Another Enterprise 2.0 is in the books! This year’s show featured a lot more diversity in terms of content and focus, moving beyond a social networking and into areas such as video, organizational strategies, and policy/governance. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the show was the evolution of collaboration beyond stand-alone platforms and into the very fabric of the organization.
At this week’s Lotusphere IBM introduced “Project Vulcan“, it’s road-map for integrating public and private collaboration and social communities into an extensible set of user interfaces. Ed Brill notes that Vulcan “is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going.” Vulcan continues a trend by IBM to merge Notes into public social networks, highlighted by last year’s announcement of LinkedIn integration with Notes.
IBM’s announcement, coupled with Cisco’s recent introduction of public social hooks into its Enterprise Collaboration Platform demonstrate a continued convergence of public and private social networks. These moves highlight the reality that social network such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are increasingly used for legitimate business purposes rather than for entertainment or catching up with friends and family, but they also raise alarms for those responsible for governance, compliance, and security. I expect that over the next year we’ll see a continued battle between those responsible for information protection and those looking to improve collaboration. Vendors can help their odds of success by addressing compliance concerns up front.
IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.
We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.
At last week’s Collaboration Summit Cisco introduced WebEx Mail, a hosted service built upon its PostPath acquisition. WebEx Mail represents Cisco’s first foray into a market dominated by Microsoft and IBM, with emerging hosted challengers including Google, Zoho (as well as Microsoft and IBM’s own hosted offerings) and Zimbra’s on-premise server. Like other hosted offerings, Cisco bundles security services such as spam and virus filtering into its service. WebEx Mail offers an intriguing option for current Microsoft Exchange shops, but also has some limitations that prospective buyers ought to be aware as they conduct their evaluation.
Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….
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.
(Alternate Title: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Facebook and Twitter)
Last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston is in the books, and while I’d like to give the usual kudos to Steve Wylie and team for a well organized, and well executed event, I thought it also appropriate the share some thoughts as I look back.
As Mac usage continues to climb in the enterprise, IT staffs are faced with ever increasing challenges of supporting multiple office suites. IBM and Sun see this as an opportunity, does Microsoft see the threat?
IT executives particapting in Nemertes latest research benchmark say that Mac use is on the rise, thanks to the Halo effect making its way from iPod, to home/school Mac, to office Mac. Thirty-three percent of participants say their adoption of non-Windows computers will grow in the next year. But supporting Macs in the enterprise creates a problem as incompatibility issues between different office suites leads to calls to the help desk as well as increasing user frustration.
Microsoft unveiled Exchange Server 2010 public beta this week, offering a number of incremental improvements to Exchange 2007, but also missing some key components
At this week’s VoiceCon conference I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion featuring Cisco VP & CTO of UC, Joe Burton, and IBM Lotus UC and Collaboration Services U.S. Leader Peter Fay on the role of Web 2.0 in an enterprise UC architecture.
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Jun 28th, 2010 |
