April 3rd, 2008
IBM and Linden Partner on Enterprise-Class Second Life
IBM and Linden Labs are partnering to develop a version of Second Life that will live behind the corporate firewall.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Second Life is far too fat and clumsy to be taken seriously in the enterprise. Add to that concerns around administration, security and integration with corporate business applications and it’s easy to see why Linden would partner with IBM.
For itself, IBM has gone hog-wild over virtual worlds. “The 3-D Internet is a transformational opportunity that will change many industry processes, gather new revenue streams, and increase productivity and brand opportunity.” says Colin Parris, IBM’s vice president of digital convergence.
The company runs three v-world implementations already. It is working to create interoperability between the v-world providers. IBM’s commitment to SL is pretty extensive as well with more than 5,000 employees on SL and numerous sales training and collaboration exercises.
Putting SL behind a firewall will put the technology in direct competition with other enterprise-class v-world providers, namely Forterra Systems, Proton Media, and Qwaq, makers of the open source Croquet.
IBM can differentiate against these providers by supplying tight integrating between SL and back-end applications. This would allow groups to view and edit business data from with an SL conference room. Today that’s only possible on a more limited basis with HTML and Office applications .
April 2nd, 2008
Google to Buy Skype?
Rumors are out again that Ebay’s albatross. aka Skype, may soon be unloaded to Google. The deal could be valued at as much as $6 billion:
“Skype is booking about $400 million in revenue now, and it’s conceivable the company could command 10-times that. *A reader suggests Skype is on track to post $600mm of revenue in 2008. If so, Google might well pay $5-$6 billion.,”writes Henry Bloget at Silicon Alley Insider.
Complaints with Skype isn’t anything new. Rumors have been rife for sometime that Ebay had to do something with the P2P VoIP system. The company went from “cool and disruptive to a wildly over-priced acquisition” when it purchased Skype, writes Mark Evans., and took a $1.4 billion writedown on the deal.
While eBay may have come to hate the P2P VoIP system, TechCrunch’s Michael Arlington points out that Google has just started to think about dominating the voice space. The company has GTalk, it’s own peer-to-peer VoIP system, a free 411 service, and GrandCentral.
Adding Skype to that mix could pull those services together. Certainly pulling together Skype and Gmail are intriguing. The move would give Gmail the broadest reach of any P2P VoIP system today. Skype has done more than a 100 billion VoIP minutes and at any one time there are 10 million simultaneous users on Skype. That’s some marketplace for Google’s products.
The integration of Gmail and Skype could also help with third-party presence integration. Google uses XMPP in Gmail for presence information so a Skype integration could finally open up the network to sharing presence information with other IM systems.
As for business, Skype for Business could end up being bundled in with Google Apps as a starter. What might be more interesting is a tighter integration between Asterisk, which Gmail works with today, and Skype. I’m thinking native Skype trunking (available through third-parties today), using the Skype client as a client on the Asterisk server, and federating presence between Asterisk servers.
March 31st, 2008
The 3-D Web Goes Thin
Increasingly, it looks like Weight Watchers has gotten hold of the Semantic Web. Fat is out. Thin is in. And while no one’s counting points, it certainly looks like, thin clients will increasingly play a central roles in attracting organizations to the 3-D web.
A number of companies are enabling organizations and users to build their own virtual worlds with little more than a browser, much the way Ning, GoingOn, HiveLive, Flux, Me.com, and BricaBox has done for social networks. These instant-virtual-world companies include Vivaty, Altadyn with 3dxplorer, and to a lesser extent ScreenCaster and VastPark.
With browser only virtual worlds, organizations can engage the largest market of users today – the Web user. Even Second Life, arguably the largest virtual world with its over 13 million users, pales in comparison to the 1.1 billion that Jupiter Media estimates enjoy regular Web access.
Appealing to those users means getting rid of the fat clients needed to enter the 3-D web today. The process of downloading, installing, and configuring those clients are too complex for many users, too hefty for many business PCs, and they mean installing software on user’s desktop configuration, a big no-no if that user’s desktop exists in a business.
A thin client solves those problems and allows business to turn their Web sites into 3-D spaces. “We have chosen to develop our virtual headquarters and facility with an entirely web-browser based toolset,” says David Elchoness, Executive Director of the Association of Virtual Worlds, “If I can get someone to ‘click a link’ I’ll be able to show them the benefits of the 3D web. “
For consumers, Vivaty, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California, is creating 3-D virtual chat rooms that users can add to Web pages and social networking profiles. Vivaty chat rooms will rely on “a widget that you embed on other web pages. You choose the virtual furnishings for the room, and when you’re on a page with the Vivaty widget, you’ll — get ready for this — see images from the page featured as wall hangings in your virtual room…,” writes Eric Elden at Venturebeat.
Three years ago Altadyn, a French firm, introduced 3dxplorer, which lets individuals do the same with their home pages. The Association of Virtual Worlds will use the Altdan technology in the building of its virtual headquarters. ScreenCaster allows users to create virtual spaces, although not interactive today, could ultimately serve as the virtual spaces of a 3-D Web similar to the way Google maps may morph into the 3-D Web. VastPark will allow anyone to deploy their own virtual world. The software still in alpha and is due to go to public Beta nextmonth.
Vivaty’s uniqueness, however, and its arguably its greatest value is its integration with other social services. User can add a YouTube video or Facebook photo to their virtual world, notes Brad Stone in his article at The New York Times.
Tying all media into a common space through a thin client will be valuable to consumers today, but organizations will ultimately find powerful as well. A single 3-D space that consolidates together marketing collateral and corporate content spread across internal and external services is a powerful tool for attracting and interacting with customers, particularly if those customers can enter into that space with just a Web browser.
March 17th, 2008
Avaya Changes the UC Game
The battle for enterprise Unified Communications took a pivotal turn this morning when Avaya announced its Intelligent Presence server here at VoiceCon.
The Intelligent Presence server collects and integrates presence information from multiple sources for a richer view of a worker’s status. More specifically, the Presence Server will aggregate presence information from Avaya and third party sources, such as those from Microsoft and IBM, using standard protocols such as, SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP.
Being able to tie together all presence sources is becoming increasingly critical. To date, the choice of a presence server is somewhat binary for most enterprises as its largely being driven the gravity of their UC investments. Outside of the call center this means the desktop and that implies Microsoft’s OCS or IBM Lotus Sametime. (Incidentally, the same could be said of Cisco, but its market position and broad reach within the IT community changes the equation.. Nortel will run with Microsoft OCS as part of its Innovative Communications Alliance.) The rest of the market must find a way to work these two servers.
Avaya knows this well and this competitiveness underscores the public face of the Microsoft and Avaya relationship. Two years ago the tension broke at a roundtable I hosted at Voicecon between Karyn Mashima, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Avaya, and Dennis Karlinsky of Microsoft’s united communications group:
So when Avaya briefed me about its Intelligent Presence server two weeks ago, I thought it was making the right move. Avaya has continued to focus on enriching the enterprise infrastructure through its CEBP offering that blends SOA and telephony. The Presence Server aligns with that strategy and in so doing will even go beyond those core capabilities offered by IBM and Microsoft.
Presence sources are proliferating and a user’s online status will be indicated my more than just their activity at the deskto.p. Mobile presence will drive their status while on the road and increasingly in the office. Consumer presence engines, such as AIM, Yahoo, and Gmail, are more prevalent in the enterprise than enterprise-specific engines. Other presence sources for specific devices, such as RFID tags, sensors and other will increasingly emerge.
Aggregating those other presence sources together could give Avaya the competitive edge that it lacks in the enterprise by not owning the desktop. Already Avaya’s Jorge Blanco told me that the company plans on using XMPP to integrate with the broader Jabber community as well as presence status from consumer services, such as Gmail. Let’s hope they don’t stop there.
March 14th, 2008
The Longtail of IT Governance
Open source has shown how marketplaces can thrive on doing good, but can whether the same concept be applied to IT governance? Archer Technology hopes so. The risk assessment and compliance company announced Archer Exchange, an open marketplace for governance applications here at its user conference in Orlando.
Archer Exchange will rely on CIOs sharing internally developed applications running on Archer’s SmartSuite framework with other organization. SmartSuite provides policy, threat, asset, risk, incident, vendor and Sarbanes Oxley management. The technology is widely deployed across top organizations, including American Express and UMB.
Archer Exchange is an intriguing idea one that allows the company to address the long-tail of applications within the IT governance space. All too often market niches are either too targeted or just necessarily overlooked by software houses. As organizations solve those problems through internally developed SmartSuite applications, Archer hopes they’ll release those applications to the public. Each new application will be Archer certified. Nor will IT customers be the only ones developing targeted applications. Archer President and CEO Jon Darbyshire says that two full time engineers will also be developing applications for the Framework.
The company already has 48 applications available, most in the compliance and governance space though users, like UMB, have extended SmartSuite that far beyond compliance management to even manage their projects. Others SmartSuite applications go well beyond IT to include a CRM application and even event management.
In this, SmartSuite has a similarity with another application framework, albeit with an IT twist. “We’re just like Lotus Notes only easier to use,” he says, “With Notes you need a developer to build your applications. With us even you [That’s yours truly] could build an application.” Umm, gee, thanks Jon.
The question remains how CxOs will take to the marketplace. Jim Routh, Chief Information Security Officer for DTCC and the Archer User Group Chairman enthused on stage about how excited CxOs will be around the Archer Exchange. Organizations can gain battle tested applications, created by peers and even potential competitors, for deployment within their own companies at no additional cost beyond the Archer licenses.
Pretty cool stuff. But what Routh didn’t talk about was the incentive for an IT organization to contribute its intellectual property into the public domain. And while some developers will be motivated by recognition, as John Kirkwood, global information security officer at Royal Ahold, pointed out to me, I suspect most organizations will only be able to release the most insignificant applications into the public domain due to contracts and competitive interests. What do you think?
March 2nd, 2008
VoIP: Cisco Goes to Number Two
Love ‘em or hate ‘em you most certainly have to respect the VoIP folk over at
Cisco. According to Infonetics, they’ve just moved into the number two spot behind Avaya in worldwide IP deskphone and softphone shipments.
Cisco grew at the expense of its competitors. “Cisco took a little bit [of market share] from everyone else,” Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst of Enterprise Voice & Data at Infonetics, explained to eWeek’s Paula Musich, The others either “went down by a half a percent” or were “flat,” he added. Alcatel-Lucent had the second spot for 2006.
Overall, the enterprise telephony market topped $9.6 billion in 2007 with worldwide IP phone shipments climbing by 29% from 2006. In my work with Osterman Research, we found that ultimately, only 64% of organizations will employ only IP handsets, 13% will deploy only soft phones, and the remainder will run both.
Other report highlights:
- The top 5 PBX/KTS system vendors account for 3/4 of total market revenue: Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and Alcatel-Lucent (in that order); Cisco was the only one of these with a meaningful increase in market share, and jumped from 5th to 2nd in 2007
- Sales of TDM systems managed to stay above the $1 billion mark in 2007, likely for the last time
- Hybrid IP PBX systems account for 2/3 of all lines shipped in 2007; pure IP systems account for 18%
- The North American market had the weakest overall line growth in 2007; CALA had the strongest line growth, Asia Pacific the second strongest.
March 2nd, 2008
Microsoft to Enter SaaS
The blogosphere is on fire with the anticipated announcement that Microsoft will be entering the Software as a Service (SaaS) market this or next week. Just how they’ll enter the market is still uncertain. My guess is that they’ll in part blend SaaS with desktop technology much the way we’ve see Microsoft merge the Internet with desktop technology (I’m thinking Microsoft Money, for example).
Microsoft’s been very quite on SaaS front since a memo was leaked two and half years ago, notes Nicholas Carr, warning that of a “services wave of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet”. (Todd Bishop has a super post listing Microsoft’s greatest internal e-mails. Don’t think this one was included, but it still makes for a good read.)
SaaS is still in its infancy, but its an important trend. Michael Arlington notes this is particularly so with Google moving into SaaS:
“….In short, they’re responding to Google Apps and Google Docs, which now account, according to analysts, for up to 2-3% of Google’s total revenue (call it $400m a year, up from $40m
a year ago) (note: I can’t find a source for this, but it was quoted to me by a senior Google employee last week). That’s still pennies compared to Microsoft’s $16b or so in annual Office revenue, but the trend is pretty clear - users like free, and they like the ability to collaborate on documents. Today, Google offers what is in many ways a superior product to Office and they don’t charge users for it….”
Why now? Carr postulates two reasons:
“First, its business and marketing priority has been the rollout of the recent upgrades to its core Windows and Office programs. It’s had to milk the cash cows. Second, it’s been building out the backend infrastructure - the data center network - required to run web apps reliably and on a large scale. These obstacles are now coming down. The upgrades have been out for more than a year, and, despite some glitches, have generated a lot of cash for the company. As for its infrastructure, a massive new data center near Chicago is expected to come online this year, adding to the capacity of the new centers the company has built or bought in Washington, Texas, and California.
Timing of the announcement is expected to coincide with the Mix conference later this week where Microsoft is also expected to release an offline version of SilverLight.
As to what Microsoft’s foray into SaaS will look like, I think Arvino Mudjiarto had it right when he wrote this in response to Carr’s post:
“Microsoft shall take their local MS-Office kingdom as their initial start. Create document on local, but make it easy to post it on the web. If they do a “me too” approach, I seriously wonder how effective it would really be. After all, in the mind of the consumer: Google is on the web, Microsoft is on the desktop. Trying to make Microsoft the king of the web is not only an uphill battle, it is also seem “unnatural” to Microsoft’s current posture.
February 28th, 2008
Google Sites: A Sharepoint Killer?
The Google redesigned Jotspot Wiki, dubbed Google Sites, is being looked as a Sharepoint “killer”. With Sites, Google would like to think that Google Apps is ready take on Office and the rest of Microsoft suite, but is it?
Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s Management Director of Enterprise, called the combined products under Google Apps a “Microsoft Sharepoint killer” because it’s allowing businesses to collaborate without all that expensive Microsoft software, writes Michael Arlington.
When Jotspot was initially released, I thought it easy to use collaboration app would give small business an answer to high-priced collaboration software. Back then the only Wiki-style collaboration platforms for business was Jotspot and Socialtext.
How things have changed. Today, there are more than 50 Wikis targeting business each with their own level of complexity and capability. Given that context Google Sites is interesting, but hardly the revolutionary product that Jotspot had originally introduced.
Yes, yes Google Sites is more than just a Wiki and nor will (or should) anyone discount Google as a competitor. Still, I don’t think Google Sites can elevate Google Apps to the status of an enterprise play. Here’s why:
My own experience with Google Apps, for example, has been neutral to positive at best. Google’s done a good job capturing most of the critical functions that one would need from a Microsoft Word. Most though I dare not say all and there’s enough missing today to still be a hindrance to adoption.
So what’s missing? How about not being able to use traditional shortcut keys like Ctrol-C for copy or Ctrol-V for paste. Columns on tables can’t be resized simply by dragging columns nor can you use the fonts on your computer and not just the six fonts Google licensed from Microsoft. Those are just some of the problems out there. You can find more rants about Google Apps by reading Rich McManus’ post here.
As for taking on Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Google Sites will have a long way to go, writes Eweek’s Clint Bouton:
…Forrester Research analyst Erica Driver told eWEEK that even with Google Sites, Google Apps is still limited compared to IBM Lotus Quickr and Microsoft SharePoint platforms.
Driver said these other suites include an abundance of functionality in key areas such as basic content services, collaboration, communication, social computing tools, portal services, office productivity tools, and what we think of as “business intelligence for the masses.”
Moreover, Apps lacks secondary functionality such as search, information rights management, business process management and informal learning, she said.
AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy agreed, and made the case that the evolution of Google Apps, particularly with Sites, is not unlike the bridge between the functionality in Microsoft Office and SharePoint.
“In Office, [Microsoft] had developed personal productivity capabilities in separate standby applications (basically word processing, spreadsheets, presentation) plus e-mail and messaging,” Murphy told eWEEK. “SharePoint ties everything together and makes Office more of a group or even enterprise productivity application by enabling collaboration.”
He also said there’s still a question of whether Google Apps can act as a true platform for companies because of certain hindrances to adopting across the enterprise. Specifically, he said that while Google is working to usher in offline support for Apps, it might be difficult to do for every function that they’re introducing.
Moreover, if Apps is to become a true platform, it has to be easier to customize or integrate to suit specific company and partner needs, such as enterprise applications like ERP and CRM, he said.
The final blow, in Murphy’s opinion? Google Sites has no workflow. “They’re going to have to find a simple way to introduce that. But it’s a challenge to keep a concept like workflow simple.”
Jotspot was a novel even revolutionary application for its time. Google Sites is not. With that said, Google Site is a small fraction of Google’s repertoire, far smaller than one suspects Sharepoint is for Microsoft. It and Google Apps aren’t in a postion to threaten Sharepoint and Microsoft Office today, but tomorrow will well be a different matter.
Techmeme has more to say on the matter.
February 27th, 2008
Sametime vs. OCS Act II
Apparently my post comparing Sametime and OCS raised a few hairs. IBM PR dashed off an e-mail listing a bunch of points where they disagreed with the piece and the offering manager for IBM Lotus Real-Time Collaboration blogged about it as well. Thanks folk. Now here’s where they were right and wrong.
February 25th, 2008
SpigIT: an enterprise social network that’s fun and games
Harvesting breakthrough ideas is a challenge for any organization, but one company thinks a bit of play may be just the answer.
Spigit mixes enterprise social networks with game design and personal incentives to encourage new ideas and steward them from the process of discovery to implementation. Employees are encouraged to participate in stock-market-like games using the good old incentives to solicit cooperation — fame (i.e. reputation) and fortune.
Spigit’s reputation ranking algorithm, RepuRank, promotes recognition of outstanding contributors to the organization. Employees gain a tool for tapping into knowledge across the organization. Employees also have a chance to win virtual stocks (“Spocks”) or currency (Spigits), which some Spigit customers allowed employees to redeem at the company store.
The company creates two markets one for harvesting innovative ideas within the organization and the other extracting latent knowledge from employees. The Innovation Market allows employees to compete for the best idea and win points for contributing to and reviewing other ideas. The Prediction Market allows employee to pool knowledge by buying and selling Spocks based on the outcome of an event, such as a question on the success of a new slogan. The current market price becomes an indicator of the option’s probability.
Spigit isn’t the first vendor to market with an enterprise social network. BEA, IBM-Lotus, and Connectbeam offer social networks for business. But Spigit is the first enterprise vendor to organizations to build an incentive for individuals to participate in the network. That’s been enough for six companies, including SAP, to purchase the softwarel notes CEO Paul Pluschkell.
Spigit is priced in three packages: a single annual amount, per user and per server, and then as a service. The software is targeted at being the equivalent of one senior IT executive. Prices will range depending on discounts with $300,000 for an annual fee for unlimited number of users to $10 to $25 per user per month. The break-even point, says Pluschkell, is 3,000 users.
Adding a goal and an incentive to participate will be critical for the success of the software’s deployment. More important though will be providing the right corporate culture that enforces the collaborative messages espoused by Spigit. Without that sort of investment, no collaboration software will succeed.
See David Greenfield's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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