The Workplace Blog

Google continues its march into the enterprise with its acquisition of Postini today. Postini is an email service that monitors communication for brokerage firms to insure regulatory compliance. It is a 100% hosted service. As the New York Times and others have reported, this acquisition allows Google to offer services to businesses via its enormous network of data centers. Yes, we’re talking about software as a service again.

What does this mean? A couple of things. Google is getting extremely serious about the enterprise space. Google’s strategy is to buy or build tools that enable it to take its consumer offerings into the enterprise in a credible and secure manner. Rather than build software products, most of its enterprise attack is going to be driven by software as a service solutions. And its offerings are going to be dirt cheap (or maybe even free) as it hopes to leverage economies of scale, its past investments in data centers and of course depend on advertising. In other words, Google wants to become the Salesforce of everything other than CRM in the enterprise. It sounds like a good strategy. Lets see whether the CIOs will buy it.

A few days ago I attended a talk at the London School of Economics on globalization and how the European Union needs to respond to it. The talk had a couple of high profile speakers like Anthony Giddens (who coined the term globalization back in the early 80s) and Neil Kinnock the former labor party leader. But fascinatingly, it was broadcast live on Second Life, the 3d online digital world.

And not only was it broadcast live, but participants sitting in the Second Life auditorium could ask questions too.
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At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I couldn’t help but wonder how the major portal players must thinking about enterprise 2.0. IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Vignette all at first seemed to have ignored web 2.0. This was largely because their own customers didn’t pay much attention to it in the early days.

Now it appears that the portal players are rushing to integrate web 2.0 functionality into their portal infrastructures but with mixed results. Some treat web 2.0 functionality as nothing very different to the collaboration features currently their portal infrastructures. Others like BEA see web 2.0 as having a transformative impact and as something that needs to be embraced holistically. Others like IBM, which recently partnered with Google, are focusing on partnerships while building more web 2.0 functionality into their portal products.

With legacy installed bases, it is hard for the portal players to move quickly. Enterprise portals with their rigid structures are in conflict with web 2.0 which depends upon emergent, bottom up categorizations. It will be interesting to see how much attention the portal players pay to web 2.0 in the next few years and whether their portals change significantly as a result.

Information Week wrote on Enterprise 2.0 in a special feature of their publication recently. The article discusses how Enterprise 2.0 is facing challenges in organizations while still providing some key benefits. It also includes results of a survey conducted with IT managers in large organizations.A couple of points in the article struck me as especially provocative and I felt obliged to take a critical view of them. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.

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Less than a month after Silicon Valley heavyweight Cisco Systems acquired content management start-up Five Across, they announced the upcoming acquisition of Tribe.net, an early yet largely unadopted social network.

Thus far reactions have been mixed but largely questioning the sense of the deal. Mark Andreessen, who last week reintroduced his social networking start-up Ning, tells the New York Times that “the idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches.” According to the Times article, he questions whether Cisco is underestimating the challenges in combining the various technologies.

Founder and Chief Blogger of GigaOm, Om Malik, is equally skeptical. He writes “News flash for Cisco: This social software thing – it is too marginal, doesn’t make money and can’t make you cool. Stick to what you know best - plumbing hardware –sell tons of it, make money, and learn to live with the fact that you are rich and old school.”

While I certainly understand both Andreessen’s and Malik’s positions, I feel obliged to state that I think Cisco is doing something a little different and a lot interesting here. Far from wanting to seed a more functional (ala Ning) social networking (ala LinkedIn) site for broader segments of individuals (especially adults), I think Cisco is seeking to create a “soup to nuts” network solution for the enterprise, including infrastructure, technology services, and both enterprise and consumer SaaS offerings. Review their materials on telepresence and tell us - is Cisco’s latest gambit tactically shortsighted or strategically visionary?

If you’re wondering what the next intranet employee directory should look like just hop over to Ning. They’re a consumer oriented social networking service that allows anyone to setup a social network within a matter of seconds. Highlighted by Techcrunch as a startup with lots of potential, their service has all the ingredients to make a successful department or team centric employee directory.

Sure, one will need to find a way to integrate a solution like this with the LDAP servers and all the databases running out of HR, but the concept for employees (and potentially business partners) is powerful. Intranets needs employee directories that in a sense are what you get when Linkedin meets MySpace. Ning has a few ideas that can take the employee directories in that direction.

But best of all is the fact that anyone create a social network and invite people to join, share information and collaboration. That’s what companies need - mechanisms for employees to form their own adhoc teams and intraprenurial environments that aren’t bound by corporate mandates or centralized intranet managers.

Not completely sure how Web 2.0 is changing the Internet? Try this YouTube clip for an answer. As I post this, it has been viewed 1,246,927 times and has 3501 comments.

Thomas W. Hazlett, a professor of law and economics at George Mason University, discussed open and closed information systems in an insightful article for the Financial Times. He argued that even though we are all busy hyping user generated content, it is the closed information systems that are just as valuable if not more.

He drew attention to the $$ that companies like Forrester and Gartner charge for their proprietary closed research and also discussed the iPod/iTunes as an example of a closed system. Hazlett even emphasized that electronic games are achieving explosive growth as closed systems.

I am not quite sure if I agree with him. Both Gartner and Forrester give lots of proprietary information away for free and have been forced to publish open blogs just to stay engaged with their readers. Much of the growth in electronic games is now happening because they of the ability to play them online leveraging open Internet standards. And finally, Steve Jobs himself would rather the iPod/iTunes system be open.

User generated content and open systems may not alter every existing economic model but what is certain is that they will at the very least influence these models - both outside and within the enterprise. Your users demand control, give it to them even if they are your employees. Read Nicholas Carr’s perspective on this too.

It may seem that the journalists who have gotten bored discussing web 2.0 have moved onto writing stories extolling the virtues of Second Life. In fact, some publications like Businessweek argue that it will be huge one day.

But should you really care? And will it have anything to do with the enterprise? Will your employees start demanding Second Life type environments within which they’d want to interact with other employees, partners and customerse? It’s hard to say, though for now it seems unlikely. Nevertheless, if you want to introduce your boss to Second Life or simply learn a little more about it here are some tips that may help you.

First there were blogs. Then along came podcasts. Now prepare yourself for vlogs. Although these trends are still in their infancy in the enterprise context (and arguably also in the consumer context), we think they are important to consider.

For example, consider vlogs in a training context. At least once a week, I give colleagues and friends demos of interesting new technologies. Imagine harnessing these demos - informal training sessions - within the enterprise. Is there an easier or more efficient way to perform an administrative task? Turn on a capturing program like Camtasia and record the task. For some things, this is a lot more efficient, effective, and inexpensive than creating documents with screen captures and step by step instructions.

Beyond the training context, simple news reportage is a fun and engaging way to distribute information within the enterprise. Whether you’re leveraging external vlogs or creating your own, the explosion of television in the 20th century has told us something about the power of the moving image.

For a deeper dive into the subject and example vlogs, check out Wikipedia Entry on Vlogs, Technorati’s Buzz TV, Rocketboom, and Diggnation.

Check back here next week for our very first vcast about Enterprise Trends in 2007. In the meantime, let us what you think about online video!