Author Archive: Irwin Lazar
Irwin Lazar is the vice president for communications research at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, conducts strategic seminars and advises clients. His background is in network operations, network engineering, voice-data convergence, and IP telephony. Mr. Lazar is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the enterprise in areas including VOIP, unified communications, Web 2.0 initiatives, social networking, and collaboration. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Mr. Lazar is a columnist for No Jitter and the Enterprise 2.0 Blog and the late Business Communications Review magazine. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press. He is regular speaker at events such as Interop, VoiceCon, and Enterprise 2.0. Mr. Lazar serves as the conference director for FutureNet (formerly MPLScon), the chair for Network World IT Roadmap Web 2.0 track, and is on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Follow Irwin Lazar on Twitter at http://twitter.com/imlazar.
Posts:
Nov 10th, 2009 | Irwin Lazar
In case you missed it, Cisco took the wraps off its social/collaboration strategy yesterday at its Collaboration Summit (#ciscocollab) summit in San Francisco. Cisco fired a salvo deep into the territory of Microsoft and IBM Lotus (and to a lesser extent, Google) with its own suite of products covering messaging and social computing. Cisco also introduced numerous video and real-time collaboration products designed to broaden access to its telepresence suite, mate video with WebEx web conferencing, and easily enable inter-company collaboration.
Notable about next months Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco is that it is co-located with VoiceCon, a long-running show focused on telephony that for many years was the place to go to learn about digital phone systems.
This week Google finally distributed a limited set of invites to its Wave collaboration application. Wave represents a fundamental re-thinking of the way people collaborate and is designed to break the death-grip e-mail still has on communications.
Wave has come up a lot in recent conversations with vendors and end-users alike. Vendors are concerned that Google will emerge as a strong competitor in the unified communications and collaboration market, while enterprise IT architects are still reluctant to embrace Google as an alternative to IBM Lotus and Microsoft, but are enticed by Google’s approach to integrating real-time and non-real-time collaboration.
I tend to think the real impact of Wave won’t be as much a mass adoption by knowledge workers as it will drive new features and innovations to applications including Notes and Outlook. Just as Skype introduced the world to UC, perhaps Wave will do the same for a new paradigm for collaboration.
A couple of interesting data points:
- A new Pew study notes that the Interent isn’t really changing who participates in politics, but Pew notes that blogs and social networking sites are seeing growing political activity.
- Brendan Nyhan on his blog points to efforts underway to leverage social computing to improve political polling
There’s all sorts of implications here from the Enterprise 2.0 perspective, not only the potential to use social computing for data gathering, but also the potential risks of employees using their public social networks to promote political views that may be contrary to their employer.
I’m curious to hear if any companies are implementing any guidelines on how employees use their personal social networks?
I wrote in June of the need for Microsoft to deliver cross-platform support for Mac (and Linux users) to combat efforts from both IBM Lotus as well as Sun’s OpenOffice. Today comes news that Microsoft will abandon Entourage for Mac and release a version of Outlook for Mac at some point in the future. Microsoft is also released a business edition of Mac Office with improved Exchange and Sharepoint integration. Still, with these products being developed by a separate BU they are still different from their Windows counterparts. Microsoft needs to set a goal of one application for all platforms.
Jakob Nielsen, who has been writing about Web usability for about as long as the Web has existing, has posted some analysis of Intranet usability best practices around data organization and personalization. It’s worth a read: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html
Mobile workers are getting left out in the cold as battles between vendors continues. I mentioned a few weeks ago the dispute between Google Voice and Apple over allowing Google Voice into Apple’s iPhone store. This week comes news that Microsoft is delivering enhancements to its Office Communicator Mobile, which only runs on Windows Mobile and Nokia Symbian devices. Microsoft also announced new partnership with Nokia. Great, but according to our research, the vast majority of business smartphones are, and will continue to be BlackBerry’s, while 38% of companies are adding support for iPhone over the next year. Enterprise mobile planners are increasingly getting stuck in the middle of efforts by mobile providers to own the operating system, the device, and the software. A trend that appears to be accelerating at the expense of innovation.
This week brings news that Apple rejected Google’s application to make its Google Voice mobile application available for download via the iPhone application store. Google Voice users are instead stuck using Google’s web portal to manage their voicemail accounts.
I mentioned previously that one of the key trends at this summer’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was in how to bring public social computing tools into the enterprise in a manner consistent with requirements for compliance, security, and governance. This week SocialText reinforced that theme with the launch of the SocialText Microblogging Appliance, joining SocialCast among others with a twitter-like appliance-based application (along with SaaS offerings from the likes of Yammer and Present.ly).
The emergence of enterprise-ready tools for micro-blogging show the rapid movement of twitter-like messaging from toy to tool. Now how long before we see these capabilities as part of a unified communications offering integrated with telephony/voice, video, conferencing, and messaging?
A couple of more markers this week underscoring the growing interest in video as a collaboration technology:
- Polycom beat Wall Street earnings estimates, with video products sales leading it’s growth
- Glowpoint, a provider of managed services for video conferencing, announced record earnings
Taken together these two data points highlight the relative strength of video conferencing in light of a rough market for communications application and system vendors. We’re seeing a number of key trends pushing demand for video, most notably falling travel budgets, but also the falling cost and rapidly improving quality of video conferencing. Even among the twitter/facebook generation, video conferencing through public services such as Skype continues to grow. Don’t ignore video as you develop your collaboration architectures.
