What a week!

Boasting out largest conference program to date - with over 100 speakers and 60 sessions - Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010 seriously rocked.  I want to take a moment to look back over the week and highlight some of the awesomeness.

Let’s not forget:

• You can check out all the keynotes on E2TV (simply register and you’re all set)
• Our very own Alex Dunne played paparazzi throughout the event - check out his photos here
• You can download all the presos from our keynoters & sponsored sessions here
• Over 65 pieces of news & coverage came out of the event, and 100 members of the press and media attended the show
• Press releases, including exhibitor announcements, rolled out strongly throughout the week

Phew.

Bring on E2 Santa Clara - mark your calendars for November 8 - 11, 2010.

It’s great seeing the #e2conf stream come alive - folks are pouring into the Westin Boston Waterfront from all around the globe to gather at Enterprise 2.0 with one common objective: to listen, learn and share their stories about collaboration in business.

Just as Enterprise 2.0 brings together like minded E2.0 adopters from all parts of the world, the World Cup 2010 in South Africa simultaneously has fans glued to their screens to support their talented countrymen play the beautiful game. Good news for all you soccer fans at Enterprise 2.0 - the Westin has set up a massive screen for the games in the Lobby, and you can grab a schedule from the Concierge (I’ve already snagged mine).

Tomorrow the conference begins at 8:30 am with workshops running till 4:15 pm, and afterwards we have a special program taking place on Monday night starting at 4:30 pm called Evening in the Cloud.

For all you #e2conf veterans, Evening in the Cloud will be a familiar program as this is our 3rd year doing it in Boston. Each year the format has changed slightly, and this year the topic is Which Collaboration Backbone is Right for You?

David Berlind will open the program with a 30 minute overview of the cloud collaboration market, the major players in the market, and touch on why the market is changing so rapidly. After his overview, Sean Poulley from IBM will provide a 15 to 20 minute demo of LotusLive Online Collaboration Services, and then join Bill McNee, Founder and CEO of Saugatuck Technology and Yuvi Kochar, Vice President of Technology / Chief Technology Officer of The Washington Post Company for an hour long discussion about choosing one’s cloud collaboration partner.

Panel Moderator:
David Berlind
Chief Content Officer, TechWeb

Panelist:
Yuvi Kochar
Vice President – Technology, Chief Technology Officer, The Washington Post Company

Panelist:
William S. McNee
Founder and CEO, Saugatuck Technology

Panelist:
Sean Poulley
Vice President, LotusLive Online Collaboration Services

After the panel concludes, a cocktail reception will begin and the audience will have a change to grab a drink, mingle with the panelists and get a closer looks at LotusLive. Evening in the Cloud is open to all registered Enterprise 2.0 attendees. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow night!

Premier Sponsor

Just a mere weekend away from Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010, the E2 team is heads down, focused on last minute details, and very excited about the show next week. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work and we can’t wait to see the finished product in action.

Believe it or not, we’re now in our 6th year in Boston.  The event has made significant strides and we expect Boston 2010 to seriously rock - some highlights include:

• a stellar keynote lineup
• tons of exhibitors on the show floor
• 100 members of the media ready to cover the event
• deep dive workshops on Monday
• and don’t forget, our Attendee Party, sponsored by IBM, is on a BOAT

Despite all of these awesome highlights, the thing I’m most excited about this year is our involvement with NSTAR’s Walk for Children’s Hospital Boston.

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One of my favorite books in my growing Enterprise 2.0 library is “Throwing Sheep in the Board Room” by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta. I recommended to Steve Wylie that we try to get one of these authors involved in the conference. It’s uncanny how prescient these authors were considering they began writing this book a few years ago. The book explains in mind-numbing detail changes that are forcing a social imperative for the 2.0 workplace. I highly recommend you pick up the book before the conference.

That said, I’m pleased to announce that Matthew Fraser has accepted our invitation to moderate our user panel keynote this year, “Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check.” Don’t miss this terrific session on Tuesday morning.

This year’s conference is shaping up to be the best yet. Make sure you book your hotel room early!

As we begin 2009, not only is it difficult for companies to attract new business, it’s tough to keep your existing customers. Budgets are sliced and orders from the top down are ‘do more with less’  - which is actually the theme of Web 2.0 Expo this year. Even if your customers are happy, budget restrictions may prevent them from repeat business.

Regardless of your vertical, getting to know your customers - especially in a down economy - is vital for success. If done correctly, there is opportunity to grow market share and strengthen your brand and its positioning.

Utilizing enterprise 2.0 tools to capture customers’ data and feedback enables an organization to take a transactional relationship and give it more dimension. Overtone Inc has take this concept of listening and developed a brand-monitoring solution called the Open Mic Integrated Listening System which delivers contextualized insights based upon what your customers are saying. Open Mic works in 4 steps: collection, categorizing, analyzing and acting.
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After the “Evening in the cloud” session I pulled out my Nokia N82, loaded up the Qik streaming video service, and roamed the crowd asking what they thought of the session and the Enterprise 2.0 conference which will officially launch full sessions tomorrow.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.
In the twenty minute video you’ll meet the following people plus a lot more whose business cards I never collected:

• Jeff Keltner of Google Apps
• Steve Golab and his colleagues of FG Squared Interactive Marketing
• Val Pishavazadeh of a start up he won’t talk about
• Sam Eder of Small World Labs

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.

The first people I ran into at the Enterprise 2.0 conference were Tina Kulow and Dr. Willms Buhse of CoreMedia. I knew Tina when she used to do PR for Smaato, a mobile application development company for smartphones. CoreMedia develops content management systems for enterprise clients. The two of them were making a return engagement to Enterprise 2.0 in Boston because of how successful their trip was last year. They learned a lot about new communications in the social media sphere and made tons of great contacts. When the camera was turned off Willms admitted that they were able to motivate some people to participate in a book they were writing. Currently only in German, the book, “Enterprise 2.0: The Art of Letting Go” will be available in English in about six months. The book is for management types, non-bloggers, in the enterprise space and it’s got case studies form SAP, Vodafone, Nokia, and of course, CoreMedia.

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