Archive for April, 2007
by Joe McKendrick
April 29, 2007 at 10:11 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
ZDNet’s Dan Farber just pointed to a new Forrester Research report that splits the social computing realm into six groups.
Forrester says it surveyed 4,475 US adults in December 2006 and 4,556 youth in October 2006 and to learn about their use of social computing technology adoption. The consultancy breaks down consumers according to reported participation in at least one of six areas:
“Creators” (13%): Publish Web pages, publish blogs, upload video to sites like You Tube
“Critics” (19%): Comment on blogs, posting ratings and reviews.
“Collectors” (15%): Use RSS, tag Web pages
“Joiners” (19%): Use social networking sites
“Spectators” (23%): Read blogs, watch peer-generated video, listen to podcasts
“Inactives” (52%): Yeah, the rest of the world.
You can deduce from the above statistics that at least 48% of the world Forrester surveyed are non-Inactives when it comes to social computing, which is significant. The percentage of consumers who are, at a minimum, spectators seems to be fast approaching Internet usage as a whole.
I’d love to see a breakout of the differences between the adult and youth populations. My guess is that it would be something like 20% adults, 95% youth.
Interestingly, as Dan notes, Apple users tend to be much more engaged consumers of social media services than Dell (read: Windows) users. “Apple users drink more from the Web 2.0 fountain than Dell users, which is expected given the profile of Mac users and the much bigger market share that Dell maintains,” he said.
by Dana Gardner
April 27, 2007 at 11:25 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Web 2.0
As Red Hat and its JBoss unit ramp up their SOA offerings and capabilities, they are re-emerging as a powerful mischief-maker to the established commercial vendors — this time on the subject of data lifecycle in the age of SOA. But there soon could be much more mischief from Raleigh.
Red Hat this week announced a series of SOA-focused bundles of open source products and associated services, as well as the acquisition of enterprise information integration (EII) vendor MetaMatrix for an undisclosed fee.
MetaMatrix provides proprietary software that provides a data services layer that decouples applications from their data sources, but Red Hat plans to move MetaMatrix to an open-source license and a subscription model in less than a year.
And herein lies the mischief. If Red Hat can offer a capable EII product set in open source, and spur on community development energies that attract more types of data and applications/services, then that puts pressure on the race for the best strategic data services layer approach for SOA. In effect, Red Hat is thumbing its nose at the other SOA vendors with strong data integration businesses, daring them to open source more of their EII and master data management (MDM) offerings … or else (remember what JBoss did to app servers and Linux did to Unix?).
This is potentially particularly disruptive to IBM, BEA, Sybase, Oracle and Microsoft. As I’ve alluded to many times in my blogs, the pressure on the data stack to move increasingly to open source is like entropy — a force that any one has little hope of preventing or resisting in the long term.
Data cleansing, data integration, data warehousing, data services, data bases — these are all hot businesses right now, adding much-needed revenue and profit growth (the good old fashioned way, via per server licenses) to the commercial vendors. I’ve been watching intently as the likes of MySQL and Ingres successfully move to an open source model in the databases themselves. MySQL is rumored to soon be going public in an IPO.
Now Red Hat is upping the stakes by moving the open source model to data integration and access activities. This could be quite a spoiler, if they can get an entire integrated data stack and lifecycle approach into open source. Perhaps Red Hat should acquire Ingres, and get even more mischievous. Perhaps some other acquisitions are in the offing for some other SOA goodies? There are some nice ones to choose from. How about a virtualization package next?
Red Hat also announced that it will be increasingly bundling products and services to make a platform-like acquisition mode for its wares, moving away from the ala carte approach. I’ve been expecting this since Red Hat acquired a slew of the old Netscape server components several years ago — and then double-downed on by the acquisition of JBoss last year.
Now Red Hat and JBoss customers can get large packages of functionality — moving toward the larger SOA value — but in an integrated, tested, and certified platform approach. This is going to be potentially disruptive (more mischief!) to the open source value-add packaging crowd, including SpikeSource, Optaros, and SourceLabs — and even IBM Global Services.
Red Hat said it plans to open source its Red Hat Network systems management offering as its integrates features from JBoss’s Operations Network wares. What? More mischief! This could be potentially disruptive to CA, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, et al. I’d like to see more mishief in the form of more management as a service (MaaS) offerings, myself. Can you say “service bureau” in Marathi?
All this mischief is like that movie where Jim Carey puts on the mask and turns into a hyper-mischief machine (I always liked the mask better on the dog).
Several previously separate Red Hat/JBoss components, for example, are being integrated into the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Application Server, Hibernate for object/relational mapping and persistence, and JBoss Seam for newer Enterprise 2.0 applications, all on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The goal: lower TCO.
Future JBoss Enterprise Platform offerings will be available for portal applications, SOA integration and business process automation requirements. Expect the portal in Q3 of this year.
The SOA portfolio — potentially consisting of JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and JBoss ESB, all on top of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (see above) — could come in Q4, probably in December. Ho, ho, ho. Also soon bending the mischief meter will be Red Hat Messaging, an advanced message que protocol to enable BPA by integrating and orchestrating app components and services.
And just in time for the beach, a new subscription offering, Red Hat Developer Studio, a development environment that integrates the Eclipse-based tools Red Hat gained via its recent agreement with Exadel with existing JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise developer tools for a programming environment for RIAs — with an annual subscription for $99 — is coming in July.
Yes, it’s certainly more than Linux mischief these days. How well history repeats itself shall be very interesting to observe over the next few years.
by Jerry Bowles
April 26, 2007 at 11:02 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SAP
A hot topic among social media bloggers these days is exactly which big companies “get” the value of connectedness, community and emergent technologies and which don’t. A subsidiary discussion to that is around which traditionally managed corporations are jumping on the bandwagon for PR reasons because they want to be seen as one of the cool kids and which ones are actually making fundamental changes to way they interact with their customers, partners and employees.
Having spent a lot of time talking with a number of SAP executives at SAPPHIRE in Atlanta earlier this week, I’m delighted to report that SAP is one of those forward-looking giants that get it. Big time. I’m not talking just about the fact that the company invited more than 20 of us lowly bloggers to sit in the big room with the regular press and analyst corps or that Mike Procenco and Stacy Fish put together a dynamite program of sessions with executives on topics that were of particular interest to us.
Or even that they provided access to any executives or customers we wanted to talk to and let us talk to them without hovering protectively in the background. All of those things were welcome and displayed a level of transparency and candor that just didn’t exist in any big corporation I know of five years ago.
The new SAP attitude is clearly rooted in the company’s discovery that communities and co-innovation are a superior approach to the ”assign an army of software developers to a task and see what they come up with” style of development. Opening up the process to partners and customers (and, indeed, anyone who wants to participate) provides the kind of give-and-take that leads to better products, satisfied buyers, reduced costs and happier employees.
The granddaddy of these communities–the SAP Developer Network (SDN)–has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own “evangelist,” Craig Cmehil. The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members. Both have proven to be invaluble resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall.
Another hub of 2.0 activity at SAP is the Emerging Solutions unit, led by general manager Dennis Moore, which is working on things like creating widgets that make it much easier for authorized users to get to the data they need inside SAP systems and a joint project called Duet with Microsoft that will allow SAP users to seamlessly use Office tools to work with processes and data. The unit even has its own vp of “imagineering,” a bright young man named Denis Browne.
Emerging Solutions was also involved in building a kind of internal MySpace/LinkedIn social directory called Harmony where employees with similar interests and skills can find each other. I was sittin way down at the end of the table when Dennis Moore was explaining Harmony but I somehow got the impression that Harmony is, at least in part, an attempt to provide SAP’s best employees with an alternative to posting their resumes on LinkedIn or MySpace where they can easily be poached by other firms.
What most convinced me that SAP gets it, though, is the enthusiasm of the people I spoke to. You couldn’t help getting the feeling that SAP has become a fun place to work. Not the kind of thing you would expect from a aging–how should I put this…German…engineering-oriented–software company with a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for making complex and costly products mainly for big companies. The new SAP is rapidly becoming a classic case study in how Enterprise 2.0 technologies, combined with a collaborative, social mindset, can give a giant corporation a second wind.
by Tom Mandel
April 26, 2007 at 11:52 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Lately, we’ve been hearing some concern that Enterprise 2.0 tools run counter to the core organizational principles of the enterprise. That’d make them dangerous. Enough so that complexity-in-business guru Dave Snowden recently noted a suggestion from a corporate Knowledge Management person that employees should be required to have a license to blog – ala a driver’s license.
That sounds serious, doesn’t it? After all, organizations are hierarchical, structured around relationships of management and reporting, whereas the new tools of Enterprise 2.0 reflect the individual and unorganized state of the public Web, especially “Web 2.0.” Isn’t there a contradiction here? Are “Enterprise 2.0” and the enterprise itself on a collision course?
This idea comes naturally to anyone who fears that a fiefdom or other power domain may be breached by new social software tools. But, it’s also behind the concern expressed by some of Andy McAfee’s students that using social software tools will make them seem laggards – like they don’t have enough to do. And Nicholas Carr’s skeptical claim (a year ago – he may have a different opinion now) that the more valuable an employee’s work and time are the less likely she may be to use these new tools amounts to the same argument as well.
If you are like me, you sense that these arguments are specious, but you have a hard time putting into words what’s wrong with them. After all, we have always gotten our work done with the tools we had; did this ever before prevent us from adopting new tools? Moreover, this same objection was used against bringing personal computers into the enterprise a quarter century ago. People were too busy to use them; only gadget freaks were interested.
As to the idea that social software can be a time waster, so can any productivity tool. Ever drum a pencil up and down on your desk?
As good a counter-example as the PC is, there is an even better one sitting on your desk. A purely social technology you use day in and day out – I mean your telephone, of course. Talk about a potential time-waster! Talk about the most important business productivity instrument of the twentieth century!
Here’s what I think is wrong with these arguments – they confuse corporate organization with the way we get corporate work done. Yes, reporting and managerial relationships are inherently hierarchical. But, this organization sits on top of a work environment that is always social and often collaborative.
Perhaps we are misled by the checkered history of the term collaboration; in the last two decades we have seen a lot of “collaboration software” that wasn’t very productive. And, too, perhaps we have the idea that “social” means something like “socializing”, so that we are forced to argue for social software by saying that, hey, lunch can be productive too!
It’s information itself that is social — embedded, that is, in the active social relations of the people who create and use it. Access to that “sociality” of information is what turns it into useful, human knowledge – in business as in daily life. Recently, a Sean Park post reminded me of The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that is essential reading for anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0.
by Dana Gardner
April 26, 2007 at 9:00 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Mashups, SOA, Web 2.0
I was just telling Coach Wei of Nexaweb the other night that Adobe was being too arrogant, and that more exploitation of open source would make sense for them. Well, darned if it turns out I was making some sense, even after two beers and a crab taco at Fenway Park.
Adobe today took the Flex framework for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) open source under a Mozilla license. A new open source Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), the same OSI-approved license used for the recently announced Adobe-inspired Tamarin project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification.
Smart move by Adobe. The road to RIAs is paved with many different aggregates, and loose stones abound. Such loose footing makes a stampede to a de facto industry standard a probable oasis for developers under pressure to produce. Adobe Flex could — if the community forces line up well — become that standard. Now’s the time to make life easy for the RIA developers — they will reward you richly.
Now Adobe needs to keep up the pressure and seek the same open source advantages for its Flash capabilities. Here’s another area begging for a standard that sticks, and sucks the oxygen out of the alternatives. This is especially so now that Microsoft is coming to town with its Silverlight so-called “Flash killer.”
With one stroke, an open source Flash framework, ala Flex, could render Microsoft’s many millions R&D spending (or should we call it reverse engineering and development (RED)) by Microsoft unable to again produce little bottom-line effect. With Adobe bringing its Flex and possibly Flash into open source — and perhaps creating unassailable de facto global standards as well — then the Web 2.0 red shift to RIAs and away from other models could be complete.
It will be curious to see how the likes of Google, Amazon, Salesforece.com, et al, react to the Flex announcement. This could free them up a bit to focus on other more remunerative activities.
Go Adobe.
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