Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

This morning I was reading some stuff from SAP StreamWork that provided a rundown of integration partners that its chosen to work with: Doodle, MindMeister, CS Odessa, Evernote, Altassian. And others such as Google Apps and Scribd.

I wonder if ~80% of the Fortune 500, SAPs customer base, will get these relationships.

I said to Todd Morrison at Tech Target a few weeks ago:

“I’ve always wondered why Streamworks is focused on seemingly lightweight offerings that most of its large enterprise customers don’t generally adopt,” said Sameer Patel, an analyst with The Sovos Group who follows social media applications.

Still, Patel credited SAP for its decision to incorporate Atlassian, which he said has “deep tentacles” inside many large software organizations. Activities like brainstorming and collaboration are important parts of decision making, he added.

Net net: Trying to be relevant / hip / cool, SAP is looking to get its mojo back in its old age.

Contrast this with what start up/ pure play social software vendors such as Jive, SocialText, NewsGator, Moxie, etc., often see:

As they get beyond the initial deployments that are general purpose in nature, their customers (and ours) are increasingly asking for a plethora of integration points for all sorts of data sources sitting inside mammoth ECM, ERP, BI and CRM systems. All in an effort to make social interaction, be that inside communities or on an activity stream, contextually richer.

Some social and collaboration vendors such as Socialcast, Qontext, SimplyBox (and others quietly in beta) are even creating engagement modules that sit right inside the system of record where critical processes are completed. Others provide the conversational glue between traditional call centers that deals with the external world and static employee intranets.

Net Net: The smaller guys are working on growing up.

I’m not criticizing either move. To be fair, SAP announced support for OpenSocial which re-affirms its commitment to nurturing the developer ecosystem and by all respected accounts, the (quite social) Sales On Demand product is the bees knees. In turn, the younger/startup software vendors have some work do to to blend process and social together – a fact that most will readily admit as they work very hard to make happen.

But I couldn’t help feel like we have one camp that’s having a mid life crisis and another that’s trying to muscle in on an adult conversation.

I found it entertaining. Life in the enterprise world would be a tad bit boring without either of these cases. That’s all there is to it : – )

Vinnie Mirchandani, in his patented ‘what’s really happening’ style of analysis pens an insightful post on his impressions of Lotusphere 2011.

“Doug did not use the word “Grand Challenges”  but he might as well have because in IBM’s vision a “social business” rethinks traditional CRM, HRM, PLM, SCM – almost every area of business where in Doug’s view you can “optimize workforce efficiency”. Indeed, IBM in another session identified it as its “$100B social business marketplace” opportunity. It calls it the “fifth shift in business technology”  – from the Mainframe to Departmental computing to the PC to the Internet and now to Social Business.

If the vision was Grand, the event seemed too tactical for it. In the Monday keynote, the audience increasingly grew restless with the concepts, and wanted to see product demos. During a customer panel, someone from the audience tweeted.

“Wish the panelists were being asked how IBM/Lotus software was helping them, rather than vague #socbiz questions”

Elsewhere on the left coast, I stopped by IBMs 100 year celebratory event last night in San Francisco for an hour. I had a chance to spend time with Craig Stevenson – Global Portfolio Leader for Consumer Experience. In plain English, that means Craig runs the retail portfolio of products and services at IBM. We spent a good 20 minutes talking about his impressions of the retail business in general and how technology investment has been back loaded on supply chain and operational efficiency side. Specifically we exchanged views on a number of things: a) less emphasis to date on the consumer experience in the store and the tie in of that valuable data into traditional customer experience management, b) fluid point of sales (not at the counter but on the customers phone when they are in the store), and c) the power of real-time customer intelligence. Net net, the front office has really been ignored and there’s lots of untapped value there to tie in people interaction into stogy data crunching of yore, to come up with better customer experience optimization.

Contrast this with Vinnie’s points as well as the comments made by my dear friend Paul Greenberg who was at Lotusphere:

“But even if Lotus had been vibrant, the move to social CRM, HRM, SCM, PLM etc. will need substantially more extensions, new types of services and partnerships. Paul Greenberg, who knows a thing or two about SCRM, told me at lunch and later tweeted

“They are still weak in #scrm. Haven’t figured that out & though its right in front of them w/their entry points.”

Ditto for social HRM, PLM, SCM.

To be fair, in this post by Dennis Howlett, Paul Greenberg was impressed by a particular case study on “how the government of Trinidad spends about $10 per head with IBM to deliver government outreach services to all its citizens. He thinks this was the best social use case he had heard.”

I don’t mean to take away from the tons of value for existing information management customers of IBM. And to some, the layering in of Social Business as the new hipper incarnation of information management will be a welcome injection of energy and hope. The banter on Twitter and overall excitement from employees confirms this. Something that’s invaluable as the organization gets behind what they consider to be a $100B market.

But based on what were seeing in our work and other executive I engage with, the opportunity lost in my opinion was that those very folks at IBM who are dealing with gnarly business problems with customers in retail, in health care or financial services should have been framing the value proposition for IBMs social business focus. These folks don’t have the luxury of using a glossy to market a new way of work – they need to provide proof points along the way before they earn the currency to even suggest large scale transformation to the end customer that buys IBM products and services.

I realize that the event is called “Lotusphere” for a reason. Its about Lotus products. But lets get one thing straight: Looking at social business, the theme of this event, as a fix to knowledge management, collaboration, portals, document management alone will be a colossal undersell of the overall promise of enterprise social computing. The problems that need fixing lie at the points of revenue (sales), operational efficiency (margins), innovation (the offer) and of course, risk management (predictability). And that’s the framework needed to realize business potential from the promise of social business.

Vinnie ends with a strong assessment, not requiring me to come up with a punchy closer to this post:

“And therein lie IBM’s Grand Challenges. Talk to customers about impact on their industries and their processes. And don’t just talk “vision” – bring the solutions to facilitate their becoming Social Businesses. “

I’ve stuck to this particular point as opposed to trying to review an event that I did not attend. For more overarching accounts from folks that were on the ground, take a look at what Bill Ives and Alex Williams have to say.

I’ve largely taken the last few weeks off from the consumption and production treadmill to frame what I see as pivotal data points that brought us to where we are and what’s on the horizon for the next 12-18 months. This was largely a rationalization based on what were seeing with customers  as well as what I learn from the practical experience of others I have high regard for. Thought I’d put some thoughts out here on the blog.

A disclaimer: for those of you nice enough to read this blog often, some of the links will look familiar. I’ve resurfaced them to the degree they helped me look back, see where some of the pontification was ahead of its time, and where it may be relevant now.  Here goes…

On Business and Measurement

2011 is when businesses will put serious effort behind the promise of enterprise social computing and get ready to navigate a complex business and technology landscape. The first round of embracing collaboration (via social concepts at least), has been characterized by a) experimentation in some camps,  b) a concerted quest for general productivity improvement others and  c) a sort of take 2 on knowledge management. That’s a fair start. Now lets look forward.

Coming out of a recession and with massive change ahead in terms of globalization and the changing contract with customers that will  impact many an industry, most executives have critical business considerations to deal with before they can even fathom the creation of the social workplace on a little more than a leap of faith. On a more positive front, we’ve finally seen a few quarters of profit and good profit in many camps to match the hollow stock market uptick earlier in 2010. That means some budgets free up. But make no mistake – the queue for programmatic spend is now 2 years long since the 2008 crash. And so only the most surgical programs will move first.

Seems like a lifetime ago but back in the summer of 2009, I wrote that “Enterprise 2.0 is a state that Enterprises achieve by employing an appropriate set of social computing concepts.” The good news is that discrete value propositions are emerging to improve employee, customer and partner performance. Some of the largest organizations in the world such as SAP, HP, Dell, Nike, Kraft, The World Bank, Humana and 100s of others are planning or working on creating a collaborative fabric that’s constantly kept honest by decisive business process tie ins.  We’re moving from touting technology and social religion to addressing business value in discrete areas. And increasingly its not a question of ‘if’ but ‘how’ and’ when’. We’ve seen good cases in the area of customer, prospect and employee engagement. We’re now seeing new cases emerge in our work on partner and supply chain performance as well. A great collection of view points on Oscar Berg’s this years prospects for moving the ball forward.

On the measurement front, the plumbing is being put in place to see how social computing concepts take foot in some of the largest enterprises. The first round of functionality has centered on platform  and program performance. As much as that’s inadequate, that’s about how this starts in most cases. We can measure usage, sentiment, likes, engagement etc. in absolute terms. But we have some work to do to measure business performance. And silod efforts to measure performance of social initiatives based on social media monitoring tool functionality is akin to looking for a problem to solve just because you have the ability to generate a report. Expensive, anti-climactic and risky (just ask many big BI buyers).

If its not ultimately tied into central performance management efforts via the system of record enterprise bus, that makes a lot of what we have today to be analysis for analysis sake.As shiny as these new metrics units are, executives with numbers on their head can only pay so much attention to these in a vacuum. Thankfully, that’s going to start changing dramatically but that’s another show.

Yes, we’ve got ways to go. But it’s disingenuous to say that our old process-laden world excessively shackled by rigid ERP processes and experiences that don’t compute for todays workforce doesn’t require a much needed revisit. In hindsight, the repeatable part of the ‘repeatable process’ mantra, whilst brining efficiency, has been a myth in many business circumstances (more on that later). Collaboration will not fix all process failures but new innovations in engagement design and technology finally offer complimentary unstructured and fluid constructs needed to inject discussion between the “submit and cancel buttons’ on ERP screens. And that’s on the verge of becoming clear and will slowly become real as we proceed through 2011.

With coming maturity, this also means that executives will come armed with their most critical questions about the additive value of enterprise 2.0 /social business constructs to customer, employee and partner performance. That’s a given precursor to staking financial and political capital behind initiatives that can have serious business impact but can also uproot decade old practices if they miss the mark. Nothing to fret about – this is how big shifts have always evolved at every innovation inflection point. The hope of course is that its easy to separate wheat from chaff.

On Technology

I’ve built a successful consulting practice over the last decade by staying away from FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). It’s something I abhor, and I don’t plan to start subscribing now. But if there ever was a time where utter confusion and an array of often contradicting technology choices are about to present themselves, its now.

1. 1. Competing Forces: In 2010, we saw the most significant technology push in enterprise social computing with clear indication that the big players have joined the enterprise social party (SAP, Cisco, Oracle, SalesForce Chatter, and IBM). We now have 4 clear camps that bring social and collaborative technology to the market:  Pure Play Enterprise Social Software Vendors, ERP and CRM providers layering in collaboration and community features, Networking and UC providers adding social networking to VOIP and Online Meeting offerings, and finally, specialist Innovation, HR and LMS vendors extending their offerings to include collaboration.
2. 2. Go Deep or Go Wide? Consider Paul Greenberg has a 4 part Watchlist (all links included in his post) just on the CRM and Social CRM market. One particular thing that jumped out at me is a coming bifurcation of the pure play start up social software vendors either going deep into engagement and community on one hand or  on the other, focus on light weight engagement add-ons to existing collaboration and knowledge management suites with API access to other business apps.
3. 3. App Store Wars: Lots of focus on app stores that use the central activity stream as the command and control hub to access notifications and data from a host of applications. Force.com has some competition now but it’s a natural place to consider alternate appstore data touch points.

4. [Update] Microsoft SharePoint is here to stay. We’ll continue to see a relationship of co-existence between ShaprePoint and other platforms. The discourse on this issue has finally become more mature where customers are now left with options of co-habitation as well as rip and replace, appetite permitting. Thanks to JB Holston for bringing this up on Twitter.

1. 5. But Wait: Elsewhere, the CIO is also going to be distracted with tectonic shifts in the vendor landscape. Oracle now sells hardware and application software in a box. Networking giant Cisco sells servers and collaboration software. Salesforce.com now wants every cloud buyer to move from Oracle DB to Database.com. And HP just hired a seasoned Enterprise Software CEO.  Expect a lot of calls to Fortune 500 CEOs as the land grab for the enterprise IT stack starts all over again. And so, all the more reason for enterprise 2.0 and social business application vendors to get laser sharp in their messaging and go to market plans. If they had 30 minutes to make a business case in 2010, they will have 15 minutes to grab the CIOs attention in 2011.

Obviously there’s a lot more but that’s the high level backdrop from my perspective as we get busy with our lives for the rest of the year.

Lets get ready to rumble. Are you ready?

——————-

Ill close with this hilarious cartoon that Steve Wylie sent over a few days ago :–)

At its’ annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com announced a version of Chatter, its collaboration application as a free utility. There’s lots of opining on Twitter and the blogs about how enterprise 2.0 start ups are going to be in serious trouble as Chatter steam rolls into their markets. There’s no question that Chatter is going to have a ridiculously big impact and they have a killer go to market strategy. But before we start writing obituary notes forcollaboration startups, lets really understand the world outside of Salesforce.coms existing customer base, the nascent state of social technology innovation today and the fact that – gasp – CIOs might just have a range of opinions on what’s optimal for their organizations. 

I’ll do a separate wrap up post on Dreamforce but here’s some thoughts on this peculiar particular discussion….

Chatter Sales Model

For starters, Free Chatter is for organizations that have salesforce.com accounts and from a go to market perspective, I’d take a somewhat similar route if I ran the business. The existing Salesforce.com account holders offer a very qualified pool of prospects for Chatter given its native out of the box integration with other salesforce.com and app exchange modules. As important, straight up fremium models to everyone can quickly create a cesspool of unqualified leads that are really expensive to convert to paying customers and require a very different sales model from what salesforce.com is used to. Execute closer to where the puck is – that’s what anyone who is injected with Oracle serum Benioff does.  Simple.

That said, Salesforce has roughly 90,000 customers that include a ton of small businesses and large enterprises. That’s a drop in the bucket in terms of TAM (totally addressable market) leaving lots of room for other vendors that are either not salesforce.com customers today or those that have seeded enterprise social computing and collaborative initiatives in pockets, other than sales, support and marketing.

Empty Social Spaces In Functional Process

The center of gravity of the salesforce relationship is in sales, support and marketing for the most part and their current integration points for Chatter reflects this. Sure, Free Chatter can work for all employees but in terms of meaningful process execution across enterprise functions, Chatter is still very closely tied to the CRM object model (opportunities, leads, customer and the like). What about product, bug, SKU, supplier component and other objects that the rest of the organization cares about? Free Chatter integration not really an option here from what I heard. So there’s plenty of open spaces where collaboration needs to still come to the rescue.

I’ve been calling from process alignment for over a year now and with respect, cautioned against what I’ve called “rudderless social”. And a set of enterprise 2.0 vendors have swiftly moved towards a model where they embed collaboration and social into process context across ERP enabled processes, beyond CRM. Klint Finley and Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb have done a good job following this advancement.

Gaping Technology Leadership Holes

The social software space has spent the last 3 years on the consumerization of IT, and emulating and re-thinking elements of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia metaphors that are relevant to the enterprise context. There’s some value to this but its also a) distracting from the task of process improvement to impact operational and financial metrics, b) a fast path to commoditization, and c) been a catapult to entering price wars.

Chatter offers some very good process context this year with Cloud 2 but for the most part, winning via real IP creation still remains anyone’s game. Identity management is grasping for a overhaul, analytics have yet to embrace social data to facilitate decisions and finding the right people, conversations and process intelligence in real time at the right time is still no where near acceptable. Social done right can remove noise but social done wrong can horribly increase the volume of useless banter for individual usage scenarios. And so there’s plenty of room to define the future of work. In some ways start ups that are not anchored to the sea bed with the challenge of cannibalizing existing lines of revenue and can move more swiftly in these areas.

CIOs are from Mars AND Venus

One one hand, on the buy side, the needs of organizations outside of Hi-Tech silicon valley adopters are very very different and the need of a range of solutions will always have a place. I’ll cover this separately but on the the sell side, the lines are being re-drawn in the social software place as mature software organizations enter the field. And no, its not about the largely religious, sell-side messaging between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Its got to do with how CIOs work social and collaboration into their enterprise stack and re-assess the different forces that brings these capabilities – Collaboration, UC, Content Management, Engagement, and ERP/CRM. Some will want to make the deep change in their collaborative fabric with the likes of Cisco Quad and Moxie Software. Others won’t want to ruffle too many features and will choose to go with simple, easy to procure engagement layering on top of collaborative stacks such as Microsoft SharePoint.  Chatter is closer to the latter but its certainly not the only game in town. The Yammers and Socialcasts make it just as easy to procure, are also in the cloud, and arguably with a Switzerland model – equally impactful to all business processes.

Closing thoughts….

As I leave Dreamforce and settle in at GigaOMs Net:Work conference (live feed here) right now, these and other opportunities start to become clear for the rest of the software market. And based on our work every day with some of the leading organizations in the world that are looking to use collaboration to improve employee, partner and customer performance, I’ll re-iterate what I’ve said before: Chatter is going to be big and in a year it’s made commendable in-roads already, masterfully leveraging its distribution reach. I loved some of the process thinking announced here at Dreamforce and how app exchange partners that I spoke with are leveraging Chatter to enrichen their process applications. And I’ve always thought coming at social computing from a sales, support and marketing angle is extremely palatable to certain types of orgs as its close to revenue and customer satisfaction.

This release re-enforces all these elements. But no, that doesn’t mean it botches all other options and current and future innovation opportunities that the market hasn’t seen and will come to expect in the years to come.

- Sameer | @sameerpatel

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social Business

Image Design Credit: My sister, Zia.

About this time last year, I threw out a prediction that in 2010 Telcos will get into the Enterprise 2.0 business by bundling social software solutions for the SMB space. In December of 2009, I said:

Telcos will start looking at picking up affordable SaaS Enterprise 2.0 suites. Why? As mindshare starts to get split between Email and Microblogging/Activity streams, telcos and CSPs that offer white label business email hosting for the SMB market will see these as a natural extension. In the SMB market, standalone solutions are key to allow for simple, cheap distribution directly as well as via small reseller partners that don’t want service and customization headaches. E2.0 SaaS offerings meet those criteria. In addition they offer ready plug ins into other popular SMB apps such as SalesForce for those that want integration.

That could mean a huge buyer market outside of the traditional enterprise players who seem to prefer build as opposed to buy scenarios (Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO Tibbr, SharePoint 2010, SAP Constellation, etc).

If I’m somewhat correct, expect the likes of British Telecom, Singtel and Comcast etc jump in. If I’m very right and my commoditization assessment from last year holds true, we’ll see more players such as RackSpace and XO communications start to pay attention as well.

Fast forward to November and it looks like I was on target albeit by the skin of my teeth. Cisco Systems, the makers of Cisco Quad, announced a hosted SMB solution for their existing Telco channel to distribute. Says Murali Sitaram, VP at Cisco who oversees the collaboration business:

"We think our telecom partners over time will have the opportunity to deliver full services using our products." Murali Sitaram, the Cisco vice president in charge of Quad, told me in a recent interview. "So [that can include] cloud-based, or private cloud based or hosted services for our customers, using the range of UC and collaboration components we have."

Where I expected that a telco will have made an acquisition by now, this move by Cisco puts the products in the hands of Telcos to resell. Don’t be surprised if this triggers a few large telcos to acquire social software technology and keep the entire spread. Most of what an SMB requires is basic social software functionality and most likely, that can be attained at a commodity price. Whilst we’ve seen over and over again that larger companies continue to chose the build over buy route (Novell, NetSuite and Epicor for example) when it comes to social software solutions, there is an argument to be made for the IP that’s gone into building scalable and purpose driven experiences by the more mature start ups (relatively speaking).

Looking at 2011….

It’s only November but since Starbucks in the US has already started selling coffee in red and green paper cups (gulp), I’ll take the liberty of penning a 2011 prediction that I’ve already stated to many industry insiders:

Expect Intuit/its’ competitors to make a SaaS-based social software acquisition (such as Yammer, Basecamp or Socialcast) or enter the business organically. Intuit’s core competency in my view is less about its’ ability to sell hosted business process services but it’s close relationship with a gynormous SMB base, thanks in part to its amazing community building efforts. They’re way ahead of the curve that I laid out here over the summer. And tacking on collaboration for an additional $1-$3 a month looks like a slam dunk way to own employee engagement  – a capability that’s an extremely fragmented or even down right neglected system-of-record in the SMB software stack.

Based on what were seeing in the market in our work with large-co buyers that are looking to execute social software enabled business programs, I see a few more industry shifts coming to market that buyers and sellers need to get ready for. But this was worth an open discussion right about now.

Enterprise social software is in for a wild ride in 2011 as large companies enter the market and smaller ones alter their focus to solving known business and process inefficiencies. As a result of this, expect the sell-side to get very very noisy with their marketing.

As someone who cut his teeth in the traditional strategy consulting business, SWAGs (‘strategic wild ass guess’) were common back then. Thankfully (hopefully?) we all get better with age by adding experience and logic to what we expect to see coming down the pike : – )

For research on market moves as you make/validate critical business directional decisions and technology choices, get in touch.

Effective today, the Sovos Group is happy to announce the creation of the Constellation Research Group. Sovos is one of the founding members of this new entity. Constellation brings together leading consultants and research analysts in the Enterprise space (bios below) that cover critical areas of business strategy and technology research. This new collaborative model now allows us to wrap a comprehensive set of expertise around critical challenges and opportunities faced by end users as well as buyers and sellers of technology enabled solutions.

Why We Think This is a Win for Customers

To truly accelerate performance for 21st century enterprises, the answer lies far beyond specific technology-enabled innovation categories. Silo-ed approaches to evaluating the benefit of emerging technology areas will not bring optimal benefit with respect to how organizations engage and transact with customers, employees, distribution partners and suppliers.

Those organizations that break away from the pack will have successfully used the right blend of not just social and collaborative constructs but also other critical technology pockets such as in-memory computing, cloud based computing, traditional and new ERP driven structured process and context, mobile and tablet experiences and of course, social media. Similarly, from a sector perspective, public sector initiatives around collaboration and enterprise social software offer a lot of lessons learned for private institutions, and vice versa.

Constellation Research members counts some of the most accomplished names in each of these business and technology segments areas as well as public and private sector expertise. And our joint research agendas will aim to help organizations understand how to bring all of this innovation together to effectively meet an organizations operational and financial metrics.

Is Sovos Changing?

So what changes at Sovos? Nothing and Everything. We will continue to work exactly as we have as Sovos with some of the largest organizations in the world that we are privileged to help. But now along with our Constellation Research colleagues, we get to also bring the best research around adjacent technologies and concepts such as ERP, Mobile Computing, Infrastructure planning and sourcing to get the best out of your enterprise collaboration and social initiatives. We will contribute research around topics were best at and draw on the best thinking and provide joint thought leadership.

About Constellation

Our research agenda includes a number of emerging trends and technologies: enterprise applications, legacy system optimization, cloud computing, mobile computing, social networking, business analytics, game theory, and unified communications.

Constellation first and foremost a research firm. We work to a research agenda and work with our clients to shape that agenda. We provided both open and syndicated products and we build long term retained relationships with both our buy side and sell side clients. Our primary product is our IP and knowledge which we share deliver in many mediums such as reports, webinars, and project consulting. A FAQ can be found here.

Introducing The Constellation Founding Team

We have assembled a really top-notch group of analysts.

• Phil Fersht (@pfersht) is a well-known industry analyst covering business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT services worldwide. He is the founder of the acclaimed global sourcing blog “Horses for Sources.” Before that he worked for 15 years at AMR Research (now Gartner Group), Deloitte Consulting, Everest Group, and IDC.
• Maribel Lopez (@maribellopez) brings deep industry knowledge in covering the communications industry. With over two decades of marketing as well as industry analyst experience, she has covered the massive shifts in the communication market. Maribel has worked in marketing at Motorola and Shiva corp and as an analyst for IDC. She also put in over 10 years at Forrester Research, most recently as Vice President of the tech industry strategies group, covering network and service strategies, enterprise communications, and consumer markets for voice, video, and data.
• Oliver Marks (@olivermarks) is a partner at the Sovos Group. Oliver provides consulting to end-user organizations on the effective planning of collaboration strategy, tactics, technology decisions, change management and roll out. Oliver previously managed the Sony WorldWide collaboration extranet, and has worked with the American Management Association, Sun, Docent/SumTotal Systems, Harvard Business School and McKinsey on major initiatives around knowledge transfer and change management.
• Vinnie Mirchandani (@dealarchitect) is a thought-leader on trends in software, outsourcing, and offshoring. He has personally assisted clients in negotiate technology contracts valued in excess of $5 billion and has advised companies on IT risk management, globalization and sourcing issues. Vinnie is the founder of Deal Architect and is a former Gartner analyst and an outsourcing executive with PricewaterhouseCoopers.
• Paul Papadimitriou (@papadimitirou) is a big thinker on online media, its impact on how brands and individuals communicate, and the redefinition of social norms through new technologies. With more than a decade of experience as a lobbyist and business consultant, he delivers intelligence to companies seeking to understand the shift in customer engagement. Paul also advises startups, writes about Japan mobile & web trends, and is a sought-after speaker at conferences around the world.
• Sameer Patel (@sameerpatel) is a partner athe the Sovos group. Sameer is a recognized expert in accelerating business performance via the use of collaboration and enterprise social software. He has more than a decade of experience managing initiatives for large organizations to help drive sales and marketing intelligence, partner network optimization, innovation, customer acquisition, and employee productivity via communication and collaboration technologies. Sameer’s clients have included Ingres, Sun Microsystems, Computer Associates, KPMG, McKesson HBOC, WR Wrigley Co., The Sabre Group, Grupo Televisa (Mx), and Cardinal Health.
• Frank Scavo (@fscavo) is the co-founder of Strativa, a management consulting firm providing business and IT advice to end-user organizations. He has over 20 years of experience in IT strategy, IT management metrics, enterprise applications, and business process improvement, serving end-users in a broad range of industries, including manufacturing, life sciences, consumer products, high-tech, distribution, retail distribution, and information services. He is especially skilled at aligning business and IT strategy, developing the business case for new systems, and facilitating the selection of enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM, and supply chain management. He is also an expert in benchmarking IT spending and staffing levels for end-user IT organizations. Frank is a Certified Fellow in Production and Inventory Management (CFPIM) by APICS, the Association for Operations Management. He is also the President of Computer Economics, an IT research and metrics firm, founded in 1979.
• Alan Silberberg (@ideagov) is a leading analyst in Gov 2.0. He speaks on transformational change, crisis and brand communications, and government 2.0 and the crossover into business and technology. Alan has government and private sector experience, having served in the U.S. White House, at Paramount Pictures and numerous technology companies as an advisor, founder or investor. His clients have included the Vatican Global Licensing group, currently elected officials, and former elected officials as well as numerous technology startups. He is focused on the business side of Government 2.0 and how the technology platforms create commercial ventures and new markets. He is the founder of Gov20LA which is the first west coast un-conference for Gov 2.0 tech.
• R “Ray” Wang, the driving force behind Constellation. A former Altimeter, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, he has a long history with enterprise applications as well as other leading-edge technologies. He headed up the analyst relations program for PeopleSoft, and at Oracle, he served senior product management roles for both the ERP and CRM product lines. He was voted Analyst of the Year for both 2008 and 2009 by the prestigious Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR)

Constellation Service Offerings

We work with our clients to tailor programs of access through open research, syndicated research, and one-on-one interactive engagement. Advisory services include:

Visit the Constellation Research Group website for more information, or simply contact me if you are interested in our services. Would love to hear your comments on the blog or send me an email to sameer.a.patel@gmail.com. And I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara if you want to meet in person.

Thanks to every one who reached out privately and publicly with well wishes. It means a lot!