Feb 12th, 2009 |
One of the clear trends thus far in the IT industry is that many displaced workers are looking at contract work as a means to survive in these turbulent economic times. Fortunately, Web 2.0 and hosted applications such as Google Apps, Skype, Zoho, Gizmo, ThinkFree, Yugma, and FreeConferenceCall.com enable individuals to access a full suite of communication and collaboration applications that previously would have required a significant up-front and on-going investment. So how do these types of applications jump the gap from “useful for small groups or individuals” to “useful for large enterprise.”
We’ve asked IT executives about their attitudes toward Web 2.0 applications during several rounds of interviews in recent months. What you tend to hear is “I use it at home, but we wouldn’t consider these types of applications in our office environment.” Why? In most cases it comes down to compliance and management. Storage of sensitive company documents in Google Apps for example is a non-starter (though it may be happening anyway). There’s no way to track usage of many applications such as Skype. There’s no ability for these applications to tie into the corporate directory meaning no centralized provisioning, and no revocation when an employee leaves the company. Support options are non-existent. And finally, features such as resource reservation, group calendaring, document encryption and versioning control are often lacking.
Maybe that’s fine? Maybe the Web 2.0 app vendors are perfectly content going after the millions of consumer and small business opportunities out there. But if they want to challenge vendors such as Microsoft, IBM Lotus, and so on, they will have to spend a lot of time and effort to support the realities of the larger enterprise market.
You hit the nail on the head Irwin. For some businesses the issues you raise are non-starters. My wife works in the financial services industry (no, not a bank or lender). They are extremely conservative in the applications they allow employees to use. What will it take for these companies to see enough value in the newer, web 2.0-style apps? Or will they wait until their large platform vendor of choice develops, acquires or partners with companies offering that functionality?
Spelling “chasm” incorrectly is a non-starter, too.
Without wishing to stir up controversy here, but why should they? There are plenty of characteristics of these products that are appealing to the enterprise - the flexiblity, the subscription model, the people focus, but the enterprise is entitled to demand that they are combined with the traits that are needed for their business of - traditional enterprise software words follow - performance, scalability, quality, accountability and robustness.
There are products that are built-for-purpose targeted at the enterprise, which have made this combination of the social nature of the consumer products and enterprise requirements. Jive, Socialtext, and - full disclosure - our own Rabbitsoft. In doing this they’ve recognised that there’s a lot to be learnt from Web 2.0 but Enterprise 2.0 exists as a definition for a reason. The products that are emerging in this space have learnt that they need to address the needs of the C-level decision makers but focus on what the end-user now expects - that subscription model puts a few more demands on them than a traditional perpetual licence with no real worries about customer churn.
So there is a bridge to be built in terms of matching the best features of both web 2.0 and enterprise offerings, but there is no shame in staying on your own side of the valley. A good consumer product has its own market share to win - that’s the first chasm to cross; moving into a new business market is going to take serious rearchitecting of their business model and almost certainly their technology infrastructure. And the opposite almost certainly applies too. After all, how many households use SAP to manage the children’s homework?
When I spoke to Google about two years ago about using Google Apps in my company (a large Energy company employing 80,000 people) I was a bit worried when the Sales Manager responded to my question about compliance with “Why do you need all that? Compliance is boring”. I was put off completely. Now, guaranteed, the World has moved on since then but there still needs to be that comfort blanket for some companies that such things are taken seriously.