David Gilmour is senior vice president, Collaboration Technologies at Oracle. During this discussion we cover Oracle’s Beehive collaborative product and associated strategy. I highly recommend listening to this 16 minutes on large scale enterprise issues as there are some pertinent points here highly relevant to the entire Enterprise 2.0 space regardless of company size.

Beehive is a new product launched at last fall’s Oracle Open World which unifies collaboration messaging, mail serving, team workspace and collaboration spaces, social networking and web video conferencing all in one package.

The intent is to unify and simplify infrastructure and make acquiring these tools less expensive and fragmented.

In big companies unifying user experience across all the different types of user artifacts is a challenge and Beehive seeks to address this.

On top down and bottom up models there is a challenging zero sum trade off between top down and grass roots adoption with fundamentally different goals and contexts driving use cases.

The Oracle philosophy is to split the world into a tight core of services which is managed tightly; by keeping a grip on this, information management and IT are able to control compliance and risk issues while allowing knowledge workers to operate much more loosely at the edges.

This is achieved with a unified environment running one standardized storage architecture, which eliminates the fragmentation caused by attempting to daisy chain multiple applications and their associated storage.

Plugging open source tools into this core architecture is one of the dreams of enterprise 2.0, says Gilmour, with the core sustaining the edge.

Oracle are all for openness and giving customers freedom to do what they want to do.

“One of the not much talked about subjects that lies behind the enterprise 2.0 discussion is that historically there’s always been a very bright line between the process worker where you are typically working with a business application such as a call center, roll up of general ledger, HCM systems, where the worker is engaged in a process that somebody else has designed but inevitably you hit some problems, road blocks, and we have to step out of that process, go over here, collaborate, leverage other users, be in the much more fluid world of user to user publishing, content creation and interaction”

You wind up with a completed transaction which solves the problem, plug that in as the new process and keep doing what the business does.

“That process of disengaging, collaborating and reengaging is very awkward in many situations, and there is a huge amount of frictional loss that happens back and forth across that boundary”.

Oracle are leading the charge in supporting the core operational aspects of the business - which are what pay the bills - by giving IT the core platform to manage tightly so other processes can be loose. Enterprises are inherently social but there is a huge difference between process work and knowledge work.

Customers appreciate the ability to integrate the complete centralized solution out of the box with built in extensibility possibilities.

Three core drivers for Oracle product design: cost containment, breaking the zero sum nature of compliance, and avoiding social software chaos with shadow IT fragmentation.

These measures are designed for large scale enterprises who have scaling issues particularly in the current climate of mergers and acquisitions.

(Apologies for sound quality, we had telephone interference).

I had the opportunity to interview Lee Bryant, CEO of the UK-based consultancy Headshift, and the result was a somewhat long, but extremely interesting series of insights based on his work in many enterprises.

Some of the topmost insights:

• The Economy — “People are still living on last year’s budgets,” so a lot of the momentum now is still based on last year’s decisions. He expects a point of decision for many companies in the near term, which could lead to the tail-off of earlier projects. “Paradoxically, the worst you are hit [economically] the better you come out of it.” Lee suggests that those that who accept the new economic realities quickly are the first to adapt, and may get a leap based on that.
• ROI — Some shell-shocked companies are continuing to fund large, expensive, and perhaps not that beneficial projects, while requiring highly detailed ROI analysis for a $50K experimental project, which is choking off innovation.
• The Rise of the Social Web — Lee has a great historical sense, and suggests that we are at a turning point, like the start of the industrial era. “We have our own railroads, our own telephone system,” meaning the social web, and we have a chance to reorganize our economy around new sorts of scale, new kinds of efficiency and prodcutivity. This is going to be disruptive, but will lead to an new economy.
• Change Management and Culture — Lee makes the case that the meme about people being resisting change is a bit off the mark. People are open to adopting new things if they actually help, and will resist various vacuous arguments about ‘you need to change ot die’ or psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about emergent values and so on. He has found it best to position these tools in the simplest most straightforward and business-oriented way.

I found myself wishing that the conversation could have gone on longer, even though it ran over 20 minutes. Lee and I will be overlapping at several conference in the next month, and I will be sure to talk to him again.

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading social media thinker at Forrester, took some time with me to share observations about the state of practice and the future of enterprise 2.0.

A few highlights:

• Jeremiah recently found that 53% of surveyed marketers are going to increase spending on social media, despite the downturn. Companies are starting to think about the extended enterprise: “People will begin to connect more with colleagues outside the comany, and get work done with them.”

• He quoted John Schwartz who predicted that firewalls would be extinct in the near future. Legal, personal, and true secrets may be locked down, but more and more people will be using open solutions.
• Jeremiah maintains that crowdsourcing support, and other functions, will be a fruitful area. If he were still the intranet manager at Fujitsu, a former role for him, he’d be looking at that now.
• Looking at Forrester itself, Jeremiah revealed that only 18% of the company is active in one project, the in house use of Yammer as a microstreaming platform. They are seeing good productivity paybacks from remaining connected, asking questions, and getting responses in real-time. Still, it will take a while to get real support from senior management.
• Regarding microstreaming (Yammer, et al), Jeremiah thinks they are more natural to business people than blogs. He very naturally transitioned from that into a discussion about mobility and presence, which I have long considered the killer aspect of IM. He seems to think it is a killer side of microstreaming apps, as well.
• The speed of social technologies adoption has been enormously fast, and will become ubiquitous in five years, and in ten years, we won’t use the term Enterprise 2.0 anymore.

I found Jeremiah’s naming names of products to be quite exceptional: generally specific products haven’t been mentioned much. Notably, the ones we hear the most are Twitter and Yammer.

The entire experience with Jeremiah was informative, and I certainly plan to speak with him again, as we develop some deeper analysis of the sector, to get his feedback.

In 2006 there were 750 million virtual workers globally.  By 2011 that number is expected to reach 1billion people and roughly 3/4 of the U.S. workforce.  Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski, Chief Executive Officer of Virtual Distance International sited those numbers during a recent BusinessWeek webcast that also featured Enterprise 2.0 Conference adviser and NetAge CEO, Jessica Lipnack.  The webcast topic: “Boosting Productivity through Virtual Collaboration” is something Jessica covers extensively at NetAge and is a huge theme for us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

It’s no surprise to see the use of virtual technologies increasing, especially during difficult times where companies are desperate to cut costs.  In fact, BusinessWeek conducted a live poll during the webcast and found that 48% of the audience were already using virtual collaboration daily while 32% used it weekly and 10% monthly.  Certainly “virtual collaboration” can be defined pretty broadly to include everything from the company wiki to a conference bridge but the point remains that what was already an increasing trend in business will be accelerated by our current economic woes.

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The cellphone industry has seen phenomenal growth over the years. There are over 6 billion people on Earth that own mobile phones for both personal and professional use. But at what point does this market’s growth taper off? Exponential growth year over year is not sustainable, and some of the recent earnings statements are highlighting the growth’s end is near.

Motorola recently announced their 4th quarter earnings and sales were $7.14 billion, down 26 percent from $9.65 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. One could point the finger of blame at the economy, but perhaps a bigger issue is at hand: market saturation.

Smart phones enable a new way of communication beyond voice. The Web and SMS are now part of the cellular industry and remain an integral way to exchange data. New data applications will create new revenue streams for the industry, but the explosive growth we’ve seen the last 5 years is slowing down. Handset manufacturers can’t rely on consumers and enterprise users to continually upgrade to a more expensive model.

For more insight into this downturn, take a peek at this New York Times article.

I posted last month about the prospect of new phone companies seeking to leverage the Android platform, and it looks like we won’t have to wait much longer, as the Open Handset Alliance just announced 14 new members, including major vendors like Sony Ericsson and Vodafone.

Each new member must contribute significantly towards the advancement of the Android platform. This can manifest itself in different ways. Per the recent press release:

New members will either deploy compatible Android devices, contribute significant code to the Android Open Source Project, or support the ecosystem through products and services that will accelerate the availability of Android-based devices. With these commitments, the Open Handset Alliance will continue to drive greater and faster innovation for the benefit of mobile users and everyone in the industry.

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The NY Times reports this morning that President-Elect Obama will likely be forced to give up his BlackBerry, which he relies on for both voice and e-mail communications. They note that he hopes to at least have a laptop on his desk, becoming the first President to have a computer in the oval office though his staff prepares clippings for him so he doesn’t spend his day reading news sites and blogs.

It’s simply unimaginable what it would be like to work without a computer in today’s day and age, especially when one is shielded from being able to use the Internet to seek out their own sources of information. We wonder why our political leaders are so isolated from the “real world” and here we are denying the leader of the free world access to the most important tool for unfiltered information gathering of this age. Hopefully President Obama will be able to find a way to stay connected in cyber-space despite the concerns over FOIA and potential subpeonas.

… I’ve been pleasantly surprised and equally disappointed. Here’s a list of some of the things I love, and some of things I really don’t love about the first phone to utilize the Android OS .

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Melanie Turek posted a piece last week, on a contest sponsored by Plantronics, inviting submission of terms to replace “telecommuter.”

Never one to pass up an opportunity to win nice goodies for a single word, I threw “cloudworker” into the hat. I hope the term is evocative enough that you get the reasoning behind it without much explanation. Anyway, the process of coming up with that term (5 minutes of private brainstorming) sparked a whole interesting train of thought, which I just captured in a post on my blog, The Cloudworker’s Creed.

Here is a picture and a little extract. Do check out the article and weigh in on the merits of my pen-portrait of the archetypal information worker of the future. I’ll be writing a fair number of follow-up posts in a series.

The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.

Go to the full article.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

Siemens Enterprised Communications has annnounced its mobile UC client for Blackberry, Simbian and Windows Mobile Device users. Unlike other solutions that purport to be “mobile UC,” but which really deliver only fixed-mobile convergence, OpenScape Mobility offers users all UC capabilities from their mobile devices. Whether they take advantage of mobile video and web conferencing remains to be seen, but presence, chat and telephony are key capabilities in the mobile UC world.

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