Larry says:

The move (LinkedIn blog, statement, Techmeme) makes sense as LinkedIn can stick to its knitting, maintain its focus in what should be a boom time (lots of folks looking to network and find jobs on the cheap) and the social network can differentiate from the games and other time wasting apps found elsewhere.

Whether it catches the eye of the Gen-Y’ers I see flocking around Facebook is another matter. They don’t seem to mind the chaos that Facebook has become. Speaking personally, I got out of there the moment I started getting ‘poked.’

October 23rd, 2008

Noodling on LinkedIn's millions

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 3:35 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: LinkedIn, Investment, Finance, Dennis Howlett

The news that LinkedIn has raised another $22.7 million (total inbound investment $100 million) has me thinking. TechCrunch says the money was raised just before the credit crunch and banking collapse of last month but even so, this is an extraordinary achievement. There were signs that things were turning rough around the timing of this investment so I’m not sure why TechCrunch should make a point of this.

The key to understanding this comes in the lineup of investors and what they are saying. Per the release: “Goldman Sachs; The McGraw-Hill Companies; and SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG; as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners.” These are all savvy investors that will have undertaken careful due diligence. Not for these guys the smash and grab that one so often hears about from Silicon Valley VCs.

Doug Higgins of SAP Ventures was quoted as saying: “We made this investment because we believe that when Web 2.0 technologies are thoughtfully applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for small, medium and large companies.” (My emphasis.)

I’ve been a LinkedIn user for some years but have never really used it although plenty of people have come to me looking for recommendations or connections. However, as the economy strains to find rays of sunshine, I expect to see an uptick in activity on this service.

Where LinkedIn scores (and FaceBook fails) is in the professional nature of the relationships you’re likely to create and develop, coupled to the richness of reputation data. This makes far more sense to business people than the indiscriminate friending that occurs on the consumer social networks.

Despite past attempts to write off LinkedIn as an irrelevant walled garden, the fact remains it has been profitable since 2006. Solid business applications usually are and even though the earlier Series D valued it at $1 billion, a figure that now looks like the stuff of fairy tales, raising more money now is a wise move.

As always in investment, quality counts. In business applications, the same applies. Don’t be surprised to see LinkedIn turning out as more profitable in the downturn (in contrast to consumer spend based networks) and using its recent round of funding for enterprise style acquisitions.

Update: Here’s another reason why LinkedIn will do better than Facebook. What idiot is going to do this on LinkedIn?

October 23rd, 2008

PBWiki: growing in a recession

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 1:23 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Collaboration, Recession, Environment, PBWiki, Chris Yeh, Wiki, Marketing Research, Online Communications, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Earlier today I had a conversation with Chris Yeh, VP enterprise marketing at PBWiki. He brings an honesty and refreshing spirit to the business of building a startup.

PBWiki is a company that everyone kinda knows but doesn’t always see. They’re not big on the blah-blah circuit because as Chris points out, you tend to see the same faces and these events have a navel gazing quality to them. I was interested to hear how the company is doing, where its focus is coming from and how it sees the future. Bear in mind the wiki market is crowded yet at the same time wiki represents one of the few areas where you can argue that enterprise adoption has taken a reasonable hold.

Asked about PBWiki’s approach to market, Chris had this to say: “You have to say that you’re going to solve this specific problem for this specific audience. We have a very specific focus for people who are trying to do collaboration across boundaries. Solutions that you bring in house have a very difficult time dealing with people from multiple enterprises.”

Chris cited the example of SAP where they together with CapGemini in the UK are using PBWiki to reach out to customers raqhter than using in house existing solutions. He also said there are instances of PBWiki running inside Google: “How long that will continue is another matter,” he quipped. Yet another use case is in the mortgage industry where customers who have been rejected try hopping from one provider to another in the expectation that the providers won’t share information. All in, Chris claims that PBWiki now has 5-6,000 paying customers from a total of 400,000 who have signed up, paying on average around $1,000 a year.

Chris’s focus the last year has been about moving the company from what was once perceived as a consumer play to more of a business specific value proposition. “In the last year we’ve grown from a handful of people to just under 30. Most of those are in support and sales plus some marketing. We didn’t have any of those functions. We did that because it was obvious there just isn’t that much money in ad support revenues.” Looking at the company website, it is clear they’re doing something right because the company is still hiring. Even so, Chris is not sitting on his laurels: “These things take a long time to come hit you and even though we’re continuing to do better and better, you just don’t know when or if the recession will bite so I’m cautious.”

Asked why PBWiki is adopting a more traditional approach to market Chris noted that once you get to around the $500 to $1,000 mark, people tend to want to talk with someone about the product: “The amount of business we get from California is minuscule. Our primary markets in the US are the east coast, Texas, the mid-west and Europe.”

This was particularly interesting to me as I have recently questioned the Gen Y adoption argument. Chris said that while it is true Gen Y’ers don’t want to talk with people and that they will buy online, we’re a long way off seeing that as a mainstream form of activity. “I’m sure over time we’ll move to a model where there are less direct sales people per dollar income but that’s a long way out,” he suggested.

The more interesting part of our conversation though came from a discussion around business models and attitudes to software creation. “Free is not a business model, it’s a marketing device. The Bay Area echo chamber believes it can build its own. Trying to convince our engineering team to use outside products is like pulling teeth. There’s a strong belief that every product should be free, anything can be done with open source and whatever we do we’re smarter than anyone else. I want profit motive because the company that has to support demanding customers is going to put the best product out there. That requires money.”

Looking to the future, Chris said the company is focusing on those businesses that have teams of 5-100 people that have to operate in cross boundary environments: “We put the emphasis on hosted collaboration rather than just wiki because we have to think about how does this interact with the primary collaboration environment which is email. How can we make the two work together more effectively.”

I admire Chris’s ‘what’s on the street’ practical approach and refreshingly honest assessment of what it takes to build a sustainable startup. Too often I hear startups wanting to change the world when you just know that however smart the idea, they’re not where their target market is thinking.

October 20th, 2008

Hands up who's tired of Twitter?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:29 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Twitter, Operational Accounting, Finance, Dennis Howlett

While I didn’t have time to reflect on the top management changes at Twitter last week, I’m not surprised. Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams have swapped seats for one reason: Jack’s a code jock and Ev’s the biz guy. Andy Beal almost nails it:

Sure, it sounds amicable–which is the norm in these situations–but you can’t help but think that investors were perhaps disappointed with Jack’s leadership of Twitter. After all, three years in and Twitter still hasn’t found a revenue model that matches its Silicon Valley hype.

I’m sorry, but I suspect that it will be only a matter of months before we hear of Jack Dorsey leaving his new role as Chairman to “explore other opportunities” or “spend more time with his family.”

Reading between the lines, it seems that Jack’s time at Twitter is already done:

Jack will remain on the board and be closely consulted for all strategic decisions, while I take on day-to-day operations with the support of Biz, Jason, Greg, and the rest of this impressive Twitter team.

VC Fred Wilson who is an early Twitter backer, sounds like he’s getting increasingly fed up of the same old question: When will Twitter announce a business model.

I made a boneheaded move this week as well with this quote to Chris Snyder of Wired which he reported yesterday:

“It’s like the stupidest question in the world: How’s Twitter going to make money?,” said Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, another investor. “It’s like ‘How was Google going to make money?’

The minute I said it, I wanted it back. But it reflects my weariness with getting this question every time anyone asks me about Twitter (as well as the fact that I had flown back from SF the night before and gotten up at 6am to do a board call to London that day). Rule #1, don’t talk to the press when you are tired and irritated.

It is not the stupidest question in the world. It’s a terribly important question. But I don’t think it’s the most important question facing Twitter right now. Twitter has yet to cross the chasm to mainstream usage. It’s not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter. Search and discovery doesn’t work well on Twitter yet. There are a host of issues about the API and the developer ecosystem. Will recent reliability success continue? Can Twitter’s architecture scale now? All of these questions loom large in my mind.

Hey Fred, we’ve all been there and in this mea culpa he raises many of the right questions. But seriously, at a time like now, all businesses need to focus on revenue. It is suicidal to believe that anyone other than Google wins in an ad-sponsored world. I don’t care how great your service is, Google has got the ad-search market sewn up and there are few if any viable alternative ad-based business models for commercial software producers. At least none of those I’ve seen look that attractive.

The possible alternatives are not so palatable either. We’ve already seen Twitter clones turn up, demonstrating that it ain’t that hard to do. At least not on a small scale. It is much harder to build a business from a service that increasingly looks more like a feature. One way around this is to come out the gate with a commercial offering that has genuine business value with a roadmap to match.

I’ve seen plenty of Tweets where people have said they’d willingly pay for Twitter on a subscription basis but at what price? $5 a month? I forked over for the commercial version of Jaiku but it just didn’t have the ‘juice’ to make it to the mainstream. I didn’t renew. Is Twitter that important that I’d buy into a revenue model based on consumption? Possibly. But they’d still have to offer a freebie and I can imagine most people moderating their usage to ensure they don’t pay. If ads are a pain then swapping to the currently free TweetDeck solves that problem in a stroke. Unless of course Twitter forces ads on customers. That’s a guaranteed death sentence in a market where alternatives abound.

It seems to me that a combination of its own relative popularity, open API and free to use model is likely to prove a significant dampener on any attempt to commercialize. It’ll likely suffer from its own success and the expectations of people for ‘free.’ At least in the consumer world. Even if its first mover advantage plays in its favor, the click through rates are likely too low to make ad-based sponsorship worthwhile beyond a few million dollars.

The way to go is direct to the enterprise where customers will pay for guaranteed service levels, white labeling and integration. Even then I’m not sure how much there is to be had from a market that is 99% oblivious to Twitter. To repeat Fred’s words: “It’s not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter.” That’s why use cases are so vitally important and where an understanding of business problems is central to unlocking the value of micro-sharing/micro-blogging services.

But even assuming Twitter overcomes all those hurdles can it really reach Henry Blodget’s assertion of a $1 billion valuation?  Believe that if you will but revenue pressure is forcing prices down which can only be counterbalanced by way of an uptick in active users. Put another way, you can take the sell-side analyst out of Wall Street, but you can’t take the Pavlovian urge to sell-side pimping out of the analyst.

In the meantime I wish that Twitter would put us all out of our collective misery and tell us it’s thoughts on business models. Simply parroting the ‘lots of opportunities’ line is wearisome. But then I’ve come to expect little more from a company whose reputation for secretiveness on any topic is growing by the day.

October 3rd, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 and business collaboration

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:23 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Security, Microsoft SharePoint, Enterprise 2.0, Wiki, Collaboration, Groupware, Online Communications, Enterprise Software, Software, Zack Whittaker

Update: I hit “publish” before the article was completely finished, so I’ve added some images and updated some links. I can’t pull the post without it leaving a trail behind it, so I may as well just own up now and say, “whoops, sorry”.

GroupSwim Collaboration, in a nutshell, is a SaaS social and business collaboration tool, solution, application - whatever you want to call it. With “Collaboration“, it’s a hosted service by GroupSwim which could well be used as a replacement for SharePoint. Although it doesn’t have all the features of SharePoint, it still works extremely well, if not better, than SharePoint in small to medium enterprises.

There are many key features of Collaboration: the main one is that it appears in forum and group form. It can be a central point of contact from a customer’s perspective to get in touch with after-sales care. With forums and groups, even wiki functions for small enterprises and businesses, there are some obvious similarities with Google Groups with some exceptions. One person can be part of different groups, and with AJAX and Web 2.0 (or as it’s an enterprise web application, Enterprise 2.0) style for the site, it boasts over-over tabs to get more detail on something before you look.

It can be served along side these features as a document repository. You can directly upload to a group, forum or wiki, attach to discussions you’re having with work colleagues or consultants, clients and customers, or email them in using your unique GroupSwim email which is provided for you.

But… the documents aren’t stored in GroupSwim. Everything’s taken through the wires to Amazon S3 which significantly increases repository security and decreases bandwidth costs.

Every file has a unique page - just as SharePoint does. However what interested me was the enterprise social network feel to it. It has a version tracker and a download counter, whilst behind the scenes it’s being indexed word for word, byte for byte. Because not everybody had the available plugins for viewing the documents, they use an API available from Scribd which provides the ability to access and preview those documents in full.

Web 2.0 features and the integrated wiki –>

September 16th, 2008

Seesmic layoffs and a new reality?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:22 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Layoff, Social Media, Valleywag, Workforce Management, Human Resources, Dennis Howlett

Valleywag’s somewhat unkind depiction of the layoffs at Seesmic: Seesmic’s newest feature: layoffs is but the latest in an emerging trend of Silicon Valley startups reigning in their spend. Over in Denmark, a remarkable account of failure has emerged. Earlier this week, I debunked some of the talk around ROI, scalability and sustainability while over at Mashable, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins takes a long winded way to say what many of us inside the enterprise have known for a long time: The Wisdom of Crowds - at least as re-interpreted by many in social media - is nonsense. Along the way, he makes a number of interesting points. This caught my eye:

Crowd wisdom has this sort of philosophical feel that “cloud computing” does. It’s a catch all term that broadly describes the bulk of what’s produced in the Web 2.0/social media world. I think the best thing that can be done to solve the problem is for a more thorough understanding of crowd wisdom to be kept in mind by those who design these systems in the first place (that is, if they are designing these systems to be anything more than white-noise generators).

Buzzword bingo has been with the IT industry more years than I care to remember, predicated as it is on the idea that what catches on as a trend is indicative of the fashionista nature of the biz. You sure as heck don’t find any wisdom there. On this occasion I suspect that much of what we’re seeing in the new critiques is exposing the poverty of social media I wrote about in April and kindly reminded by John Reed. At the time I said:

In any business, power relationships are what provide the hidden glue that makes organizations develop hierarchies and structures. We see this reflected in almost every major form of software you care to examine. From process workflows that mange order to cash, through problem resolution in the call center and out to procurement. We have baked those relationships into the structure and organization of everything we see as providing the means of operating successful businesses. Then all of a sudden, business leaders are asked to forget everything they know, accept that structures can and will be subverted but that it will all be OK because people will naturally want to collaborate to get things done. This is a fundamentally incorrect assumption.

If my observations about the way structures operate in the enterprise is correct, then my remarks of six months ago are equally valid today. Add in recent events in the financial markets and it is easy to see the ripple effect of a cold winter of investor retrenchment coupled to a re-examination of some of the more outlandish claims made for SocialAnything. It can’t come a moment too soon.

The firehose blast of half baked pseudo science that pervades so much of social media blogger diatribes has reached the point of drowning in its own stupidity, especially as it applies to the enterprise. More to the point, the fact Mike Arrington appeared to be nursing the hangover from hell following the TechCrunch 50 tells me one thing: the party’s over. I hope all those advertising based startups are watching carefully. Which begs the question: quo vadis?

Jason Perlow talks a lot of sense about SMB saas, virtualization and consolidation of the data center, concluding with a question:

Will the economy force us to do more with less and use radical enabling technologies to help us accomplish it?

Clearly it will. That should benefit the innovators, especially the saas business apps operators who are prepared to charge for their services. I’d go further and say they have little choice. As the investment dollars dry up, you either sink or swim based on your ability to generate enough sales to cover costs. Charging models that make sense to the enterprise must come onto play. It is therefore no surprise to see more services coming out the gate with a charging model. Good for them. Equally, it is good to see Seesmic finally getting ready to open up a revenue generation steam. Not before time and back to commercial reality.

UPDATE: Duncan Riley says in relation to the Lehman Brothers’ collapse:

Across the country, Silicon Valley may seem far removed from the mess. The startups in Palo Alto go on, and on Sandhill Road, the VC’s are still turning up to work. Although we may not see the links to Wall Street on the surface, they are strong, and Silicon Valley is not immune to the crisis.

September 16th, 2008

A moment of lucidity

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:53 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Sustainability, Scalability, Social Media, ROI, Shel, Roi/Tco, Finance, Managerial Accounting, Dennis Howlett

It is not often I agree with social media people. Most of the time I find they’re full of it and return pointed questions with dopey answers. Today is an exception. Shel Israel, one of the earliest and most prolific arm wavers for all thing social has finally ‘fessed up on the question that vexes many: ROI for social style applications. In a revealing post he says:

For the past two years, the Sphinx Riddle for social media proponents has been ROI. Despite whatever compelling arguments we had for social media in the enterprise, failure to answer this question in a way that satisfied the cross-armed skeptic was pretty destructive to our cases.

Back in 2005, I used to reply with glib answers like, “the same as the ROI on a press release or a telephone line or an email account.” This pleased those who already agreed with me on social media. But it did little to persuade the doubters. I knew that but it was the best I could do.

Let’s cut to the chase. Shel is basically saying: “We had no idea but couldn’t lose face.” I have no argument with that, recalling well the conversations I had with Charlene Li when she was at Forrester and grappling with the ROI of blogging. Forrester continues to madly arm wave, in latter times through the efforts of Jeremiah Owyang, whose insistence on using his blog as a ‘research’ gathering tool beggars serious belief, based as it is on the bubble crowd in Silicon Valley.  In fairness to Jeremiah, he’s the first to admit that his focus is on the narrow area of external facing, marketing driven efforts in the social media space. Back to the plot.

Shel goes on to acknowledge that ROI is ‘not a resolved issue’ but then spins his argument to discuss scalability and sustainability, basing his argument on the thinking of KD Paine:

In fact, scalability may not even be the right term for the emerging issue. KD Paine, one of my favorite thinkers on issues like these told me, “I think scalability is one thing and sustainability is the other side of the coin.”

I disagree. Scalability is all about the ability to ramp up and sustain a working platform with large numbers of participants and coping with spikes in demand. It is a technology issue. Sustainability is a completely different concept. That’s about ensuring the people within a particular network are able to grow and sustain their efforts over time. This is where life gets awkward for the social media folk because the underlying assumption seems to be that social networks operate on a continuum. I believe that’s a false premise. At least when viewed through the enterprise lens to which these writers refer. Let’s deconstruct this.

The notion that hordes of people inside the enterprise will spontaneously emerge and virally form groups is patently absurd.  The silos that operate inside the enterprise are as strong today as they ever have been. Erosion may occur at the edges but that’s all we’ve seen - to date. Instead, I find the idea that small groups with a common interest as emergent far more compelling.It is about the notion that content with context and purpose has meaning. Anything else is time wasting.

If you believe as I do that 80% of what people are likely to be doing in a process driven world is problem solving then it makes a huge amount of sense to consider the network as a resource through which I can discover people who can provide answers as an effective alternative to the watercooler effect. But these are temporary requirements. Once answers are found, people go back to what they were doing until the next time.

The crucially important sustainability question comes in being able to archive the discussions that sit around a topic area for later re-use. Moving on.

Another underlying presumption is that once connected, people will maintain those connections. Not true. In life we sustain very few relationships over long periods of time. Look at the trend towards serial monogamy as an example. It therefore makes far better sense to think in terms of continually evolving and then dissolving groups with only a small core of people with whom individuals are likely to remain connected.

I like to think about the people inside the Irregulars as my ongoing example. I have relationships with them all but only a a very few are on my regular list of people that I would personally contact when requiring assistance. Sustaining those relationships is far more important to me than attempting to do so in the wider group. Indeed, I regard such a thought as intellectually abhorrent because it simply isn’t possible to do that without expending more effort than the value that might be derived. Hence a clear ROI.

Next time your Something 2.0/Social WhatNot 2.0/Twitter Clone etc startup pitches with the ‘viral’ message be warned. I ain’t buying it. At least not from the sustainability viewpoint.

September 11th, 2008

The enterprise startup conundrum

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:06 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Silicon Valley, SAP AG, Twitter, ESME, Enterprise Developer, Operational Planning, Team Management, Roi/Tco, Business Operations, Management

Larry Dignan’s article about enterprise startups is an excellent primer for those wanting to pitch Zack and I but there are other issues I’d like to surface. Especially that which talks to the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

This week, Yammer took top honors at TC50. I have no direct insight into why because for me it falls squarely into the trap of riding a hype cycle but without clear differentiation as an enterprise offering. On the other hand, ESME flopped (comparatively speaking) at SAPTechEd 2008 DemoJam despite there being broad agreement among my peers that it was the most innovative ‘thing’ on the competition roster. Check for yourself and see what you think when lined up against the others.

The point being that what the Silicon Valley blogerati believes will make a great bet and what those who are living with enterprise code think are two very different things. There are many ways to argue the DemoJam case. One view proffered by Vinnie Mirchandani as we came away from the hall: “When you look at most of the demos, they were really filling in gaps that SAP should have already filled. In that sense, they are something of a smack in the eye to SAP from its own developer community.” My take is a little different.

A straw poll among that audience, those in the Community Clubhouse and elsewhere demonstrated that 90-95% of attendees have never heard of Twitter or its growing list of clones. Simply explaining the microblogging/microsharing concept is much tougher than people think. I know because I spent time with people who were curious. The first question was almost always: “How is this different from IM - we’ve been doing this for years?” I have a solid answer for that but the fact remains I still have to go through a BIG hoop just to get to the starting blocks.

Enterprise developers are far more discerning and knowledgeable than many might believe. They know their stuff and are not easily fooled. They are time constrained and won’t waste time on anything that doesn’t have an obvious ROI. They won’t even try something new out unless there is clear utility. It’s not worth their attention.

When I think about the team involved with ESME it is easy for me to argue they are at the forefront of thinking in the enterprise world. Some are Irregulars who bring ‘code’ skills to our merry band. All are folk who are hungry for innovation. A good number are SAP Mentors, people who freely give huge gobs of time and expertise to the 1.3 million strong SAP developer and 300,000 strong business process expert communities. They are in a sense a highly distributed micro version of Silicon Valley’s hotbed of invention.From a project perspective, they are a dream team.

Many will say “You would say that,” (Disclosure: I’m involved with ESME.) But when one of the folk turns up showing a new, elegant and working WebDynPro interface developed on the plane ride to the event, it’s hard to argue against that position. Or how about the two guys who spent a few hours hooking up ESME to an SAP CRM system so we could show SAP code running behind ESME and so show a business scenario context? These are just two examples of folk who are heroes in my eyes because they get things done that matter to the enterprise but with the innovator’s twist.

I have always said that the new breed of consumery applications can work in an enterprise context. But enterprise as a whole is years behind the consumer curve. Enterprise has bigger fish to fry. Virtualization, prediction markets and sensor technology figure far higher on the enterprise radar than the next Twitter clone.

Enterprise won’t come kicking and screaming into the enterprise 2.0 world unless content, context and purpose are aligned. You’ve got a new Twitter? Get in line. So has everyone else. Even Oracle.

Therein lies the conundrum. Developing a new Twitter is easy. Developing one that as enterprise context is and order of magnitude harder. Consumery mashups look tasty but they need a business context to become marketable. And all these applications need to compete against technology that is delivering against immediate business need. Not one that is manufactured by someone who thinks social anything is the next big thing.

All of which means that this week has put the enterprise/consumer market divide into sharp relief. There are lessons for us all in there.

September 4th, 2008

SocialCast: enterprise Twitter/FriendFeed mashup

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 1:49 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Enterprise, Mashup, SocialCast, Pricing, Sales Force Management, Branding, Wiki, Marketing Research, Marketing, Sales

SocialCast has revamped its group comms service, given it a facelift, aligned itself more closely to consumery apps like Twitter and FriendFeed and then given it an enterprise twist. As far as I am aware, this is the first enterprise facing application that has gotten close to what I have long thought is the way to go for microblogging and information sharing in an enterprise environment.

Rafe Needleman over at CNet has a comprehensive write up of the main features including:

Socialcast will also let enterprise customers “white label” the product so it carries corporate branding, and there will be capabilities to include company-specific posting types linked to an internal system. For example, when signing a new customer, the service could link to a Salesforce.com record and pull information from it. Links to wikis and bug-tracking systems are also possible.

This kind of capability will give SocialCast a wide appeal but it is not without problem. In enterprise land, value lies in process. Therefore, the ability to tie SocialCast to a variety of business processes requires far more than links to services such as Salesforce.com. It’s not clear from the blurbs where data resides and that will be an important issue for ensterprise, along with auditability and traceability.

Pricing at a flat $5/user/month sounds generous but in reality won’t fly much beyond say 25 users. At 100 users for instance you’re talking $6,000 a year. Although that will hardly break the bank, I am seeing a downward trend for these styles of service and I suspect SocialCast will need to come up with a more inventive model. Also, when I tried to sign up, the system refused to recognize my zip code. I suspect this is because the service has been tethered to US zip codes and has yet to be proliferated to other territories. This is a common mistake but one that still irks. Even so, coming out the gate with a pricing model is still a good thing.

The biggest issue lays with positioning. Aligning to Twitter and FriendFeed in an enterprise setting is a no-no. Enterprise doesn’t like the idea of social anything and often views these services as a time sink. Having this association without direct purpose makes selling at scale a real problem in my view. SocialCast’s ‘ideas’ tab is one step in the right direction but I’m not sure it’s enough to convince managment about its utility. I am happy to be proven wrong on this point but it will require a change of manaegment attitude to displace what I usually see as command and control.

Despite my reservations, SocialCast is on the right track and can only get better.