Entries Tagged 'Enterprise' ↓

It takes a lot of data to make Shrek. The big guy has to run, eat, talk. How much data? We're talking in the order of data centers to process the bits to bring the warm-hearted monster to its animated life.

The making of an animated film is a look into the changing world of networking and its importance in the making of just about anything these days.

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The big question in today's networking world is how to reduce network complexity and reduce all the power it takes to manage data centers.

That's the issue Dreamworks faces. Today it was announced the studio has chosen Hewlett-Packard to revamp the networking infrastructure so it can efficiently produce films such as Shrek.

Dreamworks is in the business of making animated films. The studio has to have the ability to make films efficiently. In many respects, the number of films that Dreamworks produces in a year is dependent on how well it can use its network to do the core processing of the animated characters it is producing.

It's a similar comparison to what we see with the real-time Web. The Internet is at the center of a dynamic supply chain that requires real-time information to be delivered to the right people in the supply chain as events occur.

The challenges are similar in a studio where the network is at the center of the film production process.

The evidence is in the credits of any animated film. The number of specialists required to make an animated film represents the bulk of the people employed to produce it. The network is critical for these people to do their work. It's at the center of the film production process.

The Dreamworks story is a window into the new networking reality. The studios face challenges with producing high-quality films quickly and efficiently. For mot enterprises the challenges are different. They are not processing animated characters. Instead the increasing challenge is the structured and unstructured data that has to be organized, stored and shared.

Networks are at the center of that issue, too. Companies like HP are betting on the premise that the data center network requires a converged infrastructure to manage the complexities of the Web oriented enterprise.

The battle is for the network.

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Xobni, the Outlook plugin that reveals the hidden social network in your inbox, has today launched a business service called Xobni Enterprise. With this, I.T. administrators are being given new tools to deploy and manage the plugin across corporate desktops. In addition, the company is offering customizable extensions for popular enterprise systems including Salesforce CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. It can even tap into a company's own information store saved in an LDAP database like Microsoft's Active Directory or it can pull from other internal websites.

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Deployment and Management Features

With Xobni Enterprise, I.T. admins can manage the deployment and permissions surrounding the plugin's use via a web-based portal that provides access to user's profiles as well as a groups management feature. By placing different subsets of users into groups, I.T. can deploy custom versions of the plugin to different users. For example, everyone company-wide may get a plugin that offers LDAP integration, but only sales professionals would receive the version that connects to Salesforce. Admins can also choose to "switch off" other previously default integrations such as the Facebook and Twitter extensions.

To push the plugin out to end users, Xobni Enterprise offers an MSI file and registry settings that can be modified as necessary.

Extensions for Salesforce, SharePoint, and More

At launch time, Xobni's Solution Provider Program has partnered with a number of Enterprise vendors to provide extensions and integrations for their new system. The current list of partners includes Atlius Consulting, Cogent, Echo Lane and Interdyne BMI, which help Xobni integrate SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce CRM platforms among others.

The new service also comes with an Extensions Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows in-house developers to write their own extensions to integrate other platforms beyond those which are currently available. Xobni suggests this SDK could be used to deliver company news and information from an internal corporate portal, specific business application, or any other web service.

Other Features

Another general enhancement available with this version of the plugin is Xobni's expanded search capabilities that allows users to search calendar appointments, tasks and archived PST files. The search feature includes advanced filters which let users find results by limiting searches to email contents only or the To:, From:, and  or Subject: fields of their email messages. Users can also access their entire contact database from the auto-complete field in Outlook's "Compose" window.

Pricing

The company webpage for Xobni Enterprise does not include any pricing information, only a link to "Request More Info" from the company. This is likely because each Xobni system is being somewhat custom-built in terms of price because there are additional costs to run the pre-defined extensions created by the company. Depending on which extensions a company chooses to deploy and however many users will be using them, the overall cost of the Xobni Enterprise system will vary. However, the company informs us that the system starts at $30 per user per year with volume discounts available.

Xobni has seen over 3 million downloads of their plugin, including both free and paid versions, since their initial debut. This new offering represents the second revenue stream for the company, the first being the launch of Xobni Plus, a premium version of the plugin that sells for $29.95. They also claim to have a presence in 80% of Fortune 500 companies thanks to employee adoption outside of the traditional I.T. infrastructure, a trend known as self-provisioning and one that has steadily increased over the years.

Companies looking to maintain control over what their employees can do on their company computers often end up having no choice but to purchase the enterprise services provided by the startups their employees are already using in order to once again centralize control within I.T. If Xobni's adoption across the enterprise is as strong as they claim, they may soon have several companies looking to implement the Xobni Enterprise Service so they can do just this. Other companies may be tempted to try the product for the first time now that it offers I.T. friendly tools and enterprise level support.

More information about Xobni Enterprise is available here on the company's website.

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In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market.

The open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed.

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GR What?

Governance, risk management and compliance platforms take a broad and complex series of business tasks and whittle them down to a central point of focus for the enterprise.

Basically, they're a technological solution for keeping track of programs of corporate governance, managing known and potential risks for a business, and staying in compliance with regulatory requirements. All these platforms incorporate varying degrees of workflow management, data visualization, content management, and reporting on related performance metrics.

The Leaders

Forrester examined 14 vendors of enterprise GRC platforms, and picked AXENTIS, BWise, MetricStream, OpenPages, and Thomson Reuters as leaders in the space.

It might surprise you that GRC platforms from enterprise software giants like SAP have been beaten out by much smaller vendors. But in an emerging market, it makes perfect sense that agile young companies can dominate big players who have come late to the game.

Close, But No Cigar

Integrated governance, risk management and compliance platforms present a new way to handle these business processes. Forrester itself published a report that predicted GRC would first "hit the big time" just this year. All the leaders in the market thus far have sold a respectable amount of customers on the notion that they decrease risk, boost overall efficiency, and make strategy and decision making easier.

But platforms for governance, risk and compliance still come off as a specialist product for large enterprises in volatile markets, rather than a core business tool. The ever-growing pack of GRC vendors have clearly defined the value they deliver, but not that they're something the enterprise cannot do without during a period of belt tightening.

Image courtesy Forrester Research, Photo credit Gill Wildman

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With some core changes to contacts, Google Apps has dipped a toe in to the enterprise social networking waters. As of today, Apps contacts exhibits shades of Facebook and Twitter by allowing you to find and interact with all the user profiles in your Apps suite.

According to Google, these adjustments where made at the behest of enterprise Apps users. It has also made a user profiles API available to Premier Edition customers, one that allows IT to retrieve and manipulate data about all the people using Apps in a company.

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How the New Contacts Work

Previously, contacts withing Google Apps functioned just like email: only people you'd previously communicated with or added intentionally appeared. But now, a search will provide profiles from your company's entire address book, acting very similar to the way enterprise social networking platforms treat user profiles.

For those who've ponied up for the Premier Edition of Google Apps, a new API will let you call up data pertaining to all the user profiles in your company Apps suite. That's on top of the shared contacts API released in December of 2008.

More Facebook Than Gmail

By letting users search and interact with user profiles regardless of whether they are "contacts" or not, Google Apps has become slightly more like a corporate social network. While it still deigns to use terminology like "address book" instead of a friend and/or subscriber list, it's no longer tied to behaving like email.

Not to say that this is revolutionary for Apps. On the contrary, enterprise users of the suite would naturally demand full access to profiles, since there's no logical reason why you shouldn't have at least theoretical access to the contact information of everyone in your company using the platform.

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Earlier this month, Google attempted to make a shot across Microsoft's bow with an Apps Sync for Outlook. Unfortunately for them, it completely fizzled when Microsoft made clear that the plugin disabled key Outlook functionality.

Google admitted as much at the time. But today, they've announced that the issues have been fixed. Windows Desktop Search now works, and users can control how the archiving operates. For those who continued to use the completely dysfunctional version, Google will save you from yourself by automatically updating to the current release.

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The Problem

The most serious problem with the Google Apps Sync was that it interfered with Windows Desktop Search, making all Outlook data (not just what was synchronized with Gmail) completely inaccessible to indexing and thus making your email a complete quagmire.

The Fix

To fix this, Google says they "worked closely with Microsoft," to make sure both the Desktop Search and the standard Outlook search play nicely with the plugin.

In what looks like an attempt to appease Microsoft more than anything else, they also have taken steps to make crystal clear where data is being stored, and making autoarchiving something users can control. In addition to the fix, Google threw a lifeline to those still stuck in 1996 with support for access to Windows Live Hotmail via the Outlook Connector plugin.

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Plenty of enterprise 2.0 companies have set their sights on replacing SharePoint. But so far, not one has shown the gumption of Box.net, the filesharing and collaboration service which has launched the Box.net vs. SharePoint challenge.

Based on the premise that "sharing should be simple" and implying that SharePoint is anything but, Box.net's campaign is more than a marketing ploy. It's a bold sign of the growing conflict between hungry young startups and Microsoft over who will dominate business collaboration in the years to come.

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The Gauntlet is Thrown

So how does the challenge work? Enterprises will sign up for a free, 14-day trial of the Box.net Business Edition. If they're not happy after giving Box a spin, they'll get three months of SharePoint paid for.

But if they stick around and buy a year's worth of service, they'll get the same three months free on Box.net. Note that in order to get either, users have to perform a predetermined set of tasks during their free trial, so be sure to read the fine print.

Box.net doesn't just feel confident pitting its services against SharePoint. They're doing everything but literally shouting it from the rooftops, having bought a Bay Area billboard alongside Highway 101.

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference, they handed out t-shirts with turds on them declaring Microsoft's software was "SharePoo." Even if you don't sign up for the trial, airing your SharePointBlues on Twitter, Flickr or YouTube might just win you a similar shirt.

More than just Marketing

Billboards and t-shirts might be marketing gimmicks, but the campaign does exemplify a growing schism in enterprise 2.0 over how to deal with the SharePoint-shaped elephant in the room.

Many players have rushed to integrate with the platform in the hopes of bridging the divide between the risk-averse and those intent on seeing enterprise transformed.

Others have taken a more radical approach, drawing a bright line between the old way of working together and the new. To some, the notion of integrating with a system that they see as fundamentally broken is a foolish one, for businesses and vendors alike.

Just which approach will win out in the end, no one can honestly say yet.

Though it's months away still, SharePoint 2010 could be transformative enough to make any previous barbs look silly. But for today at least, the confidence Box.net is showing in its services might just win over some converts.

Photo by mrkalhoon

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Colligo Networks has long built some of the most best-known desktop applications for Microsoft SharePoint. The Colligo Contributor software suite lends offline access and an interface that's definitely easier to handle.

But with the 4.0 release of Contributor scheduled to ship on July 13th, they've expanded the suite's capabilities with a pair of tools that touch the core of SharePoint's capabilities: a new file manager and an uploader for Outlook. Other features incorporated in to 4.0 include an enhanced SDK, one-click attachments, and drag-and-drop control of folders.

While the additions to Colligo Contributor may not exactly be on the bleeding edge of enterprise software, they're something that's likely to be fairly indispensable for the legion of organizations still tied to SharePoint.

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Making the Desktop a SharePoint Repository

The first big addition to Contributor 4.0 is File Manager. The new software is an extension to Windows Explorer that allows users to integrate files within their systems with SharePoint document libraries, essentially making any document on the desktop accessible from the platform at will. In other words, by letting you add offline files to your SharePoint instance, Colligo eliminates the need for traditional network file shares.

Reducing Email Pains

Uploader for Outlook tackles a thorn in the side of any enterprise customer: email attachments. What it does is to take the files you'd normally just attach in Outlook, and move them to SharePoint for you to link to, rather than weigh down your Exchange server and flood your inbox.

Folder Drag-and-Drop

The last feature of note to be incorporated in to 4.0 is the ability to control folders through drag and drop. While this is not new to other desktop SharePoint clients, like Bamboo's Desktop Explorer and Neoxen's Visual Modus, it's still a welcome addition to Colligo Contributor. Easy reorganization of your taxonomy of folders is something that SharePoint sorely lacks out of the box.

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At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked all of the vendors, "SaaS or on-premise?" The assumption, because this conference was all about modern 2.0 stuff, was that everyone would say, "SaaS, of course."

Wrong. At least 50% of the vendors were deploying primarily on premise. Even some of the pure SaaS crowd would admit to an occasional on-premise deployment. Anecdotally, even some of those who say they are pure SaaS will deploy on premise quietly. Why are enterprise customers telling vendors that they want on-premise deployment?

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On-Premise Does Not Mean Old-Fashioned

Some of the vendors selling on-premise solutions are bang-on up to date in the two ways that really matter:

• Low-priced monthly subscription pricing with freemium entry,
• Grassroots adoption, one click at a time, based on usability as the core advantage.

For example, Atlassian sells only on-premise.

Those Old IT Worry-Warts

There are some red herring issues. For example, security. There is no reason that cloud-based systems should be less secure than on-premise ones. But some high-profile lapses by cloud vendors have given enterprise decision-makers sweaty palms. "Having it in our data center just feels more secure, right? No one could hack our data center, could they?" Let people keep their illusions if it makes them happy.

The concern about application integration is a bit more valid. Sure, a cloud vendor could integrate just as easily with in-house apps. But all that data transfer comes with a cost.

It's All About That 6% Utilization

But the figure that really tells the story is 6%. That is the percentage of server utilization in enterprise data centers, according to McKinsey. That is a lot of wasted cycles. It would be much better to use them up with new applications, and to bring in virtualization technology to use them more efficiently.

Why rent more cycles from a SaaS vendor when you are swimming in excess capacity?

Shh, Don't Tell Our Investors

So, why the big fuss? Because customers want on-premise, and the customer is always right.

As long as the vendor can deploy the whole solution stack really simply, there is no deployment cost issue.

The problem is that words like "SaaS" and "cloud" loosen investors' wallets. As one entrepreneur put it to me, "The moment I admit to selling on-premise, I lose the VC." Anecdotally, even Salesforce.com, which is religious about being pure cloud, has deployed on-premise when the customer is big enough. But saying so ruins a good story.

Google is one vendor that seems to be sticking to its pure-cloud approach. It can afford to forego a few mega-enterprise accounts because it makes so much from consumers and small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

Cloud Is Ideal for SMB

Small companies don't have the scale to run their own data centers. And an awful lot of small companies are out there. Department-wide deals in which the decision maker does not want to "go through IT" will still go with the cloud.

But the really big enterprise-wide deployments seem to be going with on-premise.

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On Tuesday, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton won the Open Enterprise Innovation Award at the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The portal that garnered them the accolade, hello.bah.com, has shown impressive adoption within Booz Allen, especially for a firm that's 90 years old. Since being rolled out in August 2008, it's been taken up for daily use by 40% of the 21,000-strong workforce, according to Walton Smith, who's worked as an evangelist for it.

But by now, the flurry of activity around the conference has subsided, and many are left wondering just what about Booz Allen's enterprise 2.0 initiative makes them innovative? What led their social software implementation to be successful, and what patterns and practices can we imitate? After taking a look, here are five characteristics that ReadWriteWeb feels were key to the success of hello.bah.com

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1. Empower Evangelists

The first thing to note about Booz Allen Hamilton's social software effort is that they didn't go out to just buy something and deploy it, end of story. They pinpointed and effectively aided evangelists within their organization to be responsible for making hello.bah.com work.

Now, when many people think of an evangelist, they think of an individual or two that take up the mantle of enterprise 2.0 on an ad-hoc basis. But Booz Allen went about it in a much more directed way by bringing together a cross-functional team to develop and deploy the software.

2. Draw on Past Experience

The hello.bah.com portal was not the first time Booz Allen had made a push to collaborate better. The fact that they drew on past attempts to understand just how they should move forward was a essential factor in the outcome for hello.bah.

What Booz Allen did was make an honest assessment of their past successes and failures with SharePoint, Outlook, and a standalone wiki from Confluence. They clearly understood what didn't work about their older methods of sharing information, but didn't abandon the knowledge they'd captured through older collaborative tools.

3. Know Thyself

If rules were made to be broken, the real trick is having enough self-awareness as an organization to know when to discard the given wisdom.

Case in point? Numerous vendors, consultants and analysts are quick to distance enterprise 2.0 from its consumer web predecessors by discounting all networking that isn't completely business-oriented.

But Booz Allen knew something critical about their firm that made them think differently in this case: with more than half of their distributed team out consulting in client offices and physically distanced from their coworkers, adding a dash of the personal to hello.bah could get everyone comfortable enough to collaborate more smoothly. So despite some objections, they encouraged everyone to tag their profiles with hobbies, in order to develop personal affinities within the team.

4. Create a One-stop Shop

Part of what stalled previous undertakings was that despite having good software like Confluence, their varied systems were segregated. Inadvertently constructing more silos out of multiple enterprise 2.0 platforms creates more problems than you ever had with just email and filesharing.

Now, you might depend on interoperability between your different software packages, but what really worked for Booz Allen was to create a true one-stop shop for information that included individual profiles, communities, forums, blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking.

5. Just Solve Problems for People

The down side to the growing popularity of the enterprise 2.0 concept is that we are now seeing organizations jumping on the bandwagon without any understanding of what increased collaboration will do for their business, often at the behest of overeager vendors.

But after a year of steady adoption, Booz Allen has countless stories of how even somewhat mundane uses of the portal — such as putting whitepaper drafts in to the wiki — lead to serious professional boons for both individuals and the firm as a whole.

What led to these rewards was an unwavering focus on solving real problems for people within the firm, not aiming at the vague goal of boosting collaboration and openness.

Photos by Alex Dunne, leunix, Brian Hillegas, and swanksalot

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There's a new online booking service on the block, and it's called Book'd. While there are several other SaaS outlets for small enterprise to do this sort of thing, two simple characteristics make Book'd standout.

First, it's the only booking service ReadWriteWeb could find that also allows your enterprise to do online invoicing on top of up-front payment.

Book'd is brand new, but to our thinking, it's already got a jump on many of its competitors through plain old good design. Both the administrative interface and the public sites you can build are attractive, intuitive in navigation, and easy to manage.

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Invoicing

Book'd professes to be the online booking and scheduling service to include invoicing along with all its plans. Though a freemium site such as Genbook might look good to cash-strapped small business, it only supports payment up-front through PayPal or other avenues.

Design Matters

There are some larger, more popular services for online booking, such as Appoinment-plus, but it's a good bet that the user experience of Book'd will make a difference.

More established options like Bookfresh may include more advanced abilities such as mobile support, but the Book'd dashboard for managing it all looks far superior to our eyes. When you've got a hundred appointments to handle, ease of interaction with your booking service is a great deal more important than a checklist of secondary features.

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