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 honor to recently interview Laurie Buczek of Intel, who is heading up the most ambitious and broad internal social web initiatives these days.

1. Laurie is based in the IT group of Intel, and the company has made a large-scale, corporate wide commitment to rolling out a long menu of social tools across the company. She characterizes what is going on in Intel around social web tools as ‘a heavy lift’ and ‘not an experiment’. It is certainly among the most ambitious programs we have found in our research to date.

2. They are following a phased approach, to minimize disruption and avoiding trying to do too much at once. She characterized the current, initial phase as ‘Fix What We’ve Got’, taking an earlier approach to social media, stabilizing and more widely deploying it, as well as integrating ‘professional social networking on top of that.’ This is to get the ‘mappable people network’ out in front but to allow people to start working together, to share and collaborate.
3. Laurie agrees that creating a ‘learning, knowledge-based culture’ requires broad adoption — a real network effect — and not just isolated pockets of adoption.
4. Discussing sharing, Laurie pointed out that it’s not enough to provided the tools and ask people to share: they will only do so if ‘there’s a trusted social connection.” So companies must work hard to allow fine-grained access control, so that sharing can be done 1:1, or in small claches that are smaller than official departments or teams. The sharing has to be possible at social scale.

I have to confess that I went overboard with Laurie, and the interview runs over 40 minutes. However, I believe there is tremendous value in her insights, partly because of the ambition that is driving the initiative at Intel, but principally because of her deep understanding of what makes sharing work in a work context.

As part of the Open Enterprise 2009 study, Oliver Marks and I will be reviewing case studies submitted to us, looking for the most interesting and innovative stories about companies — large or small — adopting Web 2.0 technologies. We will include the eight most interesting ones — after some further research — in our report, and we will award the most compelling case study the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award. That winning company will also have the opportunity to present at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this summer.

If you’d like to participate, please fill out the form, below, on or before 22 May 2009.

Jason Rothbart is one of the founders of Groupswim, a SAS enterprise collaboration solution that debuted at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 as a finalist in the conference Launch Pad. I caught up with him recently, and explored his perspective on Web 2.0 tools adoption in the world of business.

• Jason’s title is VP of Customer Success, which I think says something important about the orientation of the company.

• Jason affirms a bimodal sales model: some clients are buying really quickly, because their “heads are on fire”, where in other cases acquisition is very, very slow because you need to get the CFO to sign off on any purchase.
• His insights on how tools virally spread through a company or top-down in enterprise-wide deals confirm what we have seen in other conversation.
• Jason points out that the there is a stake difference between clearcut returns — like increased sales — but other benefits are more nebulous: “But anyone who tells you that they can tell you exactly what the ROI is is either lying or doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

The interaction with Jason is a lot closer to the deal side of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but that aspect of what is going on is just as revealing as the more academic and theoretical issues that seem to become foremost with practitioners.

Telligent is a 5 year old 105 person social network software company: in this conversation with CEO Rob Howard we discuss the challenges and opportunities for the industry.

Rob is seeing far deeper knowledge from customers and prospects about the Enterprise 2.0 space, as people understand the technology and benefits.

The Telligent value propositions of supporting innovation and collaboration communities around both structured and unstructured content, both internally and outside the firewall is aligned with their analytics software, which helps prove ROI.

Rob thinks we’re at an interesting point on the growth ‘S’ curve of the entire space and is aware of the need to innovate ahead of the larger vendors who are rolling up complete suites. He predicts a lot of change during the next year with a weeding out of the space at all size vendors.

Rob is surprised by just how invested some companies now are with collaborative technologies these days, which are increasingly intertwined around their existing systems.

Telligent software is helping tie different together back end technologies at client installs - erp, sales management, supply change - to increase efficiency of information exchange: they are seeing clients find this more useful than email.

Rob is seeing a lot more to down adoption as senior management understand engagement of employees and customers, and Telligent are seeing some very innovative use of their technology by customers such as Dell.

I’ll be talking to Telligent customers in the next couple of weeks.

Yammer was announced with great fanfare at the Techcrunch50 conference last fall, and David Sacks, the CEO, has had the opportunity to work closely with a large and growing list of enterprise clients since. He and I recently caught up, and the time was well spent:

A few of the insights I gained:

• Yammer was called “Twitter for enterprises, or Twitter with a business model”, he recounted, but it is evolving into a larger service with more collaborative support.

• As far as Twitter goes, David doesn’t see them as a direct competitor, since it is so geared to open discourse. Selling private areas for business discussion doesn’t fit with that model, he feels, so Twitter might not go there ever. Yammer, on the other hand, is geared to privacy as the default, which makes more sense in the business context.
• Yammer also dropped the 140 character limit that defines Twitter, and which makes sense for a consumer and SMS-integrated product.
• David points out that the buyers of technology in the enterprise market are not necessary the end users. Yammer has developed a wide range of administration tools — privacy, usage policies, user management — that appeal to the IT buyers or management. But end users really want to use web 2.0 style tools even while at work.
• Yammer supports ‘bootleg’ adoption, since anyone with an ‘company.com’ email address can start using the product, so it doesn’t require corporate sign-off, but the admin tools do.
• David has found a greater willingness by users and management to try new SAS models, which favors start-ups and leads to innovation.
• Businesses have clearly come to the realization they shouldn’t necessarily own or manage their own software, David thinks. But the hybrid, viral model that comes with a product like Yammer means that companies don’t have to make any decision about buying until it has become widely used and popular.
• Yammer seems to have an immediate impact on the way work gets done. In his experience, in traditional large companies people really don’t know what people are working on. “If you think about how tools like Facebook and Twitter allow people to remain connected with large groups of friends, and think about how that could work in business, I think its going to make companies more efficient [...] and they will have much more engaged employees because the employees will feel much more connected to their colleagues and what is happening in the company.”

While David is an unabashed evangelist for Yammer’s specific offering, I found his thoughts practical and not at all bubbling with marketing hyperbole.

Tools like Yammer represent a real turning point for business, I think, where more open social discourse (even given the privacy constraints of business) and ambient awareness become foreground activities, displacing fully closed discourse tools like email, and the batch mode mindset of org charts and monthly management reports.

I had hoped to interview Dion Hinchcliffe, of Hinchcliffe & Co, back at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, but he turned the tables and interviewed me instead. But I tracked him down this week, and spent some time talking through some issues in enterprise 2.0.

Some highlights:

1. Dion is a treasure trove of case studies, starting with a great story about wiki use spreading in AOL years ago, at the very outset of Web 2.0 adoption in large companies.

2. Regarding adoption of Web 2.0, he quotes Euan Semple, “the easiest way to do this is to do nothing,” meaning that the millenials will pull these technologies into the enterprise. He also points out that since web 2.0 tools are more conversational you have to wait for people to warm up before joining, as opposed to point-and-shoot tools like email.
3. I asked if the specific culture of companies influences adoption. He responded that we should see things that we didn’t expect to see, since these tools lead to emergent benefits. We will see a broad range of responses, since “organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways.”
4. Dion agrees that there is a bimodal division in adoption because of the Econolypse: either companies “circle the wagons” and do nothing new, or else they embrace the crisis as an opportunity to explore lower-cost, web 2.0 alternatives. He cites the Transunion case study published by Socialtext, as an example.
5. Most requested: new ways of collaborating with partners outside the firewall. He thinks that these needs for extra-enterprise collaboration are still unmet, but working “better, faster, better” within the walls of the business is still the fundamental driver for adoption.

A great discussion, and very good advice for tool vendors thinking about positioning their products in this space, as well.

A short discussion with Business Process Management (BPM) company Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi, who is currently very focused on managing their rapid expansion.

Intalio help larger organizations automate their ‘back office’ processes, which of course change quite often. These processes are absolutely fundamental to the way companies operate and also involve a lot of ‘nitty gritty’ integration by Intalio with preexisting infrastructure.

Separately,  Ismael also runs the annual Office 2.0 Conference which caters more to small and medium sized business.

Intalio are melding Enterprise 2.0 functionality with this back office functionality for a forthcoming technology suite offering which will be announced May 19th.

Interestingly Intalio BPM tends to be adopted at a divisional level before taking root and propagating outwards, a model to which Enterprise 2.0 aspires.

The current state of enterprise 2.0 is still very early in the adoption curve says Ismael; people are just starting to understand the power and benefits but technology changes fast which is confusing for the neophyte.

Software as a a service makes it easier to play with the technologies, but finding use cases are the challenges as Enterprise 2.0 expands into a more fundamental business role.

I pinged Venkatesh Rao, a contributor here at the Enterprise 2.0 blog and a researcher at Xerox, after I had received several comments from other interviewees in the Open Enterprise 2009 study about his recent writings. A wonderful example of the “coincidensity” rising around the research study, where I am finding more and more fascinating people working in this area.

I wanted to dig into some recent thoughts Venkatesh has offered here about culture and change in business (see There Is No Such Thing As Culture Change), and various related posts at his other blog, Ribbonfarm.

Venkatesh and I had an interesting sojourn into the future of business:

• Venkatesh argues that ‘culture change is hard’ may be an excuse for not pushing hard to get adoption to happen. “It’s part of people playing the Impossible Problem Game.” If you set up something as culture change, then everyone frames it as impossible, like boiling the ocean. You should look for a more ‘Darwinian survival of the fittest’ model, where various alternatives are envisioned as competing with each other.

• In a similar vein, he discussed his view that ’social media’ is actually quite different from other management disciplines that preceded it, like knowledge management. One factor is the generational differences involved, as when younger people join the company with deep social media experience. The technologies may look similar to earlier technologies, but they are very different in practice.
• I love his thought that we need to move the discussion about Enterprise 2.0 to where there is some dissent.
• Venkatesh agrees with me that ‘knowledge management’ is a dangerous metaphor, and leads people into a very static mindset. He says that we need to have a ‘dialectic’, which is another take on take on social. His discussion of how dissent can be too timid, and lead to groupthink, is very illuminating.

A tremendously helpful discussion for me, and I hope for others.

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.