This article posted on InfoWorld highlights the fact that large enterprise S/W vendors like Oracle and (IBM Previews Suite of Web 2.0 Mashup Technologies for Businesses) have started seeing the value of providing products/capabilities that allow the Web 2.0 paradigm to easily enter the enterprise arena. To me its a no brainer, Web 2.0 is all about agility, efficiency, power of human interaction and networking, end user gaining control and hence a prime candidate for enterprise adoption where these capabilities can ultimately provide organizations a competitive edge to out-do the rest and make more moolah either through the topline or the bottomline. (now now .. lets not be naive .. in the enterprise its always about doing more business)
What's been eluding a lot of folks is the application of Web 2.0 in the enterprise and their deployment challenges. I'm going to start a running post that aggregates these use cases, so if you have any to contribute post them here.
Oracle officials during a Web conference Tuesday cited collaborative benefits of Enterprise 2.0 and cast the company's WebCenter platform as its product offering in this space.
Enterprise 2.0 from Oracle's perspective brings the benefits of Web 2.0-style collaboration to the enterprise. Other elements include the ability to build mashup applications. While there has been confusion as to what exactly Web 2.0 really is, it has been equated to blogging, AJAX-style development, and even Google, said Sonny Singh, senior vice president of the Industries Business Unit at Oracle.
"The truth of the matter is there are probably as many definitions of Web 2.0 as there are technologies associated with it," Singh said.
"[Web 2.0 is] really about how users can connect and work with each other through the Internet," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of Server Technologies Development. "It's fundamentally about users sharing information with each other, using Web-based social software technology to fundamentally transform how they get access to information and how they work with each other."
But Oracle is looking at Web 2.0's relevance and benefits in the enterprise world, which formed the basis for discussion on Enterprise 2.0 during the Web conference.
"Enterprise 2.0 is basically integrating these Web 2.0 technologies and capabilities with enterprise information systems and applications to transform how we work within the enterprise, as well as across enterprises and with people outside the enterprise," Kurian said.
"For me, Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software inside organizations," said Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a featured presenter wired into the Oracle event. Rather than being concerned with how software is developed, Enterprise 2.0 is about how software gets used, he said.
Enterprise 2.0 brings new modes of collaboration, McAfee said.
Oracle's strategy for the new generation of Internet computing is to fuse Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into Oracle products, Kurian said. The Oracle WebCenter platform takes center stage in the company's Enterprise 2.0 strategy.
Part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform, WebCenter integrates enterprise services in providing a context-aware Web application. Featured capabilities include mashups, tagging, RSS, wiki, VoIP, and discussions; search and community components are offered as well.
One of the basic beliefs around WebCenter, Kurian said, is that the way to build an enterprise application, portal, and Web site is converging. The line between what is a Web site, an enterprise application, or a transaction system is gone, he said. WebCenter provides a standards-based framework and integrates into an application development framework.
Oracle also is bringing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to its On Demand applications. Information such as what a customer has purchased can be shared with a network of salespersons and others, he said. Also, the next version of Oracle's collaboration suite will include Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 capabilities, Kurian said.
To drive home its point about Internet-based computing, Oracle showed a video of a company using a mashup to compare worldwide shipping costs of FOLED (flexible OLED) systems.
Oracle competitors also are latching onto concepts such as Web 2.0. BEA Systems, for example, offers a social computing suite for ad hoc collaboration and participation-based experiences.
Putting a damper on Oracle's festivities, however, was a questioner in the audience who said Oracle needs to update its existing "Web 1.0-based" licensing model. Oracle currently bases its licensing on the per-processor or named user methods.
"We have certainly had discussions on that," Kurian responded. The company is trying to gauge interest from the user community about this issue, he said.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Corporate Social Network Design Council and Inaugural Sales 2.0 Conference
This is going to be interesting. What I'd like to see coming out of this is less talk and more information about specific applications and use cases where Web 2.0 can be directly applied to the Enterprise, CRM or Sales processes.
Visible Path, a leading provider of online business networking solutions, will lead a corporate social NETWORK design council on Monday, October 29th from 8:30a.m. to 4:30p.m just prior to the kick-off of the Sales 2.0 Conference at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, CA. The design council discussion will enable participants to share goals and challenges and pose questions to Enterprise 2.0 industry experts as they look to bring social networks into their own corporate environments.
If you are a technology, human resources or sales executive interested in the intersection between business and social networking and would like to attend please visit http://info.visiblepath.com/designcouncil or contact Kathleen Bruno at kbruno@visiblepath.com.
Those attending the design council will hear from industry leading panelists Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst of Social Computing and Web 2.0, Forrester Research, ROSS Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder of SocialText, and Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, ORACLE CRM on Demand as they share valuable information in a panel on ?How to Apply Social Networks in the Enterprise.? Visible Path Co-founder Antony Brydon and Bruno will also participate in the event throughout the day.
Following the design council, Visible Path, in collaboration with Genius.com, Oracle, Cisco, WebEx, InsideView, Landslide Technologies and dozens of other industry leading companies is sponsoring the inaugural Sales 2.0 conference at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco October 29-30, 2007. The conference will demonstrate how combining next-generation Web technologies such as web conferencing, social networking, prospect databases and web site monitoring services with innovative sales processes can dramatically accelerate the sales cycle.
Bruno will take the stage at Sales 2.0 on Tuesday, October 30th at 1:30p.m. and participate in a panel on ?Lead Qualification and Cultivation.? ?I am really looking forward to participating in the inaugural Sales 2.0 Conference,? said Bruno. ?Sales executives are always looking for ways to increase visibility into new relationships and Visible Path lets them do this in a way that leverages the power of social networking.?
The Sales 2.0 event will address industry trends and key topics such as: The ?MySpace Generation? meets the Workplace, Volume Selling in an On-Demand World, Integrating On-line and Relationship Selling, and Making E-Mail Marketing Work for Your Sales Organization. The conference will feature thought leaders including Geoffrey Moore, best-selling author of ?Crossing the Chasm?; Michael Bosworth, Founder of Solution Selling and author of ?Customer Centric Selling?; Joe Galvin, vice president of SIRIUS Decisions; and David Berman, President of Worldwide Sales at WebEx Communications (now CISCO WebEx).
Visible Path, a leading provider of online business networking solutions, will lead a corporate social NETWORK design council on Monday, October 29th from 8:30a.m. to 4:30p.m just prior to the kick-off of the Sales 2.0 Conference at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, CA. The design council discussion will enable participants to share goals and challenges and pose questions to Enterprise 2.0 industry experts as they look to bring social networks into their own corporate environments.
If you are a technology, human resources or sales executive interested in the intersection between business and social networking and would like to attend please visit http://info.visiblepath.com/designcouncil or contact Kathleen Bruno at kbruno@visiblepath.com.
Those attending the design council will hear from industry leading panelists Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst of Social Computing and Web 2.0, Forrester Research, ROSS Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder of SocialText, and Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, ORACLE CRM on Demand as they share valuable information in a panel on ?How to Apply Social Networks in the Enterprise.? Visible Path Co-founder Antony Brydon and Bruno will also participate in the event throughout the day.
Following the design council, Visible Path, in collaboration with Genius.com, Oracle, Cisco, WebEx, InsideView, Landslide Technologies and dozens of other industry leading companies is sponsoring the inaugural Sales 2.0 conference at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco October 29-30, 2007. The conference will demonstrate how combining next-generation Web technologies such as web conferencing, social networking, prospect databases and web site monitoring services with innovative sales processes can dramatically accelerate the sales cycle.
Bruno will take the stage at Sales 2.0 on Tuesday, October 30th at 1:30p.m. and participate in a panel on ?Lead Qualification and Cultivation.? ?I am really looking forward to participating in the inaugural Sales 2.0 Conference,? said Bruno. ?Sales executives are always looking for ways to increase visibility into new relationships and Visible Path lets them do this in a way that leverages the power of social networking.?
The Sales 2.0 event will address industry trends and key topics such as: The ?MySpace Generation? meets the Workplace, Volume Selling in an On-Demand World, Integrating On-line and Relationship Selling, and Making E-Mail Marketing Work for Your Sales Organization. The conference will feature thought leaders including Geoffrey Moore, best-selling author of ?Crossing the Chasm?; Michael Bosworth, Founder of Solution Selling and author of ?Customer Centric Selling?; Joe Galvin, vice president of SIRIUS Decisions; and David Berman, President of Worldwide Sales at WebEx Communications (now CISCO WebEx).
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
What does SaaS Really bring to market?
To understand what role SaaS will really play in the Web2.0 generation I decided to try and deconstruct exactly what it brings to customers.
So zooming back in time a little bit I would say that the emergence of SaaS was closely tied to the failure of on premise (desktop, 3-tier, client server) software to control the cost of ownership. Now in some ways SaaS is a redux of the mainframe - green screen model. But we all agree that the current version of SaaS has much more to offer than that.
According to me the two main things that SaaS offers to its customers is agility and abstraction.
Now both of these perceived benefits that SaaS brings have boundaries and many customers have discovered that they are kind of brick walls at times as well.
Imagine if you were an army of one and wanted to address a business issue by deploying an application. SaaS provides the agility to do that. In the on premise world the work on this kind of an initiative would have been significant and to a large extent the same whether it was an army of one or a legion of consultants. But then again, I would like to reemphasize the boundaries. As many SaaS initiatives have discovered once you take SaaS deployments to a large scale you start hitting some of the same real world problems on premise products have hit in the past where the products are too generic and requirements too varied, so it leads down the road of custom solutions and all the TCO related items that ride a custom solution.
However its the second value that is of greater interest to me. "Abstraction", software vendors have grappled with this issue for a while now and miraculously SaaS seems to provide a solution for this to a great extent. Now I say "seems to" because folks can argue against it and in reality even the SaaS vendors are not there yet. But to me the ability for a SaaS initiative to abstract or layer the "data" from the "application metadata" from the "business logic" from the "UI" is sort of the leading edge. A number of vendors have claimed this and tried delivering S/W based on these designs but you just have to go through an exercise of upgrading that software to its next version or build complex business requirements into it to realize how intertwined things can get. This leads to management issues and application of more resources which ultimately leads to huge costs and the thread goes on.
To customers SaaS seems to offer that promise that they wouldn't have to worry about these inner wiring's so to speak and just deal with their business application from an application perspective. So if the SaaS vendors pushes out a new release or updates a particular component or feature the customer is insulated (or to a large extent they are).
So then to me the question would be why stop at that. Why not have the cake and eat it too. Would it be whacky to think of a SaaS evolutionary stage where the service delivers the software artifacts from the cloud but the data, business logic and all other components remain local. Now I can already hear the SaaS purists crying foul. But to me coming from the enterprise S/W world like most of the large customers and sitting in front of this paradigm change its a valid thought.
What if my data, application metadata, business logic and UI were abstracted completely from each other such that it wouldnt matter to me if the vendor used a SaaS service behind the scenes to manage, modify or replace it. Maybe that's nirvana, maybe its a bunch of BS.
However it already sowed the seed for my next post. How does SOA play into all this is it the super glue or modelling clay that holds this together.
So zooming back in time a little bit I would say that the emergence of SaaS was closely tied to the failure of on premise (desktop, 3-tier, client server) software to control the cost of ownership. Now in some ways SaaS is a redux of the mainframe - green screen model. But we all agree that the current version of SaaS has much more to offer than that.
According to me the two main things that SaaS offers to its customers is agility and abstraction.
Now both of these perceived benefits that SaaS brings have boundaries and many customers have discovered that they are kind of brick walls at times as well.
Imagine if you were an army of one and wanted to address a business issue by deploying an application. SaaS provides the agility to do that. In the on premise world the work on this kind of an initiative would have been significant and to a large extent the same whether it was an army of one or a legion of consultants. But then again, I would like to reemphasize the boundaries. As many SaaS initiatives have discovered once you take SaaS deployments to a large scale you start hitting some of the same real world problems on premise products have hit in the past where the products are too generic and requirements too varied, so it leads down the road of custom solutions and all the TCO related items that ride a custom solution.
However its the second value that is of greater interest to me. "Abstraction", software vendors have grappled with this issue for a while now and miraculously SaaS seems to provide a solution for this to a great extent. Now I say "seems to" because folks can argue against it and in reality even the SaaS vendors are not there yet. But to me the ability for a SaaS initiative to abstract or layer the "data" from the "application metadata" from the "business logic" from the "UI" is sort of the leading edge. A number of vendors have claimed this and tried delivering S/W based on these designs but you just have to go through an exercise of upgrading that software to its next version or build complex business requirements into it to realize how intertwined things can get. This leads to management issues and application of more resources which ultimately leads to huge costs and the thread goes on.
To customers SaaS seems to offer that promise that they wouldn't have to worry about these inner wiring's so to speak and just deal with their business application from an application perspective. So if the SaaS vendors pushes out a new release or updates a particular component or feature the customer is insulated (or to a large extent they are).
So then to me the question would be why stop at that. Why not have the cake and eat it too. Would it be whacky to think of a SaaS evolutionary stage where the service delivers the software artifacts from the cloud but the data, business logic and all other components remain local. Now I can already hear the SaaS purists crying foul. But to me coming from the enterprise S/W world like most of the large customers and sitting in front of this paradigm change its a valid thought.
What if my data, application metadata, business logic and UI were abstracted completely from each other such that it wouldnt matter to me if the vendor used a SaaS service behind the scenes to manage, modify or replace it. Maybe that's nirvana, maybe its a bunch of BS.
However it already sowed the seed for my next post. How does SOA play into all this is it the super glue or modelling clay that holds this together.
Friday, September 28, 2007
CIOs face tough on-demand choices
A recent silicon.com CIO Jury poll of IT directors found half of businesses are still cool on SaaS, which is either very low priority or not on their radar at all. But it is gaining ground in customer relationship management, where analyst Gartner predicts SaaS will account for 14 per cent of the total market this year.
This would'nt surprise me as SaaS or OnDemand vendors have still not covered much ground on the main pain points that large organizations have around;
Risk management: As a large organization where my exposure to risk is higher what are the options I have available that mitigate these risks. Since the SaaS world often uses the "power grid" analogy I would ask where are their diesel generators. Have you ever been to a large telco or hospital that completely relies on the power grid but also has its own backup generators that can run for really long cycles in the case of an outage? These organizations test these generators on a weekly basis to ensure they can kick in right away. What if a "Melissa" hits SaaS vendors does that mean that I'm hosed because I'm now joined to their infrastructure at the hip. To win over large organizations that want to make SaaS as part of their mainline strategy these kinds of diesel generators are required.
What happens when I terminate my SaaS contract and decide to move on either to an On Premise or another OnDemand vendor? Thats another risk thats not significantly addressed by the SaaS vendors.
Security: This has been a perenial issue for the SaaS world and unfortunately I dont see the same progress being made on that front.
Integration: A sore point for many CIO's who've been there done that or inherited a 250+ system landscape where 50 of their systems need to integrate with their OnDemand system and there are all kinds of replication and federation issues. Again this is an area that needs a lot more investment than what we are currently seeing.
Supressing rather than flushing out these issues is leading CIO's to be hesitant to jump on the SaaS bandwagon.
This would'nt surprise me as SaaS or OnDemand vendors have still not covered much ground on the main pain points that large organizations have around;
Risk management: As a large organization where my exposure to risk is higher what are the options I have available that mitigate these risks. Since the SaaS world often uses the "power grid" analogy I would ask where are their diesel generators. Have you ever been to a large telco or hospital that completely relies on the power grid but also has its own backup generators that can run for really long cycles in the case of an outage? These organizations test these generators on a weekly basis to ensure they can kick in right away. What if a "Melissa" hits SaaS vendors does that mean that I'm hosed because I'm now joined to their infrastructure at the hip. To win over large organizations that want to make SaaS as part of their mainline strategy these kinds of diesel generators are required.
What happens when I terminate my SaaS contract and decide to move on either to an On Premise or another OnDemand vendor? Thats another risk thats not significantly addressed by the SaaS vendors.
Security: This has been a perenial issue for the SaaS world and unfortunately I dont see the same progress being made on that front.
Integration: A sore point for many CIO's who've been there done that or inherited a 250+ system landscape where 50 of their systems need to integrate with their OnDemand system and there are all kinds of replication and federation issues. Again this is an area that needs a lot more investment than what we are currently seeing.
Supressing rather than flushing out these issues is leading CIO's to be hesitant to jump on the SaaS bandwagon.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
CRM 2.0 Employment Trends
On the lines of MyCRMCareer, its a known issue that good CRM talent is always difficult to come by and these days with more CRM initiatives taking off there surely seems to be a talent crunch of sorts.
However a few weeks back I came across this recruitment search site called SimplyHired (trends). Very impressed with their approach .. make job search as easy as web search (Google). Now I mention Google and them in the same breath is because they've really ripped off the Google model and skin and put it to good much needed use in the job search space. So their one box search and list of organic jobs, sponsored jobs and Paid Advt's etc make me feel like I'm actually browsing a Google property. Might be a good thing, you never know Google just might snap them up like Yahoo did HotJobs.
Anyways the reason I decided to blog about them is not cause of their approach or interface but because I found this really interesting thing on their site where one can graphically track employment trends (pretty cool I would say). Since they claim to have more than 5 million jobs indexed it seemed like a good enough sample to see what the CRM and CRM 2.0 employment trends looked like. Not that there is a big movement around CRM 2.0 employment (yet!!).
So check these job trends out. Pretty cool huh?
However a few weeks back I came across this recruitment search site called SimplyHired (trends). Very impressed with their approach .. make job search as easy as web search (Google). Now I mention Google and them in the same breath is because they've really ripped off the Google model and skin and put it to good much needed use in the job search space. So their one box search and list of organic jobs, sponsored jobs and Paid Advt's etc make me feel like I'm actually browsing a Google property. Might be a good thing, you never know Google just might snap them up like Yahoo did HotJobs.
Anyways the reason I decided to blog about them is not cause of their approach or interface but because I found this really interesting thing on their site where one can graphically track employment trends (pretty cool I would say). Since they claim to have more than 5 million jobs indexed it seemed like a good enough sample to see what the CRM and CRM 2.0 employment trends looked like. Not that there is a big movement around CRM 2.0 employment (yet!!).
So check these job trends out. Pretty cool huh?
| CRM trends | CRM jobs |
| CRM 2.0 trends | CRM 2.0 jobs |
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Design for People, Build for Change
Since I did not attend the event, read the coverage (The Intelligent Enterprise Blog) of the opening keynote, entitled "Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work," offered by analyst Connie Moore at this week's Forrester Technology Leadership Forum.
It seems that there were some very interesting Enterprise/CRM/Web 2.0 themes that emerged from this keynote.
Very much inline with what I believe enterprise applications are evolving into. We've been talking about composite applications for years now, but I think that maturing Web 2.0 technologies and the ability to enable (design and automate) a cross enterprise process oriented approach will be the focus in enterprises.
The first two principles lead me to the loosely coupled but effective integration of business processes and applications. The next two principles to me among other things speak about the evolution and adoption of more intelligent BPM tools and the adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
It seems that there were some very interesting Enterprise/CRM/Web 2.0 themes that emerged from this keynote.
"The new generation of workers, dubbed "millenials" by Moore, have grown up with
completely different experiences and therefore have completely different
expectations about what systems will look like as they enter the workforce,
particularly around social networking. Added to all this is the evolution of
process management as a discipline, and the dissolution of monolithic business
applications into composite applications that use BPM, SOA, business rules,
collaboration and other technologies, either on-premise or as SaaS."
Very much inline with what I believe enterprise applications are evolving into. We've been talking about composite applications for years now, but I think that maturing Web 2.0 technologies and the ability to enable (design and automate) a cross enterprise process oriented approach will be the focus in enterprises.
"She lays out four key principles for designing for people, and gave a detailed
example of each (including a really interesting Second Life example for the 4th
point):
1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions. 2.
Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity. 3.
Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context. 4.
Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the
business.
The first two of these are about build for change, and the last two
are about design for people."
The first two principles lead me to the loosely coupled but effective integration of business processes and applications. The next two principles to me among other things speak about the evolution and adoption of more intelligent BPM tools and the adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
Monday, September 24, 2007
SOA Funny .. I really liked this one
SOA this. SOA that.
Find out what happens when Greg tries to swallow three different SOA pitches in one day. Will he save the day, or will Greg have to chuck the project?
Find out what happens when Greg tries to swallow three different SOA pitches in one day. Will he save the day, or will Greg have to chuck the project?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)