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At Last!
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song.
Atlassian is my new fave pick in the Enterprise 2.0 sector. I’m delaying my post because I got some excellent “second opinion” insight that I have to take seriously. We’ll see if the due diligence changes my mind.
Stay tuned.
Also coming– a Q&A with “made guy” Joe Kraus of JotSpot.
There I said it. Can we move on now? (I hope this blog isn’t getting streamed into the Crispy News aggregator yet. But blogging is kind of the HBO of published media, isn’t it? We can get away with the occasional bad word. IDG did let me write “bitch” once, though. I thought that was pretty brave.) I’m not one to use offensive language, but I’m done of bemoaning the web 1.0 crash and its band of thieves, especially in the B2B sector. The best quote I heard on the subject was Harley Manning from Forrester who said, “After irrational exuberance, there was irrational pessimism.”
I’m excited and not ashamed to admit it about web 2.0 and startup Enterprise 2.0 companies. I’m once again making stock deals with my clients. I’m thinking about the potential of a re-energized IPO market. Let’s hope second time is a charm for all of us that wiped out on the first killer wave.
What’s your take?
Just a bulletin to join in on the party. Call your broker– ask him if we’re headed for another bubble in tech… 🙂
Taking a short break from Enterprise 2.0 coverage, I had to acknowledge the news on Sapient today. I received a flash alert from Sapient’s investor team that, “SAPIENT NAMES ALAN HERRICK PRESIDENT AND CEO.” The bulletin went on to explain that co-founder Jerry Greenberg had resigned. Stuart Moore, the other co-founder is still a board member, but gave up his position as co-chairman in order to allow for an independent chairman (now, Jeffrey M. Cunningham). The company also named Joseph S. Tibbetts Jr. as the new CFO, replacing Susan Cooke who was interim CFO and who also resigned today.
Reading the press release, it appears Sapient is in hot water over options-dating, I suppose. Is this the 2.0 crime du jour? Why, everybody’s doing it! Not just Silicon Valley hotshots, but now a company like Sapient, that heretofore, I believed was basically infallible.
Sheesh. I’m not sure I’m more disappointed this happened or if I didn’t know anything about it because I’ve taken my eye off the IT Services ball. Some ITSinsider! Well, the good news is Dan Farber agreed to give me a ZDNet blog on IT Services, so I hope I will be catching up fast.
I put out a number of calls on this Sapient news, and haven’t heard back from anyone yet. I talked to Sapient, but the PR woman really couldn’t tell me anything more than was in the release. The news troubles me. I once wrote a column about what makes an IT Services firm successful, and Sapient gets high marks for all my criteria. I’m sure the company will weather the storm, but when founder CEOs leave, it generally doesn’t go well. My guess is we’ll see a merger/acquisition on the horizon.
Incidentally, Jerry Greenberg is a Jersey boy. He grew up in a small town here in South Jersey not too far (or too dissimilar) from the town I live in today. He made it to Harvard out of there majoring in Economics, he then worked at Cambridge Technology Partners, and started Sapient with Stuart Moore in 1991. Moore was a Computer Science grad out of UC Berkeley. In the day, Moore led one of the first client/server implementations on Wall Street and managed one of the largest installations of Sybase.
I admired Sapient for many things… including the choice of naming Susan Cooke as interim CFO. Imagine that? A woman who can talk numbers and face the investment community.
So, we’ll see what happens. For me, it’s the end of an era.
A woman I admire, Olga Grkavac, at the Information Association of America (ITAA) recently got back to me on an email inquiry. I had asked Olga what, if anything, the ITAA member companies were thinking about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 for their businesses. In an email response, she basically said, “Not much, but I’m still checking.” (I’m paraphrasing). I remember being at an ITAA conference with Olga in 1998 or ’99. We were standing on a beautiful outside deck at a cocktail party at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. The Colorado Rockies loomed hazily in the distance. I gestured toward them and said to her, “Olga, the Internet is like those mountains. It’s a giant phenomenon that’s going to hit the IT industry by surprise. Some people can’t see it, but it’s coming.” She looked at me quizzically, but I was going for a Hollywood impression, and I think I got it. I reminded her of that discussion this week in my return email. I told her, “I’m writing you from a conference on Office 2.0. The conference is sold out with standing room only in the popular sessions. There are over 45 companies exhibiting here. A lot of these firms (most actually) are startups. My point is the federal and commercial groups not only should but must start looking at this phenomenon. The Internet has finally grown up and is going to work!”
Office 2.0 was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended in my 20+ years experience in the high tech industry. Why? Because there was a special magic in the air that we were all on the ground floor of something BIG. Even the skeptics who made for some interesting panel discord, couldn’t deny there was something going on here that was worth sticking around for. For the record, I am an unabashed believer. I asked Rafe Needleman who sat next to me, “Rafe, are we in another bubble?” Thoughts of losing my income, my house, my car, and my stock portfolio like in the last bubble were haunting me like the ghost of Christmas past. Rafe said, “Yes,” but reassured me that the market was more mature. Rafe Needleman is an insightful guy who reviews new technology. I felt good he wasn’t fearful of the road ahead. We agreed we’d live another day to write about it, if we were headed for another implosion.
At the same time we were in San Francisco, I got an email from a friend who said there were over 6,000 people at the Gartner IT Expo that was on this week in Orlando. I was surprised to hear that even Gartner analysts were talking about Enterprise 2.0. and that it was a hot topic at the show. This encouraged me. Most of the dissension and disagreement was related to whether or not IT is the enemy or not. More on that for another post. In short, I’m starting to weigh in on the side of the neo-Enterprise 2.0ers who believe we can find some common ground. IT will embrace Enterprise 2.0 the same way they have accepted Salesforce.com; it’s just a matter of time.
With 56 vendors exhibiting, and my obligation to my client, Itensil, I didn’t have enough time to see every product. This was probably my biggest disappointment, but I’m the one to blame. The most impressive, hands-down, company I spoke to was Atlassian. The reason was not for the imaginative nature of the product, but because of the company’s fast-track success. I will post separately on Atlassian, as I spent a lot of time getting a demo and brief from co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Other products that impressed me included Approver, FreshBooks, Koral, SiteKreator, Vyew, Wufoo, and ZoHo.
Major Props to Ismael Ghalimi for conceiving and delivering a first-class conference!
I’m here at Office 2.0. It’s a terrific conference. I’d say the enthusiasm is outweighing the skepticism so far, but the day is not over.
In the meantime, Anne Zelenka has taken up the initiative to create a podcast for the conference. Be sure to tune in:
“The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam launched Monday with podcasts on the Office 2.0 revolution, technology usage in Afghanistan, and 2.0-style enterprise content management. This experimental project provides a virtual alternative to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Check in today for a discussion of Office and Web 2.0 in higher education, a proposal for an IT 2.0 toolkit, and coverage of the unified communications landscape underlying next-generation web technology.”
Visit the website at www.office20podcasts.com