EMC announced they have acquired Dutch XML content management company X-Hive. X-Hive brings XML tools to the Documentum content management division of EMC. All X-Hive employees will stay on board, and the company will immediately hire new staff. Terms were not disclosed. http://www.x-hive.com/, http://www.emc.com
Year: 2007 (Page 14 of 45)
Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) announced the availability of new technologies in the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP) that integrate with and extend the enterprise search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. In addition to supporting 80 languages, FAST ESP will enable Office SharePoint Server’s users to employ advanced navigation capabilities to refine results and find facts, using FAST’s Contextual Insight technology. It also uses Office SharePoint Server as a platform, extending Web Parts capabilities to expose customers and industry partners to more relevant information. http://www.microsoft.com/, http://www.fastsearch.com/
You’d think the CEO of a public company would have better things to do with his time than to blog anonymously about his company’s performance and trash the competition. But this seems not to be the case with John Mackey, chief executive of Whole Foods Market, whose “sock puppeting” behavior, “the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company” has now landed him in hot water with the Feds and competitors in the natural foods grocery business. Probably a gaggle of lawyers will figure out a way to solve the Mackey issue . . . at least for now.
Yet, this latest escapade got me thinking (once again) about the double-edge sword of social computing. Sometimes we can be too social – not just speaking out of turn but also crossing important organizational boundaries. In our era of instant communications, it is possible to communicate too freely.
What we need are a few good models for how we’re going to “collaborate” with one another over the Net—figuring out the boundaries without building walls. (By enterprise collaboration I mean exchanging and sharing both information and insights, to do our jobs better.) Behind all the Web 2.0 hype, I suspect there are a few pointers towards new models.
One of my current favorites for a new model is Lotus Connections, an integrated suite of five services for social software (IBM’s moniker for the market). These services are (a) communities, (b) social book marking, (c) enterprise profiles, (d) activities, and (e) blogs. Not surprisingly, these services are based on the ways that IBM typically does business. In fact, Connections productizes several internally developed IBM technologies.
I realize that I have the same feelings for Connections that I had with Lotus Notes in the early days of the groupware revolution – a terrific concept for a new computing paradigm, yet where the devil’s in the details. With a $110 per user price tag, IBM is focusing (for now) on the large enterprise marketplace. Designed to run inside an enterprise, Connections bundles restricted versions of WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Enterprise Database, and Tivoli Directory Integrator. To be sure, large organizations have large internal collaboration problems – such as quickly assembling ad hoc task teams of company experts who do not necessarily know one another to solve a pressing problem, or coordinating constantly changing schedules and deliverables.
But I am still bothered by the boundary problem of social computing – which Connections (despite all its promise) does little to address. Yes, as soon as we are authorized and authenticated by our networked environment, we can collaborate and share information. With current technologies, we’re living in a binary world. Either we’re inside the firewall/enterprise or we’re public on the Net. Either things are “private” or “public.”
In real life though, we’re dealing not with just black or white. Social computing’s going to have to do better, and be able to deal with many shades of gray. This means being able to manage content, schedules, and relationships across an “extended” enterprise – and being able to adjust the degree of connectedness we want to have with colleagues across different organizations.
Open-Xchange Inc., announced collaboration software designed to make it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of open source without requiring prior Linux know-how. Open-Xchange Express Edition includes the tools required by companies to facilitate communication and teamwork. The product does not require a licensed operating system or any other software prior to installation. Open-Xchange Express Edition “transforms a bare metal computer into a fully-functional e-mail and groupware Server” integrating the Ubuntu operating system. Open-Xchange Express Edition supports standard groupware clients, such as Microsoft Outlook. Outlook users on Open-Xchange Express Edition can synchronize public, private, and shared folders, accept or decline appointments through Outlook, manage private appointments, tasks, contacts, and “Free/Busy” status. In addition, Open- Xchange Express Edition’s AJAX-based web interface is always accessible to users, regardless of platform. Open-Xchange Express Edition offers enterprise users smart links between calendar appointments, task lists, contacts, documents, bookmarks, and knowledge articles. Open-Xchange Express Edition is available today at the Open-Xchange Online Shop and through resellers. Prices for end customers start at US$ 898 / euro 691. Governmental, non- profit organizations and educational organizations are eligible for discounts. All prices exclude VAT. http://www.open-xchange.com/
Thank you Andrew.
Andrew McAfee has a thoughtful post (“It’s Not Not About the Technology”) on a topic I’ve often bitten my tongue about, i.e., the (often smugly delivered) phrase “It’s not about the technology”. And of course the context is a discussion about applying technology to a business application, which should by definition, imply that both technology capabilities and business requirements need to be part of the “about”.
It is common for one or the other to be overly emphasized to ill effect. Perhaps because of my technical background, I am more sensitive to the use of this phrase in situations where the utterer is covering up for a lack of knowledge or fear of technology or change.
You simply can’t make good business decisions that involve technology without understanding what the technology can and can’t effectively do – business requirements need to be expanded or contracted based on what is possible and feasible if you want your IT investments to be successful and competitive.
Often the largest benefit of a piece of software is a little known (even to the vendor) feature that happens to allow for, e.g., a process improvement that would be a requirement if you knew it was possible. See what Andrew has to say.
A week late I am wrapping up my first six months blogging for The Gilbane Group on enterprise search. I am attempting a retrospective of discoveries, thoughts and issues that surfaced in second quarter. June was especially busy and now that I have had time to sort the sortable here are a few noteworthy highlights and reflections on them. In short, the search market is complex and becoming more so on a monthly basis.
Google the company and Google the product suite are so dominant that any article about search in the mainstream or technical presses evokes the “G-word.” This happens even if Google is not the main topic.
Consider for example Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal in this article June 28, “Ask.com Takes Lead in Designing Display of Search Results.” The first paragraph never mentioned Ask.com but began “Google and other search companies …” On the same page was an article “Start-ups Make Inroads with Google’s Work Force.” Earlier that week the New York Times ran a story “The Human Touch that May Loosen Google’s Grip,” MassHighTech referred to Google throughout an article “Why the Best Search Marketers are Right-Brained,” and Intelligent Enterprise did as well in “Enterprise Search: Seek and Maybe You’ll Find.” [More about the latter further on.] A search on www.Clusty.com for “Google” under News>Top News today gets 89 hits and “Toyota” 49.
Korea presents us with a take on Internet search that I think is highly relevant to the enterprise search market as described in the New York Times, July 5 in “South Koreans Connect Through Search Engine.” It turns out that the amount of content in Korean on the WWW is so scanty that Google is irrelevant. Instead a five year-old company, Naver.com is giving Koreans what they really need, answers to questions native Koreans are seeking, built up collaboratively through their cultural “helpfulness.” Naver.com services 77% of all Internet “searches originating in South Korea.” Just as Google can’t deliver to a Korean population what it wants to know, Google can’t really “understand” all of the information needs nuances in culturally diverse enterprises. Naver maintains “questions and answers in proprietary databases not shared with other portals or search engines” as well an enterprise might want to do.
At the Red Herring conference in Boston on June 28, a panel of industry leaders, in a session entitled “The New Frontier in Search” was asked by the moderator whether there will “be any major breakthroughs in semantic search in the next ten years.” The answer from all four including Jeff Cutler of Answers.com and Doug Leeds of Ask.com was an unequivocal , “NO!” I have a list of over 30 companies working on or publicly “sniffing around” the semantic search marketplace. Others are sure to be engaged in stealth work so “not in ten years” is hard to digest but who really knows?
Also at Red Herring, in an interview with EMC’s Mark Lewis, he emphasized a compelling issue for enterprise search, “security,” namely authentication for permission to view search results. In another panel session moderated by Judy Hurwitz on SOA, the security issue was even more dominant as speakers discussed the complexities of integrating heterogeneous applications in a SOA environment while maintaining security integrity. As the number of variables in the architecture rises, so too the technical difficulties of making secure content really secure in search.
The Enterprise Search landscape is pretty crowded with companies that are more focused on helping us find what is in the organization than what is on an enterprise’s Web site. Summarizing the challenges these vendors face is the aforementioned article, “Enterprise Search: Seek and Maybe You’ll Find.” Their market is my beat but grappling with the realities of serving such diverse audiences is a serious necessity.
OK, this blog entry is already too long but you get the idea. The fact that the New York Times has recently had at least one article a week relating to search technologies is really a business marker. While search was introduced to professional searchers 35 years ago, it has been a real sleeper for most of the decades since. Web technology is truly the enabler of so much that makes search work for the masses in so many environments. It’s pretty clear that although search is ubiquitous in the workplace, its commodity status and the normalizing of enterprise search protocols are still a few years off. It is going to be interesting to see who stumbles and who prevails of the current bumper crop of offerings. Or will another disruption take us into more innovative forms of search?
Stay tuned for the next six months – I’m predicting more shakeout in the industry and more adoption of different flavors of search in more organizations. Trying to keep up will be the primary challenge.
The recording from our June 26th webinar, “Utilizing Web CMS as an eMarketing Platform to Deliver Tangible ROI” is now available here.
During the webinar, my co-presenters from Hot Banana Software and I talked about how the Web is a critical component of marketing and sales strategies for organizations large and small. We noted that more and more marketing dollars are moving to online activities, in billions. Not many would argue with that. But we also reminded our audience that “the other side of the coin” in having more money to spend is the parallel rise in corporate expectations for ROI on that spend. Not many can argue with that.
The heat is on. Organizations want eMarketing to drive sales, period. Proving that it can – and quantifying that it does – remains the conundrum for many. As we discussed how to prove marketing ROI, we asked the audience to tell us about their eMarketing goals. Their responses clearly have accountability (read: measurement!) in mind:
We also talked about the fact that eMarketing is a dizzying challenge, given an array of emerging approaches, techniques, and technologies. Selecting the most lucrative methods is as far from a one-dimensional process as you can get. Here’s a snapshot of the methods our webinar audience is using today:
It can be interesting for both analysts and technology vendors to understand the rate of technology adoption within the field — as opposed to within the market forecast. Here’s a case in point, where “2.0”-driven techniques such as social media advertising and RSS content distribution lag begin more traditional “e” methods, focused squarely around email and search.
Want to read more on Web CMS and eMarketing? Download here.
Jacques Bughin and James Manyika at McKinsey have just published another thought-provoking report, “How Businesses Are Using Web 2.0.” They’re working with a beefy survey (2,847 executives worldwide, 44% who hold C-level positions), supplemented by an online discussion. Their conclusions:
“Expressing satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, [respondents] say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments. But companies aren’t necessarily relying on the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs; instead they place the greatest importance on technologies that enable automation and networking.” Companies that are using Web 2.0 technologies “have developed a new way of bringing technology into business . . . This new approach is easier to implement and more flexible than traditional top down approaches.”
Wow, so at the end of the day, our focus on Collaboration 2.0 is all about developing new, more flexible models for deploying business applications! Could it be that this year’s two-dot-oh rave is all about light-weight development models?
Well, perhaps — this is certainly the underlying logic of Google’s $625 million acquisition of Postini, an email security and management company, consumated today. As today’s NYTimes observed, “The deal underscores Google’s ambitions to become a serious player in the business of selling software to companies and organizations, in competition with Microsoft and others.” But as much as I am a fan of Gmail, I don’t think it is going to be the Exchange killer. There’s still going to be a big market for enterprise applications, enterprise email included. (I’m not sure how I would feel about my doctors using Gmail in the hospital when discussing my health and well being.)
Here’s the issue. We can rely on the Internet and the Web to provide an ever increasing set of business services. Some are advertising supported (such as Gmail); others are subscription based (such as Salesforce, Foldera, and Longjump). The savvy Web 2.0 vendors — including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, and various startups — are rapidly exposing their APIs for meaningful mashups, each promising to anchor a vibrant ecosystem for content sharing and collaboration. We’re going to have a lot more flexibility. Yet as business leaders and technology visionaries, we are going to have to plan very carefully how we will use the Internet’s power of instant connectivity for our strategic business advantage.
We often forget the amount of infrastructure we have readily available when we go online and exchange email. DNS, TCP/IP, some basic security, SMTP, HTTP — it all works now; earlier generations of technologies limited the scope of these services to enterprise islands. (Remember DECnet, PROFS, and WangNet.) Now we’re concerned about privacy, security, findability, records retention, manageability, and a whole host of knotty systems infrastructure issues.
The challenge facing the collaboration ecosystem vendors for the enterprise (whoever they may be) is to build the infrastructure required to support the “automation and networking” environments that the McKinsey execs have in mind. The jury is still to be convened.
I bet that we’re going to be hearing a lot from the mainstream enterprise vendors–Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, EMC, Cisco–by the end of the year. With our continuing focus on enterprise collaboration and social computing, we are going to have to pay even more attention to the infrastructure services available over corporate intranets, partner extranets, and the public Internet. It remains to be seen how flexible these loosely coupled core services can be–and how they can be packaged into vibrant business propositions.
