Wow– Software2007 is shaping up to be some gig

A few of our CIO customers (along with Steve P) are going to be on a few panels at the Software2007 conference in Santa Clara this week– May 8-9. Out of curiosity, I asked MR this morning for the media registration list. He sent me a list of over 100 reporters, editors, bloggers, and analysts including A-lists from every genre. I was really impressed. they’re expecting over 2,000 attendees. I had no idea the conference was so well known and widely attended. I was under the impression it was more of an insidery Valley software VC get-together. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because of its affiliation with sandhill.com. Now I regret not going!

Oh well, I’ll look forward to the reports, as always.

On other gig news, I got a disappointing call from Francois Gossieaux that the Enterprise 2.0 Rave was canceled. That elicited a big c’est dommage from me and much empathy for poor M. Gossieaux who was in the unfortunate position of having to call a host of influential bloggers and tell them the party failed to draw a guest list. I know they’re still working on some backup plans, so we’ll see if something can be salvaged. In the end, it shouldn’t surprise too many people. It’s a testament to the power of time-tested market research. Take your standard bell curve– Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere in the beginnings of early adoption and Francois had an unusual, innovative approach to enlighten these early adopters– therefore, statistically, about 2 people should have probably registered, which sounds about right judging from Francois’ tone. Aww, I’m just having a little fun with research, but it is true that there weren’t enough people signed up to justify the expense of holding the event, and after all, it was backed by VCs not conference organizers, so they had no problem pulling the plug.

Speaking of VCs, we announced our first round financing today. A nice $20M validation from Silicon Valley (including Foundation Capital and Hummer Winblad) that we’re onto something. I guess I can file my expense report now. šŸ˜‰

Enterprise 2.0: what’s in and what’s out?

I found myself surprised that Euan Semple is a Facebook user. I asked him about it, and he says it’s not just for kids, “There are loads of my friends in Facebook and it is good at helping us be social.” he replied. And like a select few of the bloggers I follow, I have not succumbed to the Twitter addiction, but find myself a little jealous that Stowe Boyd is now a friend of John Edwards and Barack Obama if only for a few random minutes at a time.

Social media knocked me over again last week reading the reports from my fellow Enterprise Irregulars who were blogging at Sapphire– SAP’s flagship conference for its friends and fans. This screen shot of SAP’s Harmony, an internal MySpace/Linked-in of sorts, got forwarded immediately to our head of HR. We’ve been using Ning for our internal communications– which we are really having a lot of fun with, but seeing this, I realized how much more fun we could have if we customized Ning for our company– and then for our customers.

SAP's Harmony

Harmony screen courtesy Craig Cmehil

What really caught my eye last week was Stephen Danelutti’s initial attempt at drawing up a framework for enterprise 2.0. I comb the web daily for enterprise 2.0 posts and news, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take a stab at defining what is including specifically in the definition. For instance, we probably all agree that McAfee’s SLATES is included (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extentions, and Signals). This would include all blog, wiki, and search technology. McAfee talks a lot about predictive markets too, though. I would add mash-ups, most SaaS apps, and anything AJAX-built, no? I don’t have Dion Hinchcliffe’s gift for drawing diagrams, but I’d love to hear some input on this.

Just a Footnote on SAP’s SDN

I tried twice to post a comment on Jerry Bowles’ blog on his site and on the Enterprise Irregulars’ site and was unsuccessful. Since I don’t have time to keep fooling around with the software, I will post a link to Jerry’s post today here. Back from Sapphire, Jerry posted on how SAP is getting enterprise 2.0. religion citing among a few things, the SDN network and Harmony, its internal HR web platform, which I was getting around to writing about myself.

On the SDN network, Jerry writes:

The granddaddy of these communitiesā€“the SAP Developer Network (SDN)ā€“has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own ā€œevangelist,ā€ Craig Cmehil.) The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members. Both have proven to be invaluable resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall.

What I wanted to communicate to Jerry was this:

Hi Jerry. So wishing I had gone to Sapphire! It’s good to hear that SAP is getting religion on enterprise 2.0. It’s worth noting, however, that the SAP Developer Network is run on a Confluence Wiki (Atlassian). I’m pretty sure about this, although I’m sure someone will correct me fairly quickly if I’m wrong. Even a technology giant like SAP with its billion dollar R&D budget can benefit from innovation at the edge from a couple of college kids who started a company on a credit card a few years ago. I just couldn’t resist the irony.

It’s a New Day (Job)

BSG logo

Yep. Iā€™m chuckin’ the binoculars and getting onto the field. The game is just too good to watch and not play.

Let me introduce my new company, BSG Alliance Corp. First, some history. As you know, my heritage is tracking IT services firms. In the 90s there was a handful of what we then called, ā€œclient/server integrators.ā€ By far, the most animated, passionate and fun company in that space was a company called, ā€œBSGā€ out of Houston (and then later, Austin). BSG was the brainchild of a zany entrepreneur who took a risk and started BSG with little more than what I once wrote, ā€œan 800 number and a prayer.ā€ The entrepreneur was Steve Papermaster. In the IT services sector– particularly the client/server arena— Steve’s reputation is somewhat legendary. In fact, if the IT services market had a rock-n-roll hall of fame, Steve would have been an early inductee. He doesn’t like people to talk about him this way, but today I’m writing as a blogger and a writer who followed Steve’s career from the early 90s, not an employee. He has that certain infectious enthusiasm that gets everybody in the room pumped. In BSG’s first iteration, the company’s culture was surely its greatest asset. I credit that to the sheer strength of Steve’s upbeat personality and unbridled enthusiasm.

Steve is a classic example of what I look for in a successful entrepreneur– a good sense of timing and vision. There are a lot of smart guys who start companies with one or the other, but if you donā€™t get the combination right, you wonā€™t have a strong finish. Steveā€™s successes far outweigh his failures, and heā€™s right on the money with what heā€™s envisioning for the 21st century BSG. This time ’round Steve is older and much wiser too. He’s surrounded himself with a management team that all have had considerable entrepreneurial successes. I’m sure it won’t slow him down; in fact, it makes decision-making a lot faster.

Where the 90s BSG was about helping companies through the transformation from legacy mainframe computing to client/server architectures, the 21st century BSG is about much more. It’s not even a pure-play IT services company. It’s about helping organizations get through the transformation to on demand, web-based solutions. There’s a lot of marketing rhetoric that goes into that I won’t bore you with here, but as we’ve seen in these enterprise 2.0 blogs, the user adoption process has been slow in coming. Enterprises could use some objective advice as they try to make sense of the new web landscape and the opportunities it affords. We’ll be launching our official web site soon and making some big announcements in the next few weeks. You can see some early press on our teaser site.

So, what will my day job be exactly? I’ll be continuing to track the developments in the market, the vendors/tools/technologies, highlighting case studies– same as always, but the position will provide me deeper customer access to explore these issues. In addition, we have some incredibly interesting alliances and relationships on tap that will provide a non-stop source of new insights.

I will be phasing out ITSA, but will continue to blog here. I promise not to shill for the new company here, but will enjoy posting about what I’m learning as I continue on the enterprise 2.0 journey. I’ll also be moving to Austin in the next few months, as I mentioned a few posts ago. Now you know why.

 

 

 

Did social media tools let us down?

I’m a little surprised no one in my regular blogging circle is commenting on the Virginia Tech massacre. I know the story is still unfolding, but I spotted this piece in Wired. The article is about the need for next-generation emergency alert systems, but a few paragraphs spoke to me:

As the carnage unfolded, eyewitnesses IM’d terrifying firsthand accounts to their friends, some of which appeared on blogs and MySpace within minutes of the shootings. Yet students complained that the first official word they heard about a killer on campus came a full two hours after two students were shot to death in a nearby dorm, just as their suspected attacker opened fire again in an academic building on the other side of campus.

 

Why, given the ubiquity of SMS-enabled cell phones and the growing popularity of social networking and communication tools like Twitter and dodgeball.com, did it take so long for news to reach students that class had been canceled and that students should stay in their dorm rooms?

A few weeks ago, the blogosphere was giddily publishing the widespread popularity of Twitter at SXSW. How is it possible that Virginia TECH students were so uninformed?