Author: Alex Williams

Recently, SAP showed us its new, cloud-based enterprise collaboration service called 12Sprints. It embraces consumer services and activity streams correlating to the context of the business use, in particular collaboration among teams and groups.

Since that demo a few weeks ago, our views about the SAP service have changed a bit. In particular now that Google Buzz is part of the picture and conversations we have had recently with companies like Jive Software.

It’s evident that the landscape is changing. 12Sprints, Jive Software and a host of other enterprise services have solidified the belief that the enterprise expects applications to be social. Enterprise vendors are hearing that pretty clearly from their customers.

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We stopped by the Jive Software office in Portland this week to talk with CEO Dave Hersh and Co-Founder and CTO Matt Tucker about the company and the technology direction in the market.

Hersh said Buzz is interesting as it reinforces to customers that activity streams are effective ways to get the right information to the right people. Now, enterprise customers want all of their applications to be social.

“Every application they have in house is getting buzzy,” Hersh said.

Bets are on for how to apply activity streams to the enterprise while at the same time developing open architectures so they may continually adapt to market changes.

For instance, Jive sees its “Social Business Software,” platform as reaching across the enterprise. It has invested heavily in the social, customer facing environments. The company recently acquired FiltrBox to track and analyze information from the social stream. The next step is to create activity streams for all applications, deeper in the enterprise. Integrate, for instance, an activity stream into an ERP or CRM environment.

Hersh said Jive now has 200 employees. He expects employee head count to be 300 by the end of the year. Resources will go to R&SD with a concentration in developing activity stream technology and mobile services.

In the meantime, the focus across the market is how to bring universality to consumer and enterprise applications. These are services built upon cloud-based infrastructures that use APIs to integrate consumer-based applications that are as popular for the office as the home.

SAP’s 12Sprints is illustrative of this trend. In December, we wrote about the service, describing it as a competitor to Google Wave. Now it seems more like Google Buzz. It has the elements of a fully collaborative environment where people add to a stream of information, editing simultaneously in real time.

It’s a competitor to any number of enterprise collaboration services, including Saleforce Chatter, PBWorks, MindTouch and IBM’s Project Vulcan. Other services that come to mind include Tibco’s Tibbr, as Dion Hinchliffe points out in his post recently about the 12Sprints service.

The service is designed to integrate with consumer-based API’s, initially integrating with Evernote and Scribd. That’s a smart approach. Innovation in the market is coming from services that are fit for the consumer or the professional. For example, doctors use Evernote to keep notes and for their own personal use.

The SAP team looks like they have no hesitation in developing 12Sprints as a service that is much like a consumer offering.

It uses activity streams that allow people to follow individuals, groups, updates or search terms.

But it is not a rival, as of yet, to Microsoft Sharepoint. 12Sprints takes a more focused approach than Sharepoint. Hinchcliffe points out that this may be its best attribute. It’s not like the rest of the pack in that it tries to do everything:

“It’s important to note that 12Sprints doesn’t try to be the best at everything, a fault that’s endemic to large enterprise application suites and which is wisely avoided here. It does however integrate with best-of-breed services where it makes sense, whether they’re from SAP or not. This includes WebEx, Evernote, and Scribd, with the first two custom-integrated and the latter as part of their extensions program. With extensions any developer can onboard their functionality to 12Sprints, which offers users an experience not dissimilar to an app store and makes it possible for anyone to enhance the platform.

Who will find 12Sprints compelling? Those who have traditional, non-collaborative desktop and communication tools. E-mail and instant messaging is an obvious competitor for many of the tasks that 12Sprints targets, while Microsoft Project, Web conferencing, and knowledge/document management tools are as well in terms of more directed and less open-ended apps.”

SAP, Jive and even Google have a shared interest in developing applications built upon open architectures. The consumer facing aspects of these applications will continue to unfold, especially as cloud computing grows in acceptance.

And with this all, activity streams will be the standard for how the social stream flows.

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Companies are dropping Internet Explorer 6 in droves and vendors are quickly following the lead by sunsetting support.

It’s a pretty safe move on the vendor’s part. Data collected by the exo.performance.network shows how quickly companies are dropping the IE6, which was first introduced in 2001.

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While Internet Explorer 6 collapses in the enterprise, Internet Explorer 8 is picking up fast:

“Current data from the exo.repository shows a dramatic spike in IE 8.0 adoption, with over 70% of Windows XP systems – sampled from the exo.performance.network’s IT-centric community of nearly 23,000 registered sites – now running Microsoft’s latest web browser. This compares to the less than 10% of XP systems that are still running the aging IE 6.0, and the roughly 20% who are stuck on the in-between version, IE 7.0.

And now Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Atlassian have all dropped support.

The Atlassian news appeared on its forums:

“Hi guys,

We are announcing our end of life of Atlassian support for Internet Explorer 6 on JIRA.

This will be effective from the launch date of JIRA 4.2 (target Q3, 2010). This means that JIRA 4.1 will be the last version of JIRA to support IE6. (From JIRA 4.0 to JIRA 4.1, all of the main functionality will work in IE 6; however, some of the visual effects will be missing).”

Socialtext is still providing support for IE6. Co-founder Ross Mayfield told us that, “as much as we would like to move beyond IE 6, we have enterprise-wide security-conscious customers that still require supporting it for their users. These are valuable forward looking customers for whom we must be backwards compatible.”

Microsoft does not seem to be fighting the effort. They will continue to support the product. Here’s what the Microsoft IE blog states:

“Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.”

Every product sees a twilight. IE6 has reached that point in the enterprise.

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Google is giving a small town in Oregon $100,000 for free Wi-Fi. It’s a town called The Dalles – a community with an interesting significance for Google.

The Dalles is a city of 12,000 people along the Columbia River, about 80 miles east of Portland. Google owns a massive data center there. It’s a key Google operation, that’s powered by the cheap hydroelectricity that comes from a dam on the Columbia. Twin cooling towers stand four-stories high, keeping the servers from overheating as they continually crunch data and serve it back to millions of people online.

This data center in The Dalles is what helps make Google’s cloud computing capabilities a reality. Sure, it’s connected to data centers around the world. But this one has special significance, In some ways, it symbolizes the emergence of the cloud computing era.

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The prospect of a data center in The Dalles had national significance. In 2005, Congress changed energy legislation so the Bonneville Power Administration, which runs the dam, would not be privatized. That meant BPA’s electricity prices would stay low. With that in place, Google went ahead with construction, knowing it could burn as much power as it needed to keep its servers humming.

In that year, Harper’s Magazine published blueprints of the data center. The magazine used the diagrams as the center piece in a profile of Google and its quest for cheap electricity, and the emergence of cloud computing. In June of 2006, the New York Times ran a front page story about the data center. The headline: “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power.” It, too, used the data center to tell a story about Google’s strategy and its lead in cloud computing over rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo!

Today, The Dalles and its free Wi-Fi from Google has some interesting correlations to another announcement this week pertaining to Google’s efforts in creating an ultra-fast broadband network.

This effort to provide broadband service to select cities is certainly designed to show what kind of opportunities come when people get an Internet connection that is 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today. It’s the kind of effort that makes sense as Google seeks to offer a whole new generation of applications that would be available in the cloud.

As the New York Times points out:

“In Google’s vision of the future of the Internet, the live streaming of 3-D medical images from a rural health clinic to a specialized medical center or the downloading of a full-length movie in a matter of minutes would become commonplace.”

Google is only providing cash in the form of a grant to The Dalles for the Wi-Fi. It is not providing the kind of Internet access that will go to those who receive the ultra fast Internet connection. But The Dalles experiment does show Google’s interest in providing Internet access to rural communities.

There are some other interesting correlations:

Google made provisions with The Dalles that it would not be permitted to filter content. That’s a move we should also expect when Google lays its experimental fiber in cities around the country. Google alluded to this kind of spirit in its announcement this week:

“Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.”

Google gets final approval over the content and design of the splash page and the landing page for the free service in The Dalles. Will they seek that kind of control in other communities, too?

Google will also help get the network up and running in The Dalles. Accordingto Wi-Fi Net News, Mountain View, Calif. is the only other town where Google operates a Wi-Fi network. Google tried to launch a network in San Francisco but the effort failed.

Google also referred to Mountain View in its announcement this week about the fiber network:

“Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn. Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there’s still more to be done. We don’t think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone.”

It’s a different task to lay fiber but The Dalles may serve as a miniature model for the complexities that come with developing a municipal network for accessing the Web.

In the meantime, it’s great to see a small Oregon town play such an interesting role in the development and future of Google, the most significant Internet company of our time.

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We often hear how cloud computing makes it more affordable for customers to use services that in the past would have been packaged as software and required buying, installing and maintaining on any number of individual machines.

But we often forget how it is also much cheaper for the vendor to produce and distribute services through the cloud. Cloud vendors do not need to test software on any number of operating systems. Version control is a nagging task. it’s unnecessary when the service is cloud-based. The idea of a software disc seems almost antiquated.

IBM seems to get this whole concept pretty well. The company has realized that it can use a cloud computing infrastructure to market its web-based services. Their target right now are college students and professors who are being offered the use of IBM software and databases through a cloud infrastructure IBM calls the “Academic Skills Cloud.”

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Programs now available to college students and professors include IBM Rational, WebSphere, and Informix. Services to be added to the cloud over time will include Cognos, Lotus and Tivoli.

This is a smart move by IBM. It shows how deeply ingrained cloud computing has become at Big Blue. It leverages the power of the cloud to offer IBM technology at minimal cost. Plus, it reaches students who will go on to associate IBM with cloud computing as they begin their professional careers.

The Academic Skills Cloud provides students with access to leading cloud computing technology and new methods for developing applications. Courses and work material can be accessed anywhere the student is located.

Professors can teach practices that students will see in the workforce once they graduate. Machines do not need to be continually updated with new software. It’s all available online.

Students who learn about cloud computing today stand a far better chance of adapting to a world where working with online services will be the way business is conducted. IBM is making guarantees that they will be top of mind for students once they move on to the professional world.

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The federal government sure loves cloud computing. And now it’s using the foundation it built in the cloud to create a mobile apps store for citizens and government agencies.

The federal budget for IT services has $35 million set aside for introducing mobile technologies. The money is part of a $79 billion IT budget, down from $81 billion last year.

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According to the Hill.com, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said he wants to “tap into the mobile revolution” by helping the General Services Administration add the mobile apps to the government “store” at Apps.gov.

Apps.gov is the government’s cloud-based apps environment. Government agencies use it to download different software and services.

The Hill reports that Kundra wants to model the success that Apple has seen with its app store for the iPhone and iTouch. For example, just as independent developers can submit iPhone apps, he wants people to use government data to create mobile apps for citizens. There is no detail yet about the costs of the apps, if they’d be free or a mix like on Apple or the Android platform.

Kundrs has the information ready to mine. He spearheaded Data.gov, which gives access to all kinds of government data.

Kundra understands the ecosystem that is developing online. He refers to the way social networks leverage third-party sites. He’d like to see the same ecosystem emerge out of the federal government.

But we wonder what apps developers would create. Kundra envisions mobile apps that, for instance, would track federal spending, and show which projects get initiated in your neighborhood.

And how would this application developer community emerge? Apple’s success comes from the sheer volume of applications available and the popularity they enjoy. Is there an interest among developers to create applications out of government data? And we wonder if the Apple model is really best. An open application development environment seems more in the spirit of an effort such as this by the federal government.

In the meantime, cloud computing appears to gaining slowly in the federal government over concerns about security. To help spur adoption, Kundra’s IT budget has $70 million in funds for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish formal security standards for cloud computing.

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Oracle is launching a worldwide, cloud computing tour. It’s a 50-stop show for developers and system administrators.

But is the tour really about cloud computing? It seems more like virtualization with a touch of focus on how to leverage public cloud environments from providers like Amazon Web Services.

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The tour will focus on three topics:

• How IT can become a private cloud service provider for your users.
• How to evolve existing enterprise architectures to a cloud model.
• How to leverage public clouds from providers like Amazon Web Services.

The premise of private cloud computing is to get more out of an enterprise data center. Virtualization technology makes this possible to some extent. But is it really cloud computing? Is private cloud computing just a glorified data center?

The question is the focus of our weekly poll. So far, the question is eliciting responses that question what private computing really means.

Jonathan Lambert has this to say:

“Utility computing is an old model, and on demand resources and APIs are the core of what makes a cloud more than just (usually) virtualization.

The key differentiator here is how organizations approach clouds: how do they do their accounting of resources. If organizations are moving their opex spending to utility resources and on-demand compute resources, that’s a significant move that really indicates a willingness to move to this kind of external resource as they mature.

If they’re simply building programatic extensions of their regular business operations, you’re just looking at another move to gain IT efficiency in the in-house datacenter. The only real difference there is the management approach.”

But this tour may be more about the Sun Microsystems acquisition than anything else. Sun invested heavily in cloud computing. The tour is a chance to talk about Oracle’s new ability to provide infrastructure for companies that seek to build private and public cloud infrastructures.

Perhaps after we will not see the shuttering of the Sun open cloud.

In any case, it’s always fun to write about Oracle. So, why not show our favorite cloud computing video: Larry Ellison doing his most awesome tirade about the folly of cloud computing.

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Google Buzz is headed for the enterprise. According to the Google Enterprise blog, Google Buzz will become a part of Google Apps within the next few months.

Google Buzz applies as much to the enterprise as it does to the consumer market. The real-time application creates an extension for communication that adds a threaded context to a conversation, a critical component for an enterprise application.

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But Google Buzz in the enterprise will have some inherent weaknesses.

Tony Bradley of PC World makes the point that most consumer products do not work with Google Apps Premier Edition. To access Picasa, a Google Apps Premier account holder must log out and log back in to a consumer account.

Security concerns drive the reasons why the service has this partition. But an application like Google Buzz relies on information rolling in from different sources. It is that richness that makes Google Buzz a potentially useful consumer tool. But you won’t have that richness with Google Buzz under the current limitations that come with Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google Buzz does have an open architecture, which should make it possible to integrate external data. We’ll see how this affects Google Buzz. It looks like a step in the right direction.

It was revealed that Google Voice and Google Wave will also be part of the Google Enterprise productivity suite. We do not know yet how these applications will integrate – but by adding different layers, it creates the foundation for a social CRM environment.

“The best thing about all of this for me is that Google has recognized and capitalized on the fact that email is the ultimate social network and they are agregating- which is what they do best,” said Sameer Patel, a founding partner with the Sovos Group that consults about integrating social Web applications and collaborative technologies into the enterprise.

Patel said that Google Buzz could become a service that sits on top of GMail, much in the same way that Xobni or Gist integrate with Microsoft Outlook.

The integrated service shows how aggressive Google is getting versus Microsoft and other on-premise giants like IBM. Microsoft responded to the Buzz news this way:

“Mary-Jo Foley posted her views that Microsoft also has been working to integrate social networks from third parties not just into its Web-mail product, but also into its Outlook mail client, via the Outlook Social Connector that the company unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference in 2009. Microsoft is integrating the Social Connector into the Office 2010 product which is due out in the first half of this year. Microsoft’s Social Connector does a lot of what Buzz does, except with more of a business-centric focus. Microsoft’s Social Connector also provides regularly updated “activity feeds” for those in a user’s social connector via a connection with SharePoint 2010.”

Google Apps has it own faults to work out, before Google Buzz can even be considered a viable service for the enterprise. The Google Buzz open architecture may be the difference though, creating real opportunities for customers to pull external data into its real-time environment.

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We are in our third week here at ReadWriteCloud. One of the weekly features we do is a poll about an issue related to cloud computing or virtualization.

Last week we asked if you plan to invest in virtualization. This week we are asking: Is a private cloud just a glorified data center? You’ll see the poll in the right sidebar of the main ReadWriteCloud page.

We had a pretty small sample to work with last week but the results show that virtualization is living up to its promise as one of the most important IT investments being made in the enterprise.

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This week, the question turns to an issue that gets its fair share of debate. For detractors, private cloud computing is not cloud computing at all. It’s virtualization applied to a data center. It does not have the capacity that you get with a public cloud infrastructure.

From Andre Ye:

“And, the cost to expand that variability means additional capital expense for the company. That seems to run counter to some of the inherent benefits of cloud computing.”

Proponents, like Gartner’s Thomas Bittman, say the debate is a foolish one.

“There’s an argument over whether the term “cloud” can be used to describe the changes taking place in internal IT architectures. How silly! Regardless of the term, there is a major trend playing out over the next few years where internal IT providers want to make fundamental changes so that they behave and provide similar benefits (on smaller scale) as cloud computing providers.”

What do you think? Is private cloud computing for real?

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From time to time, we look at how Enterprise 2.0 practices are reaching into companies.

A recent post by Michael Idinopulos demonstrates how the premises for finding Enterprise 2.0 champions is often flawed. Too often the search is for the right personality. Instead, the focus of the search should really be for the people who are “exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization.”

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Idinopulos compares it to how The Godfather’s Don Corleone would approach the issue when choosing the right people for the job: “It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.” In other words, people are chosen for their role in the organization not for who they are as people.

Let’s just say the “Godfather,” process is still not widely used. Often, managers look for the “it” factor. Here are a few of the more common things Idinopulos has heard managers say they are looking for:

• The Young and Hip: “Jimmy’s only 28. He grew up on Facebook!”
• The Tech-Savvy: “Mary’s always got the latest gadget. She’s a natural for this!”
• The Connectors: “Martin knows everybody. He’s the ideal social networker!”
• The Visionaries: “Isabel is so visionary. She’ll totally get what we’re trying to do!”

Idinopulos makes the point that these psychological attributes don’t work for a few reasons:

• The premise that just a few have such talents is repudiated by the fact that it gets adopted by any number of people who don’t fit into any one category
• They re not actionable. How can you scale this across an organization of 5,000 to 10,000 employees?
• The signal does not transmit. Do you know the lonely social media evangelist? The one who finally just gives up and says people “just don’t get it.” The enthusiasm has to transfer to the organization.

It’s evident a methodology is emerging for how to make Enterprise 2.0 a deep institutional focus. Companies like the Dachis Group and Pragmatic Enterprise are pioneering new methods to help clients institute technologies and practices that fit with the social enterprise.

Dion Hinchcliffe and Michael Krigsman of Pragmatic Enterprise take a holistic approach. They look at the political, technical and business issues that come with any social Web initiative. They look for executive champions who want to use social technologies to solve a business problem. Once the problem is identified, a process begins that seeks out the spectrum of opinions about the
project and the use of Enterprise 2.0 practices for the group.

The business world is developing its own methods for how it makes social technologies a part of the business process. At times it may be surprising how the technologies get adopted. Idinopulos points to a marketing manager who turned out to be responsible for attracting thousands to a Socialtext environment that Idinopulos and his group had implemented for the company:

“Because the Marketing Manager’s commitment to social media wasn’t a personal thing, it transferred quickly to other parts of the business. Other Marketing groups got wind of the project, and started posting their own content, creating their own workspaces, starting their own conversations. Then it started to spread beyond Marketing, to Sales and Product groups that had initially participated as consumers of Marketing content. Marketing’s cross-silo reach positioned them to involve different parts of the organization, which then went on to do their own thing. That would not have happened if Marketing’s success had been a function of one person’s passion.”

The example is proof that the enthusiasm comes from how the social technologies help people in their work so the business can prosper. As the Godfather would say:

“It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

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The rise of cloud computing looks like it has lead to the fall of SAP CEO Léo Apotheker, who resigned over the weekend.

It’s not that cloud computing has been absent at SAP. There are a number of efforts underway. But it’s the lack of any unified strategy that is most notable.

“They have been exploring the cloud,” said Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. “It’s how quickly they have responded is the question of contention.”

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SAP’s headquarters are in Germany, and Wang says that may have contributed to the company’s scattered approach to cloud computing. Compared to the United States, Europe is more concerned about privacy issues, which leads to questions about the path a company can take: Private cloud? Public cloud? Hybrid? This may reflect somewhat on SAP’s hesitancy.

John Wookey, a former Oracle executive, is leading SAP’s cloud computing efforts. At the SAP Influencer Summit in Boston last December, Wookey said that SAP would open its Frictionless Commerce platform to developers. In 2014 the company will release its next generation technology, according to Wang. The idea is to leapfrog what we see today in SaaS offerings.

Today, though, customers are speaking out. They were hit last year with higher maintenance fees. They have been pretty vocal about their discontent. For SAP’s part, the company is starting to acknowledge it has made mistakes.

What do customers want? Wang said they want to run their operations in a cost efficient manner and augment what they already have with SAP. That means a unified cloud offering, not a scattered approach like what they see now.

In contrast, a company like IBM looks unified in its approach to cloud computing. You can build, host and partner with IBM. Its offerings are diverse yet unified. You know that IBM has a focus on the cloud. That’s not so clear as with SAP.

Currently it’s the SaaS players in the market that are the most exciting ones to watch. Plex, Workday and NetSuite are targeting the SAP customer base.

They are ready competitors even if incoming co-CEO Bill McDermott doesn’t think so.

Here’s what he had to say in an interview last January with John Foley:

“McDermott contends that now more than ever companies need a full-featured, integrated applications platform for running global business operations — mySAP, for example — not half-baked applications from unproven SaaS upstarts. He points to SAP’s 36 years of experience developing a “stable core” of enterprise software and a service-oriented architecture that makes it easy to add on third-party and custom applications. “It will take another 36 years for software-as-a-service vendors to do the same thing in the cloud,” he says.”

Thirty-six years? That has to be an exaggeration.

We’ll have to see what happens. But without a unified strategy cloud computing, SAP’s future does not look as exciting as the emerging SaaS players in the market.

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SAP’s CEO Léo Apotheker resigned today. SAP will return to a co-CEO structure, replaced by Bill McDermott, head of field organisation, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development.

The particulars are to be announced early tomorrow.

According to the Financial Times, one reason for the resignation is SAP’s delays in the introduction of a new online-based business software for small and medium-sized companies.

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The competition is getting fierce for companies like SAP that have prospered for years with on-premise software deployments for the world’s largest companies.

SaaS providers are starting to make some headway into the market against giants like SAP. Companies like NetSuite are offering services that do not require software or a significant infrastructure.

NetSuite knows it has an opportunity to take clients away from SAP. It has a program for prospective customers that want to switch from SAP to NetSuite.

NetSuite even offers a cloud conversion kit. Here’s how it positions itself against SAP:

If you’re running SAP R/3 4.6 or 4.7, then you know that it’s time to make a difficult decision. Should you upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0–and face a notoriously complicated, expensive and risky process–or pay a costly hike in maintenance to keep your old system running? Fortunately, there’s another option.

In face of this, it doesn’t help either that SAP increased maintenance fees during a worldwide recession.

Dennis Howlett said the resignation is no surprise.

“It won’t take a nano-second for the enterprise pundit tongues to start wagging. I’ll kick it off. Leo’s departure has long been predicted. In private conversations stretching back to last fall, I initially thought he would survive through SAPPHIRE but more recently thought the company would get the Q4 earnings out the way and then make changes. So it seems.

The choice of new leaders should not be surprising but hardly imaginative. In effect, SAP has chosen ‘last men standing’ rather than taking what some of us thought might be a bold move by appointing an outsider.”

What is SAP’s alternative in the market? How is it moving out of its shell into a more modern company that can compete with SaaS providers like NetSuite? We’ll take a look at this issue tomorrow on ReadWriteCloud.

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