It’s Wednesday night, the big two days of the Enterprise 2.0 conference are coming to an end. I’ve blogged a ton and shot a lot of video at the conference. The overall sentiment I’m getting from all the attendees and from all the sessions I’ve attended is that enterprise 2.0 is not there yet, but it’s going to happen, it’s inevitable. Here’s a summary of the top learnings from the conference:

• Young people entering the workforce communicate with Web 2.0 tools. They want more than just email.
• Cloud computing is an easy way to launch a service and scale, but it’s far from being a true utility like electricity.
• To innovate, you need to harness the wisdom of your network. First start with your staff and then move to partners and your audience.
• When you create a collaborate Enterprise 2.0 space, TRUST your audience. Release the desire to control. Don’t control. Even the CIA recommends this.
• Change management. Adoption requires evangelism and constant reminders and associating Web 2.0 tools with everything you’re doing.
• Don’t just deploy social media for the sake of deploying social media. Develop a strategic business rationale.
• There are tons of companies that offer business social networking solutions. Some are trying to offer everything, and some are just trying to solve a single problem.
• Allow people to engage with your company outside of your .com business address. Let them engage with your brand where they already like to go, like Facebook, MySpace, etc.

And here’s a summary of all my coverage from the event. It’s a total of 23 posts of which seven include video. Enjoy. :)

• Introducing Social Networking into your Enterprise
• Social Network Shoot Out
• VIDEO: Karen Appleton on why social networking is critical for business
• VIDEO: Peter Biddle, encryption will be like air bags
• Mashups: Best practices and best examples
• Successful enterprise-level wiki implementations
• Developing business rationales for an enterprise 2.0 strategy
• Drive business growth from the bottom up community development
• Creating a socialization plan for deploying social media in the Enterprise
• VIDEO: If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can you
• Making sense of the endless options for enterprise social networking
• Stowe Boyds post everything economy
• What blogging brings to business
• Innovation will be driven by the adoption of cloud computing
• Age doesnt matter and other realizations for enterprise 2.0 culture
• FedEx makes its services accessible outside of FedEx.com
• From the bottom up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community
• VIDEO: Selipsky on the flexibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• VIDEO: Richard Soley of OMG is waiting for more cloud computing standards
• VIDEO: Schmoozing on the eve of Enterprise 2.0
• Move all your IT to the cloud: Cloud computing providers try to convince CXOs to take the plunge
• VIDEO: Enterprise 2.0 inspired CoreMedia to reignite communications and write a book

Thanks to Alex Dunne for supplying all the photos for many of the posts. Make sure you check out his entire Flickr feed.

In his presentation entitled “Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise Technology,” Rishi Chandra, Product Manager for Google Enterprise discussed why he believes cloud computing will drive innovation for the next generation of enterprise computing. The pace will be set by consumer driven innovation, the early adopters of cloud computing.

Traditionally, consumers go directly to vendors. In an enterprise environment, choice isn’t that easy. There’s a layer of business and IT that separates the vendor from the end user. It stifles creativity and innovation for the enterprise.

To create that creativity in the enterprise environment, employees become “power collaborators.” You need to connect with people to get information and to get things done. People have to work across groups. Because of this readily available access to information, through others, expectations have changed.

That collaboration, that communication, will all happen in the cloud, argues Chandra.

The cloud eliminates the need to know a variety of unnecessary elements previously needed for collaboration such as geography, computer, operating system, or even the language you speak. The cloud can be completely agnostic to all these issues, cutting through barriers for collaboration providing that idea that you have a single repository of data that anyone can access at anytime from anywhere. And since it’s based on open systems so you don’t need to know about what each user physically has at his or her desktop or mobile device.

Scale drives unit costs toward zero. He argues that if your environment doesn’t support that, you have to get to that point, and cloud computing can help you get there. And cloud computing can provide a capability your organization doesn’t have, unlimited scalability.

Barriers to cloud adoption are falling away:

• Connectivity - most companies have fast access. Customer expectations have changed.
• User Experience - People have accepted it and use it as evidenced by applications like Web-based email.
• Reliability - Google can’t be down, our customers will leave us if it does. Which is true because there are many alternatives. But if consumers are locked into a service that they’re dependent on because that’s where your network is, you’ll put up with downtime. I point to Twitter on this one. It’s been going down like crazy, yet users still hold on tightly.
• Offline Access - There are certain places you won’t have Internet access. Need to still have an offline experience within the browser. Chandra claims Google Gears answers this problem. They recently launched this with Google Docs and they will be launching it with their calendar and email application.
• Security - Have to prove that it will be strong with a Web application in the cloud. How secure are you today? It’s a misnomer. With all data on the cloud you may not have to worry about laptops or thumb drives getting stolen or misplaced.

Last thoughts from Chandra:

• On premise software is not going away.
• Even so, Google feels all innovation will happen in the cloud.
• There will be lots of competitors because the cloud is based on open standards.
• Your new employees will be the cloud generation. Under 30 crowd grew up with cloud services. They were using Web mail first.
• Google needs to earn your trust.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Right after Adam Selipsky, VP Product Development and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) presented his “move all your IT services to the cloud” argument during the “Evening in the Cloud” round table last night, I asked him if there were any major issues that the panel DIDN’T cover in the nearly two hour presentation. Only lightly touched upon was the notion of the flexibility cloud computing can offer. Processing in the cloud is application and operating system agnostic. Not speaking for his competitors, Selipsky said that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a rainbow of operating systems and applications running on its servers.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Richard Mark Soley of OMG, Object Management Group was one of the CXOs who grilling the cloud computing team of Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com during last night’s session, “Evening in the Cloud.” The big question on his mind was “Can I leave one of you and move to the other?” And the simple answer is “no,” but everyone recognizes that problem and they’re all looking to build standards so that one day they can say “yes.” Soley, a user of cloud computing today, is eager to move more over, but not until he’s comfortable that he won’t be locked in with any one specific service provider.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

CXOs on one side of the podium and cloud computing providers on the other side. Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com each got up and tried to convince the CXOs to move all of their IT operations to the cloud.

Here’s a summary of the initial arguments.

Amazon’s argument:

• Your company doesn’t run better if you create your own electricity, so you shouldn’t be dealing with your own storage. In fact, Amazon’s tagline is “We make electricity so you don’t have to.”
• The price of admission to delivering Web services can be very high.
• Amazon’s cloud computing service is Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their motto for cloud computing is that it be “Easy to use, Fast, Elastic, Highly Available, Pay as you go.”

Google’s argument:

• Eight out of ten dollars spent on IT is not contributing to business change and growth. Google believes that cloud computing is the answer to reducing wasteful or “dead money” IT spending.
• Wants to bust the myth that cloud computing is not secure. Reminds me of the days of Larry Ellison who tried to convince people about the security of the Net PC. Ten years ago I remember hearing him boastfully say that data at Oracle is more secure than it is sitting on your hard drive at home.
• You’re not moving from zero risk. Lots of data like credit card information is stolen from laptops, hard drives, and thumb drives.
• Scale is appropriate for the enterprise. Points to how they quickly scaled up Google.com, plus they have plenty of enterprise clients using Google Apps’ messaging and collaboration, plus security and compliance.

Saleforce.com’s argument:

• First point to their own success with cloud computing. Salesforce.com is purely a software as a service company built for the enterprise, plus other enterprise customers like Dell and Avaya use Force.com (Platform as a service).
• Salesforce.com sees its cloud computing offering as an Innovation driver, catalyst, and evangelist.
• It’s faster, easier, lower risk.
• You’re always on the most recent version of the product.

Q&A:

After the presentations, the CXOs hammered the cloud providers with questions as to why they won’t move all their IT operations over to the cloud.

Question from Rick Mickool of Northeastern University:

His concern is how to manage the model of a university. At a university he needs to bring 5,000 people in two days on the network, and then when students leave, he needs to get rid of all of them in one day. Plus, they come in with loads of different devices. Mickool’s team has to be creative about supporting all these consumer devices. His top two trepidations that keep him from moving Northeastern completely to the cloud is that the things he needs for his institution aren’t there yet, plus he gets worried about making decisions today that would lock him in for the long term. He doesn’t know if these guys want to stay in the “electricity” business if it simply is a commodity.

Answer from Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Google:

Admits that there aren’t applications for everything you want to run yet. The only way we’re going to lock you in is if we hold your data hostage, and we don’t. The economic model forces them to behave. Although, like most businesses, cloud computing providers are going to look for ways to keep you on as a customer. You can view that as “lock in,” but that’s one perception. Ultimately they say nothing’s painless, but it’s easier than the world you’re in today. Think about how much technology you’re “locked into” now.

Carolyn Lawson of the California Public Utilities Commission:

Argues that a government entity can never fully move all IT operations to the cloud because they have far too much sensitive information. We have your SS#, your driver’s license number, how much money you make, where your children go to school.

Answer from Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Google:

There is never a solution that’s 100% safe. But why not just encrypt all your data? We couldn’t look at it even if we were motivated to look at it. Trust is something cloud computing providers fight for every day.

Richard Mark Soley of Object Management Group:

How easily can I pick up from one of you and move to the other? I know I can move my data, but I’m more concerned about the applications. When it comes to total cost of ownership (TCO), what should I be doing in house, and what should I be doing in the cloud? Can you really create “all the electricity?”

Answer from Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Google:

While you can shut off a cloud provider in three minutes, it can take weeks to months to reengineer with another provider. It’s not truly like electricity because you can’t swap from one provider to the next without having to do some redevelopment. They admit that they’re not like electricity today, but they’re all hoping to move into that direction where you can turn one off and then turn on another.

A final note

I thought the bold topic of “moving all your IT services” to the cloud allowed for a really good discussion. Kudos to David Berlind for choosing and moderating the discussion. Although, he did the wise thing and stayed out of most of the discussion. Everyone’s hanging on the analogy of trying to compare cloud computing to paying for electricity, yet we all admit it’s not that simple a model, it’s every changing.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.