Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

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!

I stumbled upon this insightful blog post by SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann about how SAP realizes value from its own SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance).

HANA is powered by in-memory computing – a way to store and process data in the main memory as opposed to disk storage . For a primer on In Memory, see this video of Hasso Plattner embedded in a post by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett and this piece by CIO.com’s Chris Kanaracus.

Citing a use case, Oliver writes:

Here’s the problem many companies face today: global executive pipeline reports are at least a day old, making real-time decisions and tactical adjustments impossible. In-memory computing allows you to process huge amounts of real-time data in the main memory of a server to provide instantaneous results from analyses and transactions. By the time critical information or trends reach decision-makers, it could be too late. The benefits of in-memory computing are phenomenal – imagine being able to access real time operational information within seconds.

That’s a pretty amazing feat – surely to be appreciated by technologists who have lived through various generations of computing evolution as well as business struggling to make timely decisions.

But there’s a missing piece. I’m not belittling the value of in-memory in any way but Oliver’s post made me think hard about what’s needed for the benefits of  In-Memory processing to permeate business process in a scalable way. And my conclusion was this: unless the system is also going to magically make a decision or auto invoke an action (e.g. transact or place a stop order on a check) based on this real time insight , we have a universal bottleneck in that our decision makers who need to band together to use this data are woefully scattered (and worse, unknown) across most organizations today.

Of course, certain decisions are made by individuals and in those cases, there’s direct value from this technology. And if were recreating BI with these nifty advancements for the benefit of the executive brass all over again, that’s fine too. But the next wave of analytics needs to be pushed down into the hands of teams and line individuals to truly drive performance. And for that, we need a strategically designed collaborative fabric that can locate the right people to group together to leverage this real time data, facilitate the decision in an auditable fashion and update systems of record with better, more timely data, accordingly. Well designed collaborative plans will leverage dynamic rich identity profiles and and the appropriate collaboration metaphor (streams, project spaces, etc) to create that perfect compliment to real time data and intelligence access. Together, these two advancements comprehensively accelerate process performance.

Today’s often siloed ERP system-based designs stand in sharp contrast to a more people centric enterprise footprint that is needed to improve discrete non repeatable business output. In-Memory has tremendous promise and I loved the demos at SAP Sapphire. And I expect to see more at SAPTechEd next week. But I hope its’ wide scale adoption doesn’t stutter due to an acute case of technology innovation outpacing practical, scalable, real world applicability.

I remember how we used to admire Cisco’s ability to do a virtual close on its accounting books every day. That was a cool technology feat for its time. But it didn’t do much to help the company preemptively respond to the downward demand forecast thanks to the market crash of the dot com days or the recent recession. Analytics and Business Intelligence capabilities needs to leave the top floors and corner offices and become an active tool for all managers and workers in the enterprise. In-Memory brings that sophistication no doubt but collaboration federates the use of this amazingly accurate snapshot of progress-in-the- moment.

Ever since I started blogging about the work we do around collaboration and strategic use of enterprise social software, I’ve long advocated for purpose built, in context use of social constructs to make a meaningful impact on business performance. One one hand, Enterprise 2.0 – the value proposition and enabling software began its journey as a stand alone solution trying to unseat Microsoft SharePoint. Most vendors have begun to focus on contextual use cases centered on business process or via ERP and CRM process integration, to surgically enhance specific outcomes. Be those CRM via PBWorks, Crowdsourced Innovation via Spigit, Supplier Management Via RollStream, and the like.

Coming at it from the other end, Enterprise Resource Planning Applications, Supply Chain Optimization Apps or Customer Relationship Management Apps – the BIG systems of record at larger enterprises, have seen little business process innovation in the last decade. Most of the innovation has been on the infrastructure and delivery end of the stack or feature updates. On Premise to Cloud based services, Feature Release X to Release Y, In Memory Databases and Applications for faster throughput and access. Significant benefits to IT and to the end user from this, no doubt, but more to do with convenience and evolutionary improvement, as opposed to objective re-thinking on how to best execute a given business activity, today.

Injecting Social at the Source with Fusion

What we haven’t really seen is back to the drawing board innovation on business process design. Over the last decade we’ve mistakenly begun to believe that the best way to execute a given business activity is synonymous with how our ERP systems enforced our way of work. Ever since the wide scale adoption of ERP applications, largely thanks to the Y2K hoax, we’ve been judiciously streamlining process in black and white. Ensuring that every application has a Submit and a Cancel Button. Commit your decision now, or roll back. Choose now and forever hold your peace.

Decisions are not always black and white in the Enterprise context. To me, the ultimate promise of social computing lies in improved process execution outcomes. What I’ve been looking for is an in-context and even onscreen utility inside enterprise process apps that helps you answer: “I’m not sure” OR “What’s the best selection from that dropdown menu” OR “Who knows more about this than I?” OR “Can I first take a vote from a few smarty pants before I commit, please?

Oracles ECM, HCM Fusion and OnTrack applications offer a sneak peak into how this might work in the future. The core of the application centers on 4 questions, as seen in the screenshot above. And in a visually appealing way.

I spent hours away from the pitches and deep in the demo pits working through a ton of applications from Fusion HCM to CRM to SCM and on and on. I’m not going to go into the details here but in a nutshell – your social network is one click away. Whilst I would hardly call this deep collaboration in its’ truest sense, there’s built-in rich profiles inside ERP apps tied to Roles and Identity Management. Enabling me to find expertise and people based on skills and interests, click a button to chat, add people to my contacts or my social network and even initiate a VOIP call.

In general, engagement metaphors are applied with different doses across the Fusion portfolio. The Fusion HCM  and CRM applications have more of what most would consider collaboration but most of the other apps have in context social networking. The purist Enterprise 2.0 or Social CRM thinker would balk such minimal functionality and I think they would be correct. In fact, al lot of it isn’t even new. But the kicker is that it’s in context, at the source of the problem, at the fork in the road. And that’s what makes it valuable. The chances of you needing to talk to someone or get answers quickly makes Unified Communications – type functionality + rich profiles more of a priority than the whole enterprise 2.0 stack (wikis, communities, document access etc). The key word is priority though – there’s lots here that is missing and needs to be dealt with – supplier and partner communities, document collaboration, for starters.

Why No Balloons and Confetti?

What was puzzling to many was that Larry Ellison did not come out thumping his chest when introducing Fusion. Using phrases such as “God Bless You if you do so” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

I suspect it’s a combination of things:

• First, as people like Dennis Howlett suspect, it’s not ready for large scale adoption; just for a controlled GA for now.
• Second, Oracle is facing heat in the market. When the keynote names names – Workday, SuccessFactors, Taleo, you know something’s up. For relevancy sake, it needs to tout innovation at the same pace as the rest of the market.
• Third, and most likely in my mind though not mutually exclusive: Fusion can truly be an enormous undertaking for any enterprise. Oracle is legendary for executing for where the proverbial puck is and surgically moving to where it will be closer to mainstream acceptance. Either by buying its way there and sometimes by innovation. But never at the cost of revenues the next few quarters out. I suspect its pipeline is looking fine for now and there’s no financial reason to fall for the innovators dilemma and confuse the market.

Oracle ECM

On the ECM side, there’s extensive use of SOA that allows pulling in analytical and other data as social objects from business applications to comment and collaborate on. Oracles view of Enterprise 2.0 seems to be closer to traditional ECM + Activity Streams + SOA based access to structured data. Very different from the traditional wiki + social network + micro blogging combo that’s come to be known as a complete Enterprise 2.0 suite.

In his keynote, Larry talked about how different middle ware groups at Oracle had to shed their differences and collaborate on a single middleware offering. I strongly suggest the same happen in on the ECM and Enterprise Social Networking side of the house. It’s going to get really confusing really fast for customers when they see social capabilities peppered across ECM, UC inside ERP apps and standalone products such as OnTrack (more below). Whilst they seem to be serving different purposes, organizations still need a single collaborative backbone for all its interactions. The Spaces product seems to be a great foundational home for these solutions as long as they can be offered in a modular way.

Talking about Spaces, the product has good social networking capabilities inside the ECM suite and good extensibility, out of the box. For instance, integration with Microsoft outlook to take long threaded email conversations and turn it into message boards instantly in nifty, good collaboration on documents inside the CMS system, and social networking hooks to other non Oracle collaboration systems.

On Track:

It’s still in the oven, but OnTrack looks to be pretty slick and was without a doubt my favorite ‘enterprise gadget’ demo at the event. As much as we hate to use the Facebook for the Enterprise metaphor, its just that – a simple to understand connection and conversation facilitation hub, with enterprise context built in. To draw comparisons, it reminds me more of a purpose built GoogleWave (RIP) and StreamWorks from SAP than it does mature activity stream offerings from Socialcast, Socialtext or Newsgator. Designed to be purpose built around ‘conversations’ as the primary social object, it works as a central engagement utility in the enterprise that can be triggered from anywhere – natively or (soon) from other applications. With light collaboration features such as annotation on digital assets, business intelligence integration, support for voice and video, and integration into various Oracle Apps it offers a solid 2010 design for unified communications. I’d love to know if it comes with an API so if anyone from Oracle knows, please chime in.

Closing Thoughts:

All up, the event was a good one. There was too much lots of focus on the Cloud. In a box. But taller than a Human. The depth in the sessions made up for the sometimes rocky keynotes, with folks such as Steve Miranda doing a solid job balancing pitch and customer analogies when giving an overview on Fusion. For my part, the demos by knowledgeable product mangers gave me deep, marketing-free, insight into many products.

Was this breakthrough innovation on the Enterprise 2.0 front? Not by a long shot. But its engagement in context and that’s a huge leap forward in the ERP space. As I’ve said before, the thing we often forget when pontificating about enterprise software innovation is that buyers don’t buy best, they buy ‘good enough’. And so whilst the race is partly about out innovating the competition, it has as much to do with execution. And part of that depends on who has the deepest tentacles inside the customer base, whether directly or via a channel ecosystem.

Whilst Oracle is late to the enterprise social party when compared to stand alone Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM vendors, it pacing very well when compared to other ERP vendors. With that in mind, a lot of the social and collaboration innovation seen here will ultimately get into the hands of it’s large installed base.

In addition to the posts I’ve linked to here, here are other must read articles that I’ve seen thus far:

Thomas Wailgum: Oracle OpenWorld 2010: 10 Buzzwords to Know, Love and Hate

Brandon Bailey – Ellison closes Oracle OpenWorld: ‘More new technology’

Robert Falerta – What’s Larry Ellison Thinking About The Indirect Sales Channel?

Mike Fauscette – Oracle OpenWorld 2010 – The Recap (good screenshots)

Next Up – what this all means for the rest of the Enterprise 2.0 landscape.

The innovation zealot in me felt instant disappointment today upon reading that Google Wave is no longer. The official word from Google:

The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

One one hand, its startling when a behemoth such as Google cannot use its deep tentacles in the developer and user community to shepherd a product to critical mass. That’s a lesson for many others that think they can win just on sheer scale and marketing wallet. It doesn’t matter if you are a Cisco or Microsoft –  today’s end user in the enterprise has more ability to vote with their clicks than they ever did.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch suspects: “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly.” That’s definitely part of it – I personally felt there was way too much happening in Wave to encourage a wholesale leap off of the email cliff.

But there’s a more important issue at play here. My sense is that the primary culprit here is lack of context.  No matter how sexy, the use case for silo’ed, dumb “un-smart” collaboration still generally goes like this:

• Think up/get notified of a process problem or event
• Remember that a bunch of tools and metaphors (email, phone, the conf room or water cooler, software) exists that can help decision facilitation and brainstorming
• Group/find the right people to collaborate
• Pick a collaboration metaphor that works for everyone
• Solve the problem
• Go back to the system of record or powers that be (a boss, a customer, a supplier etc), to deliver the outcomes.

That’s a lot of steps and frankly a lot to expect from the average business user. If you want to hear more voices on this, the comments on Lifehacker are especially enlightening. And there’s parallels to be drawn from the consumer world as well: Think about the scores of of tools and nifty web apps introduced by Robert Scoble. We rush to try them, fall in love instantly, and then proceed to forget about them, pronto. Why? Because most of them require stepping out of our daily routines or are predicated on pre built, evergreen network effects to see value.

This is a conversation I’ve had with more vendors and customers than I care to remember but its working and many of them are understanding the value of associating collaboration with performance drivers (more in a subsequent post). Organizations still need to understand how to design work processes that blend optimal process and collaboration but its a hell of a lot easier when the software choose to plays nice.

On the other hand, far too many product teams continue to pile on whiz-bang collaboration features when end users are still struggling to understand the basic applicability of these new tools to meeting their performance requirements in a better/faster/simpler way. Organizations on the other hand often have a huge gap between declaring big picture strategic collaborative intent and tool selection. It’s in that gap where the “why” and “how” gets figured out and where the magic truly happens.  Putting the onus on the user to decipher when to use enterprise 2.0 or collaboration will almost never lead to business results.

You have to give Google credit for trying and failing fast though. I had high hopes. The good news is that Google promises to inject some of Waves core technology into its other products. That hopefully will provide the necessary context that will celebrate some of the most amazing innovation that the core Wave team developed.

I almost missed 2 very important social events when I was in Bombay earlier this year. One of these with my childhood pals that I don’t get to meet unless I’m visiting. Boy would that have sucked.

Why? Because I don’t carry a Blackberry. And by extension, don’t use BBM – RIMs Instant Messaging Service for its Blackberry Phones. (great primer here on BBM, btw)

What is BBM?

For those of you (like me) who live on the iPhone and are not BBM users, its Blackberry’s IM client that lets you engage with other BBM users on Blackberry devices. You can friend one another, create groups and share pictures and videos. There’s millions out there that don’t exchange Skype and Gtalk handles. They exchange their BBM handle.

What gained traction as a way to bypass costly SMS, BBM is now the preferred mode of text based communications amongst GenY-ers, team members and groups of friends. That’s how you arrange drinks at the local pub, partake in American Idol gossip and collaborate with teams at work. Think of it as Twitter with group functionality + a (very) light weight Yammer / SocialCast for business interaction. But all mobile, no character limits,  always on and in real time.

Here’s a short Video

Apple recently filed a patent for messaging called iGroup that enables Apple to command control over specific social networking metaphors. Here’s a short summary from the AppleBlog:

An interesting patent of Apple’s relating to a social networking app surfaced recently. Dubbed iGroups, the app aims to solve the pitfalls of traditional social networks, like Facebook, that require users be a member before being able to participate. Instead, iGroups creates a virtual social network based on proximity.

The thing is while Apple’s focus, for the most part, has been on hardware + data / applications RIM is quietly giving the rest of the world hardware + participation.

Threat: Mobile only folks

Granted that the Blackberry is no iPhone when it comes to overall experience but Apple faces the threat of being beaten at a game it invented: couple hardware with seriously useful software software to create simple, unmatched experiences.

Whilst the webs proliferation in the west started on a PC, there’s tens of millions of people out there outside the western world that skipped the web on a PC for the most part and went straight to a phone. Wireless access in these highly mobile parts of the world meant get a more powerful smart phone as opposed to a PC. These folks are not tethered to iTunes on their laptops, and use SMS as a primary form of text based interaction. Facebook, if at all, is experienced over the mobile phone but the primary interaction is conversations (as opposed to data access and even sharing). Conversations around where to hang out tonight, or debriefing after a sales pitch – all done via BBM and on their mobile device.

This group of people also have little appreciation for the App Store and all that it has to offer. Communicating with people they know takes precedence over consuming data and applications on a mobile device. And so iPhone apps that the rest of us are so very mesmerized by take a back seat. The network wins.

Apple needs to stem this land grab and stem it fast. Communication networks built off of Blackberry to Blackberry interaction are super sticky – as sticky as the networks many of us have created on Facebook. And that’s hard to replicate.

Opportunity: The gaping hole that Facebook leaves

Many digital socializers, especially GenY-ers using the desktop web are either just baffled by Facebooks shifting privacy policies, get disapproving stares at the office when they fire up Facebook or couldn’t turn down mom when she be-friended them.  Also there’s nothing instant about Facebook. Its far too asynchronous, party because the metaphor still very much looks like this: post > wait > receive > wait > react. And its not set up to create quick groups that can converse on a social or business topic and disband.  That’s the missing metaphor that represents a very common interaction amongst a lot of people. Whilst Twitter works well to consume broadcast from magazines and Aston Kutcher, it remains gobbldygook for those newbies looking to converse. BBM in contrast, has this interaction metaphor locked up, for now.

Business Implications

Most of us use one mobile device for both personal and business communication and that’s a Blackberry for many many users. Whilst a plethora of Enterprise microblogging vendors duke it out to become the ‘engagement system of record’ with features on their desktop, web based apps and lighter weight mobile siblings, BBM may well be the most convenient and killer Enterprise 2.0 app for the mobile masses. Ofcourse there’s a lot more to business collaboration than engagement, but for many, this might be just the missing component that compliments their existing process and document collaboration investments.

Enterprises don’t buy what’s best. They buy what’s good enough. BBM is a perfect example of light weight collaboration that’s always on, always with you, designed for mobile, wired into your company contacts folder, and with groups functionality to host private conversations.

Ofcourse, Apple is Apple and its highly likely that when they do come out with an alternative to BBM it will re-define messaging in some way or another. And that might well be the basis for the iGroup patent. That said, we’ve entered a world where The Network is the ultimate resource. And that can well be a powerful powerful antidote to any remarkable design Apple comes up with.

Related Posts:

Lee Provoost: Generation Y and the iPhone-Blackberry dilemma  http://ow.ly/1S9wY

These are my favorite videos from SAP SAPPHIRE 2010.

Mobile: Vishal Sikka on the Sybase acquisition

You got the sense that one of the most important objectives of this Sapphire Event was to instill confidence in the market about SAPs continued prominent role in the business software. That comes, in big part, from clarity in intent. Vishal is dead clear in this video about why SAP purchased Sybase (after being prodded by Vinnie Mirchandani). My favorite, most well articulated video across the board.

Video Credit: Dennis Howlett

Collaboration in Context: SAP StreamWork and ByDesign

Whilst I wish SAP does more in terms of radically re-thinking how discrete business activity needs to be executed by balancing engagement, content access and traditional ERP processes, this application of StreamWork is an excellent start. This video provides a sneak peak into the power of blending structured and unstructured data access and collaboration to improve business outcomes.

Video Credit: SapphireNow

Experience Design: Hasso Plattner demoing SAP apps on the iPad

As I mentioned in my post, modern interfaces are finally coming to the enterprise. Some of the Enterprise 2.0 pure plays have done a great job of bringing engaging, usable interfaces to business – companies such as Socialcast and nGenera for instance. Intuit is an example of a traditional enterprise company that’s also done a brilliant job with Brainstorm, its innovation platform. In this video, Professor Hasso Plattner shows how seemingly bland (ok, who am I kidding – totally uninspiring) enterprise experiences can come alive thanks to in-memory and the iPad.

Video Credit: SapphireNow

The Outside Perspective I: (Mostly Positive)

Video of Paul Greenberg, Vinnie Mirchandani, Oliver Marks and Me. From Dennis Howletts blog post, about this video:

The magic dust Bill sprinkled must have doped Vinnie. I have never seen him write such an effusive and enthusiastic post about SAP. And we go back way longer than the number of hairs left on my head. If Paul Greenberg had been any more bubbly, you’d think he was a shill for the company. He most certainly is NOT. SAPPHIRE virgin Sameer saw lost opportunities around the collaboration space and I sense he is right in talking about SAP using collaboration as an add-on rather than appearing to think about it in terms of rethinking business processes.

Video Credit: Dennis Howlett

                                                                                                                                The Outside Perspective II: (Tough Love)

Finally, Vinnie Mirchandani and Paul Greenberg, two well respected analysts, thinkers and authors, tell it like it is.

Video Credit: Dennis Howlett

Related Posts:

• Ray Wang: Event Report: Sapphire 2010 Brings Customers Back To A Sense Of Normalcy http://ow.ly/1OUHU
• Thomas Wailgum: 5 Must-Read Blog Posts from SAP Sapphire 2010 – CIO.com http://ow.ly/1OUFE
• Michael Fauscette: SAP SapphireNow 2010 http://ow.ly/1OUKf
• Sig Rinde: SAPPHIRE Now – huge surprise, good stuff and a couple of important issues http://ow.ly/1OUGa
• Oliver Marks: SAP Gets Mojo Back: Enterprise 3.0 | ZDNet http://ow.ly/1OVe1
• Thomas Wailgum: SAP Sapphire 2010: Observations, News and Tweets – CIO.com http://ow.ly/1OUGY

SuccessFactors, a very well known provider of business software, particularly with an HR and Workplace performance focus has acquired enterprise social business software provider, CubeTree.

The terms of the deal from the press release are as follows:

SAN MATEO, Calif. and REDWOOD CITY, Calif.  – May 3, 2010 – Today SuccessFactors, Inc. (Nasdaq: SFSF) announced a definitive agreement to acquire CubeTree, Inc. a visionary leader in the rapidly growing social business software category. SuccessFactors is acquiring the company for $20 million in SuccessFactors stock at closing plus a contingent cash payment three years from closing to bring the value of the total consideration to $50 million.  There is no contingent cash payment if the value of the stock issued exceeds $50 million at any point during the three year period and to the extent the holders have disposed or hedged their holdings.  The guarantee is considered contingent consideration and will be recorded at fair value and marked-to-market each quarter through the statement of operations.

 

Couple of thoughts:

• $50 million doesn’t seem like a whole lot when compared to your average enterprise software deal but there’s more to it. Whilst CubeTree counts SAP, Cisco, LG, and Adobe as customers, I’ve confirmed that at least 2 of these companies do not use CubeTree across all employees. So the pricing seems warranted.
• On the $50 million thing, another point to consider. Many founders/CEOs of E2.0 companies have been open about that fact that social software is not hard to build (form an IP stand point). So effectively the exit for most will end up being an execution play or a technology transfer. In that context, $50 million on the table looks pretty good.
• Based on my interaction/work with the space as a whole, HR or employee productivity focused offerings are very serious about adding social and collaborative features to process. It’s the most natural fit in the enterprise. SuccessFactors is ensuring that they have a forward looking solution. And the timing is perfect.
• Cash is king of course, but the $30 million payout may well be a good bet for the CubeTree team. And it also goes easy on SuccessFactors’ wallet. Following little or no innovation in the last decade with respect to Enterprise Software, we’re at the beginning of a new cycle of overhaul when it comes to enterprise systems of record. In some cases its due to the need for SaaS, in others, its the need for better engagement. And as we see here, you get both. The likely hood of upside for CubeTree and its investors is better now that its been for a while.
  • For that cross section of customers that use both SuccessFactors and Saleforce.com, they now have an alternative to SalesForce.com’s Chatter, should they choose to look for one. Ben Kepes covers this.
• For the Enterprise 2.0 segment, my sense is that this is actually very good news from a valuation stand point. There are a few players such as Jive Software, Socialcast and Socialtext that have been attracting somewhere between reasonably sized to very large customers for a long time. And the emerging Enterprise 2.0 services ecosystem (disclaimer: My firm is one of those) will only raise awareness for the applicability of these technologies to address business challenges. If CubeTree could secure $50 million after it’s relatively short life, the prospects look good for other prominent players in the space that have a marquee customer base and as important, highly engaged platforms.

About a year ago I sensed that standalone Enterprise 2.0 faced serious commoditization and the lack of process and context was going to be a big problem. I still consider these to be significant impediments to getting to IPO for most vendors. That said, Chatter and now CubeTree serve as excellent reference architectures for other traditional enterprise software companies to see how process injected with engagement can lead to accelerated business performance for end customers. And subsequently look to make a purchase or build their own.

Congrats to both companies.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about CubeTree when its come up in conversations and it’s great to see that they have found a good home.