Category: SaaS

Quick LeWeb3 report from o’er there.

Despite how the world is flat and increasingly digital, the fact remains it’s not trivial to physically get around the globe. For this reason, I’ve teamed up with my old pal, Fred Alden, to be ITSA’s man on the street. Fred and I worked together for a large division of Dutch Philips Electronics, then called Origin B.V. now Atos-Origin. Fred is a Brit by birth, educated in the U.S. (Stanford), lives in Paris, and works in Belgium. It’s a buy one get four+ proposition. I love that about my European friends. In any event, Fred’s a smart guy and has been around the enterprise space for years. Fred will be filling us in on his travels around the UK-European enterprise 2.0 sector.

Here is Fred’s quick report from leweb3:

LeWEB3 and Enterprise 2.0

Despite the LeWeb3 crash there were interesting trends and companies which I will cover in detail in a future post. For now some quick impressions:

The vast majority of companies at LeWeb3 and the start-ups presenting to GuideWire/VCs (see good overview in French by Olivier Ezratty with links to the presenters here ) were in the web 2.0 “consumer” space. A few exceptions fused enterprise/consumer sectors but there were some interesting Enterprise 2.0 plays both in the main event and the start-up section. Unfortunately the main session on the Enterprise 2.0 degenerated…both Ross Mayfield and Lee Bryant on the panel expressing frustration with the meandering which went way off topic (see Mayfield’s post here.)

On the BtoC side you have to wonder if this is not déjà vu all over again; lots of variations on a theme, chasing a finite number of dollars/mindshare, tweaking existing business models with marginal differentiation.

On the Enterprise 2.0 side it is still early days and quite a lot of what I heard is in stealth mode some being funded by people who cashed out of Enterprise 1.0 or others who cashed out of Web 1.0. These are fusing models, think for example p2p (peer to peer) meets business intelligence. There is a small but active Enterprise 2.0 services community across Europe that have done deals with Fortune 100. Larger consulting companies are trying to get into the act from the strategy side but have little depth while digital agencies are pitching their skill set to try and sell into the Enterprise. Pre-configured solutions and applications are few and far between but not totally absent.

So the Enterprise 2.0 landscape from LeWeb3 looks like this:

(a) Internal Collective intelligence plays; in the enterprise, focus on knowledge workers (think lawyers, pharma researchers etc) using blogs, wikis and other tools. How you drive value using tools to extract and visualize data from places, topics and persons…..Others are fusing current office tools with the web, for example look at wrike.com

Bridge plays are a variation of the theme using the same tools to bridge between the internal and external audiences. Think customer-driven product and marketing development.

(b) Customer “sand box” plays using web 2.0 tools for user generated content, increasing loyalty, providing a platform. Think sponsored sports events that can be used to stretch the brand without taking too much risk…it all closes down after the event. Traditional media and communications companies are looking to user-generated content tools and platforms to anchor their current customer base that has begun to migrate because these tools and services are available elsewhere.

A variation on this play is turnkey solutions for specific segments: a “professional” MySpace for doctors in a specific country, for example. Another example is catering to a very unusual sub-segment of the market which is not associated with main brand but is key to their market. Think car-tuning fans around the world for a major oil multinational as an example here

(c) Finally there was some talk of open source SaaS meets online services, think compiere meets fedex, meets citibankonline meets…. well you get the picture. There was a wikierp.com presentation from Italy but there was no there there.

More details in a future post. Stay tuned.

Early market test data coming in…

Over on the Itensil blog, I posted a note about early user adoption. To summarize, we’ve begun our Early Access Program for interested users. We’ve employed a useful web lead generation tool called Salesbuilder to categorize and qualify the interested parties in the product. For me, as a researcher, the early data coming in is interesting.

I was particularly alarmed by the answers to this question: User Adoption

Over 50% of the qualified leads were not able to get a product evaluated by the team that would benefit by using it. A mere 19% were. And there’s no guarantee, the product was adopted post-evaluation.

Although the data is not yet statistically significant, it’s an early warning sign to all Enterprise 2.0 vendors that user adoption is going to be a challenge for many enterprises. For this reason, I’m starting to think it’s in the best interests of the community to start educating and enlightening its target communities on the benefits of ALL enterprise 2.0 solutions.

I think Jeff Nolan was onto an idea like this… I will contact him and report what I find. In the meantime, I’m recommending all e2.0 vendors start accumulating data about their customer’s trials and tribulations while adopting or trying to adopt e2.0 products. If web 2.0 is truly about content, collaboration, and community– we will all benefit from eachother’s experiences, yes?

Watch this Space: Hinchcliffe is Hot

Dion Hincliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe, as many of you know, is one of the leading pioneers in the Enterprise 2.0 movement. His regular blog posts on ZDNet and at the SOA Web Services Journal have explained concisely and eloquently how to apply web 2.0 in the enterprise. Yesterday, Hinchcliffe & Co. announced its Web 2.0 University. The university will be providing high-end Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 education solutions and premier consulting services in partnership with O’Reilly Media who delivered the concept and the term “web 2.0” to the industry.

The early registration list of A-list customers for the University is impressive. Classes and seminars for Web 2.0 University will be offered around the world in a variety of locations starting this year. The core curriculum consists of five courses, beginning with “bootcamps.” The next scheduled is the Enterprise 2.0 Academy ™ which aims to provide real-world, hands-on information on how to transform the enterprise. The first bootcamps will be held December 12th and 13th at the Carlyle Center in historic Alexandria, VA.

The University will train top executives, IT experts, programmers and developers and other business leaders on how to transform their business by focusing on “the power of the user.”

Hinchcliffe’s partnership, also announced yesterday with with Tim O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Media to deliver a suite of educational and consulting offerings to enterprise customers is a further testament to Hinchcliffe’s rising status as a thought-leader in the web 2.0 market. Tim O’Reilly certainly could have chosen literally anyone in the industry to partner with, but he chose Hinchcliffe. The combination of O’Reilly’s reach into global corporations and Hinchcliffe’s passion and depth of understanding for the technology that is fueling Enterprise 2.0 advances is an unparalleled match for consulting and education services.

Andrew McAfee recently wrote about “Evangelizing in the Empty Quarter.” With this O’Reilly and Hinchcliffe partnership, that quarter will be populated in no time. Remember, the “Rub’ al Khali” is one of the most oil-rich places in the world.

Riders Wanted

It’s Halloween, so my time is limited on what I can post today. Sorry.
Today’s leading news regarding JotSpot being acquired by Google is more validation of the sector. Tomorrow, I’ll post my interview with Kraus. You can read an excellent analysis of the acquisition here. I’m sure there will be more to come.

Lots of good indicators moving forward in the Enterprise 2.0 sector lately. In the past few weeks, several major vendors have made announcements regarding incorporating web 2.0 technologies into their platforms. According to Internet News,

“Software vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft are increasingly seeing the value of shifting their traditional portal and applications offerings to an integrated platform to reflect the trickle down of Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise.”

Yesterday, SocialText announced SocialPoint ™– a wiki solution for Microsoft’s Sharepoint. You can read Dan Farber’s take on it in his blog post yesterday. Boothby also provided a good analysis.

Also, yesterday, I was able to convince Computerworld, the “Voice of IT Management,” to let me write a freelance story on the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon. With these announcements and developments, it’s clear to me that Enterprise 2.0 is saddled up and ready to ride, but will this dark horse turn out to be a winning thoroughbred or a trojan horse? The pace of industry adoption is accelerating; yet how, when, and why users adopt these tools will make for interesting news… no doubt.

Are We Eating Our Dead? Again?

During web 1.0, I was a skeptic and pretty vocal about it. Before my research was finished, I presented in Atlanta (12/99) when market caps were high for the digital apostles I was tracking. Most of the presentation was tongue and cheek, but is somewhat prescient looking at it today. I wrote this column for Phil Wainewright’s aspnews.com site which was also published as an op-ed in Computerworld for the user community. When the back-breaking, risky 300-page market research report on what I called the “e-services” market was published in April 2000, I joined one of these start-ups myself. You see, through the course of doing the research, I became a believer too. I fell in love with the first Internet revolution and its massive societal-changing promise. Of course, like most companies in that first run up, the start-up crashed. I felt like I, in particular, should have known better than to have fallen for such an idealistic infatuation.

I read with interest Michelle Manafy’s editorial in eContent. This is the second time I’ve heard the Soylent Green, “It’s made of people!” reference in the web 2.0 crowd. This time it gets attributed to Ross Mayfield. I know when I have said, “It’s the people, stupid.” I’m not talking about cannibalism and annihilation; I’m talking about liberation. I’m not talking about overpopulation; I’m talking about a billion Internet users– sharing and doing. Interestingly enough, the tagline for our 2000 start-up was a question– “what happens when everyone’s connected to everything?” Less death. More rebirth.

So, maybe we should start considering a different indie flick? or maybe something more mainstream, if the mission is to turn perception positive on Enterprise 2.0, eh? Manafy’s a great writer and her community is extremely important to the new office generation. For instance, I just received the best presentation (a 100-slide deck) I’ve ever seen on web 2.0 yesterday. It didn’t come from Dion Hinchcliffe; it wasn’t something I found on techcrunch or wasn’t even something I could have gotten my hands on privately as an Enterprise Irregular. It came to me from Molecular, a consulting firm part of the Isobar network of Interactive Agencies. And oh, the reason I was reading Manafy is because Shiv Singh (Avenue A|Razorfish) referred to it in his blog.

Manafy writes:

Web 2.0 inside the firewall isn’t all work and no play, though. Singh has suggested to clients that there are fun ways to use the interactive processes for “prediction markets,” which harness group intelligence. For example, if a company has six ad campaigns under consideration, they can create a space where employees can “trade shares” on the ideas. “Then execs can see the activity that happens around an idea,” he says.

While Web 2.0 may or may not live up to its press, nobody can scoff at the ability of its underlying technologies to enable some of the Internet’s founding principles. As Singh says, “Collectivism is very big.”

Referencing the slide above… Now, one film we might consider could be Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The “throw out your dead” scene, in particular, is working for me. I was chatting with Cognizant’s Malcolm Frank Friday who is not dead (“Yes you are! No I’m not!”), and he was telling me that, in fact, Bob Gett, Gordon Brooks, and few others from web 1.0 are back in the Internet or IT services game. Of course, Jerry Greenberg has found Internet religion again. So maybe the Holy Grail is attainable in web 2.0. I’m not skeptical this time ’round. And it’s really early.

Incidentally, for all ITSinsiders who haven’t heard yet. the weirdest development for those with long memories, is last week’s announcement that Jim Sims was named to EDS’ board of directors. Can someone send that cart to Dallas? 🙂