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The IT Report
Starship Enterprise 2.0
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
By David Burns
You may have noticed that Facebook not so quietly celebrated attaining 500 million users in July 2010, not a bad database at all. What is staggering is that this number has been attained in a frighteningly short period of time (it only launched in its current incarnation in 2006), and has and is slowly strangling the life out of its biggest competitor MySpace.
This unimaginable success and positioning as the global flagship model for social networking is a milestone development in the relatively short history of the Internet and with the extraordinary leap in revenue year-on-year, of course big business has sat up and taken notice. Profound influence is ensuing. Ditto the ubiquity of Wikipedia.
Essentially Facebook (and by association – social networking as a whole) makes earlier means of communication and electronic interaction (like email) look increasingly passé. Social networking hasn’t gone unnoticed by big business and is already evolving in a business context into what is most commonly known as Enterprise 2.0, which contains ‘social software’. Where traditional Enterprise software has had its structure imposed prior to use, Enterprise 2.0 actually encourages use prior to providing the structure.
So what sort of change does social software bring to Enterprise 2.0? It allows users to search for other users or content. It enables grouping of similar users or content. It enables people to author blogs or wikis, allows people to ‘tag’ content and people can subscribe to other users or content to receive ongoing, information through RSS feeds. It doesn’t inhibit authorship, is transparent, diverse and open. And it detects and leverages collective wisdom of the community.
All this sounds fantastic in a business context, and already major global corporations have embraced Enterprise 2.0. One notable example is British Telecom. It has introduced many social networking tools featuring a Wikipedia style dataset it has called ‘BTpedia’. There is also a central blogging tool, podcasting tool, software that enables collaboration on projects and business-social networking.
Of course there is currently a frantic scramble by all the biggest fish in the pond to grab a chunk of the Enterprise 2.0 pie. Microsoft has been the leading player with SharePoint 2010 – its offering which added for the first time social networking, contains tools like wiki and blog integration and tagging. Microsoft’s big advantage is that it is already a widely used part of the entrenched and long-established Microsoft ecosystem.
However, there is some serious competition from some other huge companies. IBM has leapt into the fray with Lotus Connections, that also has a cloud-based version and claims to have some advantages over SharePoint such as being built on open standards, and aren’t dependent on the bigger Lotus platform (whereas SharePoint is dependent on the existence of Office).
Cisco has introduced Quad, which is also web-based and is differentiated from SharePoint by integrating unified communication tools like VoIP, video and WebEx Connect presence tools into social networking. Like Lotus it is also built on open architecture.
Google has Buzz, which is built into its Gmail, and which is primarily aimed at consumers rather than enterprise. However if CIOs decide en masse that cloud-based Google apps are best for their organisations then Buzz may take off. It also has the advantage of superior smart phone integration than its competition, but currently its security, privacy and customer service levels are not at a level Enterprise would likely be comfortable with.
Finally there is Salesforce. It has a platform called Chatter and is currently suing Microsoft for patent infringement. It integrates social networking features with a suite of its own and its competitors business, financial and HR apps.
Enterprise 2.0 is set to fundamentally change the way we interact at business in the immediate term future, and it will follow that in just a few years, standard business email will be consigned ‘back to the future’ like the Rubicks Cube, the Walkman and the CD.
• David Burns is BDM for Origin IT |
davidb@originit.co.nz
|
www.originit.co.nz
