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Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:55:38 +0000

In 2013 look for the action in social technologies to be increasingly enterprise-focused. In 2012 investors soured on consumer social media companies: Groupon, Zynga, and even Facebook were deemed disappointing. Arguably, Facebook left no money on the table. As it began to show revenue from mobile by the year’s end, its stock began to recover, but the damage was done. So a different set of companies will drive innovation and perhaps a little disruption in social technologies in 2013. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year.

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Forecasting the future cloud computing market

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:00:31 +0000

During the period from 2011 through 2014, the worldwide cloud market is estimated to grow 126.5 percent, driven by 119 percent growth in SaaS and 122 percent growth in IaaS. This report takes an in-depth look at each of the three areas of cloud computing, using examples of companies like Salesforce.com and LivePerson to detail each sector. The PaaS segment is expected to nearly triple from a smaller base, although all areas of the sector will continue to grow immensely over the next two years.

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Social networking goes to work

Barb Darrow — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:58:07 +0000

Enterprise-class social networking is apparently all the rage — news that will be met with mixed emotions by anyone who feels that these tools can be more annoying than useful.

The premise of these workplace-oriented social tools — things like Yammer, Socialcast and features and functions in IBM Sametime and Microsoft(msft) SharePoint, is that they help workgroups and departments work together better, know where everyone is, and cut down on phone- and e-mail tag.

Social networking products, especially instant messaging (IM), took the consumer world by storm a decade or so ago with millions of users downloading AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft IM clients to their PCs and phones. Many of those users brought IM into the office, where IT worried about security and compliance. That’s when IBM, Microsoft and others started coming up with enterprise-grade IM and other social tools. The problem is that the same sort of services people like to use with friends can be viewed as intrusive at work. The challenge for companies, which have high expectations for the communications efficiencies that these services can create, is to figure out how to make the enterprise versions as compelling as the consumer versions.

Salesforce.com joined the social networking party three years ago with Chatter, and Microsoft has been pushing SharePoint as a vehicle for social networking in a workplace context.

As Salesforce.com rolled out its integration of its Rypple social networking-oriented HR-management acquisition into its CRM and Chatter products, Microsoft’s SharePoint team was on the road touting research into what companies “really” want in enterprise social networking. A Microsoft spokeswoman said enterprise social networking will be a big area of investment for Microsoft in the coming months.

As is its habit, Microsoft attacks this market with a “platform” approach (as in, why buy plain old instant messaging when you can buy a big hunk of software?) — which puts workplace social interaction in the context of getting your job done.

Right now, a lot of the talk around social networking touches on “frothiness,” said Jared Spatero, senior director for SharePoint product management in an interview Wednesday. ”The discourse is all about how feeds and follows will change your life. We think it’s about task completion, not stalking people and hearing about what they had for lunch,” he said.

Here are some highlights from Microsoft-funded research on enterprise social networking adoption plans conducted by Harris Interactive. The researcher surveyed 202 “business and IT decision makers” in companies with more than 1,000 employees. (Note: The respondents worked for companies that either have social networking in place or plan to implement it.)

65 percent of respondents believe it is “absolutely essential or extremely important” to involve their IT department in creating an enterprise social network.
57 percent are inclined to use a mixture of new and existing social software.
25 percent said they will leverage existing infrastructure.
18 percent will adopt new social software.
90 percent cited security as a top concern in rolling out social networking.
66 percent said integration with existing systems is a top concern.

Social networking can certainly foster collaboration in a workplace — especially if group members are not in the same location — but if it’s overly intrusive, it can be more a hindrance than an asset. It remains to be seen whether any one vendor’s approach will finesse that fine point.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user 10ch.

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HTC passes over Samsung on MWC buzz meter

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:24:37 +0000

Samsung has reigned supreme in Twitter buzz relating to Mobile World Congress, but one week before the start of the show, HTC has leaped over the Korean handset giant on news of a new “superphone” being unveiled in Barcelona, according to social media number cruncher anly.tk.

MoDaCo and several other gadget blogs have recently begun leaking details of the HTC One X or Endeavor, an ultra-skinny Android 4.0 device, which could be the world’s first smartphone to contain Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor. The news vaulted HTC to the upper echelons of Twitter chatter, according to anly.tk, generating nearly 5000 tweets with MWC-related hash tags last week.

HTC recorded about 12 percent of the 38,427 MWC-tagged posts, so buzz surrounding the show is definitely becoming more dispersed since we last reported on anly.tk’s numbers. Samsung, LG and Nokia all made good showings.

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Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40?

Miguel Valdes Faura, BonitaSoft — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:00:44 +0000

Earlier this year, European IT services giant Atos Origin declared its intentions to completely phase email out of their internal operations within the next three years. This perhaps the most compelling case to date that suggests the declining necessity of email in the enterprise. While it’s certainly premature to declare email — which turned 40 years old in 2011 — “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise.

Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:01:28 +0000

Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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How far can consumerization go for enterprise apps?

Derrick Harris — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:08:52 +0000

During VMworld this week, talk of consumerization — or the rise of consumer applications and devices in corporate settings — was everywhere, stemming from VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s and CTO Steve Herrod’s mobile- and application-centric keynotes. Included in Herrod’s presentation was talk of a new Dropbox-like application called Project Octopus that will let users safely store, access and share corporate documents. It all sounded so promising, and then someone asked me whether it will actually get used.

If employees already use Dropbox, she asked, why would they want to use a different service to do essentially the same thing while at work? The truth is that I don’t know. I can see why employers would want them to use a separate service, but will employees stand for it?

I tend to agree with my colleague Stacey Higginbotham, who noted while reporting on VMware’s mobile play, “While enterprises will love the ability to control who can access their data, employees may not want to give up the ability to use their own tools and choose who they share their files with.” Of course, it’s not so much a question about Dropbox or Project Octopus as much as it is about the role of consumer applications in corporate settings in general.

There’s no denying that consumerization is real. Employees really are demanding the ability to use their personal devices rather than company-issued BlackBerrys and laptops. By and large, employers seem content to let them do so because it takes productivity to a whole new level. That’s one of the megatrends driving VMware’s new focus on mobility and applications: If personal devices can’t be locked down from a security standpoint, it wants to make sure enterprise applications and data can be.

Consumerization even has made its way into traditional enterprise applications, thanks to the advent of Software-as-a-Service offerings. Business users accustomed to clean, simple web-based consumer applications in their personal lives expect the same thing from web-based business applications. As Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker asked in a post last year, “Why buy and manage complex infrastructure or applications when a simpler approach will get results faster and cheaper?”

But there’s a difference between applications that either emerge from business settings or that are only relevant to businesses, and consumer-focused applications that prove themselves useful in business settings. Beyond social tools such as Socialcast and Chatter (no one could legitimately suggest Facebook, for example, as the interoffice communication channel), I’m not so certain it will be easy to get employees to give up the consumer applications they’ve already begun using for business needs.

Dropbox is just one example. Look at Amazon Web Services, which grew popular among enterprise developers despite not having been sanctioned by IT departments. Despite an endless supply of vendors selling private cloud software and alternative hosting providers’ pushing “enterprise cloud computing,” AWS still dominates cloud computing. Maybe that’s because anyone within the organization who has used AWS really likes it and won’t settle for less. Or look to Google Apps, which has wormed its way into many companies by this point.

Application providers aren’t stupid, either. When AWS and Google recognized the money to be made by selling to businesses, they got started with all sorts of security and identity management improvements. They both even undertook the effort to achieve certification for the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) to be able to win lucrative federal-government deals. It seems only logical that other new consumer-based services will follow the money, too.

Given that iPads, iPhones, Android, AWS, Gmail and so many other tools have made the transition from the consumer world to the business world, it just seems a bit off base to suggest that enterprise applications mimicking useful consumer applications will suddenly catch on. Sure, companies might buy them and mandate their use, but that doesn’t mean employees still won’t use their preferred services, or that they’ll be happy about the change.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Pete Prodoehl

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The impact of social tools on the enterprise

Simon Mackie — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:00:28 +0000

Following on from the massive success of social apps like Facebook and Twitter in the consumer space, over the past couple of years we’ve seen a new wave of social networking tools, such as Yammer, tibbr, present.ly, Socialtext and Salesforce.com’s Chatter hoping to capture similar successes in the enterprise market. These tools are attractive to businesses looking for new, more efficient ways to communicate and capture knowledge and offer potentially great benefits: the ability to break down information silos and to flatten traditional organizational structures by stripping out management layers. But in reality, will these new enterprise social tools reduce hierarchy, or will they just provide a way for employees to “goof off” during work hours? To find out, I decided to speak with some organizations that have implemented and being using enterprise social networking software for a while, including Deloitte Australia, the American Automobile Association, and the American Hospital Association, about the tools they use and the impact they’ve had on the organizations themselves, and I’ve detailed my findings in Measuring the effects of social tools in the enterprise over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

All of the companies I spoke to reported similar benefits from their adoption of social tools:

Breaking down silos
Connecting like-minded individuals
Reduced need for meetings
Leadership access and buy-in

Given the benefits reported, and generally positive senior management sentiment towards these tools, I think we’ll see much more widespread adoption in a short space of time.

To get the complete detail on how social tools are transforming the companies that use them, the benefits the companies reported, and patterns of adoption, check out the full article over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Photo courtesy Flickr user prettydreamer.workshop

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The Future of Workplaces

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:00:08 +0000

Technological advancements have minimized the need for employees to be as physically present in a traditional office setting, and employee relationships now extend across different time zones and geographies. This paper discusses the future of work and the workplace in that context. We examine the shifting nature of actual workspaces, from four office walls to the online world; the emergence of new flexible hours that no longer require a nine-to-five mindset; the role of consumer-grade technologies such as iPads, smartphones and notebooks in the workplace; and what role cloud-based services such as Box.net, Huddle and Dropbox play. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Google and Skype. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Haydn Shaughnessy — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:35:14 +0000

The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.