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Posts Tagged ‘Enterprise Customers’

The Cloud, Activity Streams and Applications That Cut Across the Home and the Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LotusLive Scores Huge Win at Panasonic over Microsoft Exchange

LotusLive has scored a big win over Microsoft Exchange in perhaps the most significant deal to date for a SaaS provider. The IBM deal with Panasonic means that 300,000 people at the electronics company will drop Exchange for the LotusLive, web-based collaboration service.

We would normally not cover customer wins, but the LotusLive deal with Panasonic is so large it signifies how lucrative this market could be for cloud service providers.

We expect these deals to pop up everywhere as more companies see the benefits of shedding IT assets for cloud-based services. In turn this will change how companies negotiate. With more competition and publicized wins, managers will look beyond the desktop for the best deal possible they can find from a cloud services provider.

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Panasonic will use LotusLive for its calendar; email; web conferencing; messaging; file sharing; project management and contact management as well.

LotusLive will also replace Lotus Notes and other collaboration tools.

The LotusLive tiered pricing structure looks similar to what we see with many SaaS providers. According to eWeek, the cost for LotusLive starts at $3 per user, per month. As the client uses more services, the price per user increases.

The win also shows that Google Apps is not as dominant as it sometimes appears. Google Apps has not scored a win on this scale.

Still, Google Apps has had the most success as a provider of online collaboration service. It recently closed deals with several large enterprise customers, including the city of Los Angeles.

All of these wins show that enterprise customers will move faster to the cloud than many expected. In the coming months, we expect Google and IBM will intensify its campaigns against Microsoft. IBM may also have an advantage against Google as the LotusLive pricing structure makes it easy for customers to make an investment. Google offers its services for free and $50 for a premiere account.

It may seem like Microsoft is the one most vulnerable. But we don’t think so. Its cloud-based platform, Azure, may be the best fit of all for many enterprise customers. Further, its deal with Hewlett-Packard means it now has a powerful package it can sell, combining HP servers with Microsoft software.

This is already proving to be quite a year for cloud computing. And just think, we’re only halfway through the month of January.

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New startup Joincube joins social software fray — targets small businesses

Social software — software that gives companies and individuals ways to interact and share information — has quickly been winning the interest of companies looking to track progress and share knowledge better among their employees. A number of software offerings already cater to large enterprise customers. But Joincube, a new startup from Argentina, is now targeting smaller companies.

Since its October launch, the company has signed 100 such customers mainly in the US and Europe.

It’s easy to be (justifiably) skeptical of yet another player entering an increasingly crowded space. A few days ago, social software company Jive Software announced that it increased revenues by 85% in 2009 (reportedly to $30M) and added marquee customers such as SAP, Qualcomm and Kaiser Permanente. And another player in the space, Socialtext, recently announced a record quarter.

But a newcomer specifically targeting smaller businesses may still be able to carve out a niche for itself. For example, Zoho, a bootstrapped company with most of its employees in India and China, has more than 2 million users of its applications primarily within small businesses. Given the fact that it sometimes competes head-to-head with the likes of Google and Salesforce.com, the company was able to surmount some formidable obstacles.

According to Joincube’s CEO, Mariano Rodriguez, the company’s focus on ease of use and customer service will be key in differentiating it within the small-business market. Mariano says that a typical customer purchases a 50-user subscription package ($39 per month) and is up and running quickly thanks to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. As an example of the type customer the company is targeting, he cited a law firm that was able to quickly integrate the software into their work processes in order to collaborate on creating legal documents for clients without a lot of effort expended on training and IT support.

According to Mariano, the company is currently working on pre-integrating some third party applications — such as VoIP conferencing –as a prelude to releasing a public application programming interface (API). Also, since customer acceptance has progressed faster than the company anticipated, it is exploring new, more aggressive sales strategies in order to take advantage of a window of opportunity it sees in the small enterprise space.

Though the company faces many challenges, not the least of which is the growing interest in the social software market from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, its focused strategy could continue to bear fruit. One thing the company should consider is integrating its offering into one or more of the SaaS ecosystems — Intuit, Netsuite, or Salesforce.com, for example — in order to leverage their captive user bases. Either way, Joincube offers one more option for small companies to take advantage of the benefits of social software: greater productivity and collaboration.

Joincube is based in Buenos Aires. It was founded two years ago by eight engineers who bootstrapped the project with $100k of their own funds.

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Apple rumor roundup: improbable removable battery edition
Now that CES is officially over, it’s apparently time for the vague Apple rumor factory to start churning out sketchy reports about tablets, next-gen iPhones, and “vanishing” domain names. Yeah, it’s getting silly out there, but judging by our tip box you all can’t get enough, so let’s do this thing rapid-fire style.

The rumor: The Korea Times, citing unnamed sources at Korea Telecom, says the carrier is planning for a 4G iPhone featuring an OLED display, a front-facing video camera, a fast new dual-core CPU, and a removable battery. General launch is expected in June, but corporate clients will be doing a “litmus test” in April.
Our take: We will eat our hats if Apple puts a removable battery in the iPhone. Plus, Apple doesn’t do focus group testing, least of all with enterprise customers. This just seems like wishful thinking — we could have made up a more convincing rumor while eating a hat.

The rumor: 10.1 OLED and LCD display panels are no longer available anywhere, because Apple has “pre-ordered them all” to secure volume discounts and keep the tablet’s price down.
Our take: We certainly saw plenty of new 10.1-inch netbooks and slates at CES, including some multitouch LCD units, and no one was complaining. Also, we saw several larger OLED displays at CES, but they were all too expensive and impractical for shipping products, so that’s gotta be one hell of a discount.

The rumor: Apple has mysteriously shut down the FingerWorks website, which means something tablet-related because… well, it must mean something, right?
Our take: Apple bought FingerWorks years ago — we’re surprised this hadn’t happened sooner. We bet the hosting contract just ran out. Alternatively, Steve Jobs is trying to send us a message by yanking an obscure touch-related domain just weeks before a highly-anticipated product launch, because he is the master of extremely minor hints about nothing.

All in all, a pretty lame set of rumors — there’s barely anything here for pundits and the mass media to conflate and distort into something bigger. At least give us a poorly-translated French telecom executive speaking off the cuff, you know? Have some dignity.

Continue reading Apple rumor roundup: improbable removable battery edition

Apple rumor roundup: improbable removable battery edition originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Can Google and Microsoft Be Challenged with Open Source Search?

Open-source search has some major advantage compared to it competitors.

First of all, it’s free. Second, it stands up in comparison to the largest, proprietary search vendors. Third, there is a growing ecosystem around open-source search that makes it far easier to implement than ever before.

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The combination makes open-source search a potent alternative to Google and Microsoft, arguable two of the biggest players in the enterprise search market.

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Lucid Imagination considers itself a bit like Red Hat. The company provides services for Lucene and Apache Solr, open-source search technologies. This week, Lucid Imagination is releasing a certified version of Lucene 2.9. What this means is that Lucid has tested and debugged Lucene to make it palatable for organizations to implement.

As a Lucid executive said today, it’s Lucene with a “shampoo and a blow dry.” It can be integrated quickly into an enterprise search environment. For example, a major online retailer downloaded the certified version and had it running within a few days across its Canadian, German and United Kingdom sites.

Lucene is downloaded several thousand times a day. It is used by more than 4,000 organizations. Many organizations have switched to Lucene to replace proprietary search software products. Beyond the issue of cost, organizations are using Lucene’s flexible and scalable architecture for developing highly sophisticated full-text search applications.

Compared to Lucene, Google Search Appliance prices according to the number of searches performed. This can get pretty costly for larger scale search efforts. The API can be customized to some extent but Google protects its core technology, which requires the customer to do some work arounds. Google is targeting enterprise customers to do search within Sharepoint and in a number of other ways in the Enterprise.

Earlier this month, Google announced Commerce Search, a service designed for for e-tailers to customize search for their products.

Microsoft is banking on Sharepoint to position its search functionality within the enterprise. In particular, with Sharepoint 2010, Microsoft will launch FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Based on the FAST search technology, it combines the FAST’s high-end search capabilities with SharePoint.

But the issue here is again how much customization the customer can actually do with the search technology. Due to its proprietary nature, the customer has little control over how it can be customized. Cusomers are forced to wait to see what features Microsoft develops.

No doubt, Lucene is a super-hot player in the enterprise search market. And who’s to gain? Enterprise customers who want world-class search at cost you just can’t beat. Even better is the fact that one company, Lucid Imagination, is dedicated to supporting Lucene. The company has the chance to score big in the market, especially with certified offerings such as what they are providing for Lucene 2.9.

Open-source search is here to stay. The proprietary players in the market will continue to keep significant market share but open-source search has to be considered in the mix as more companies seek to take control of its search environments.

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Salesforce.com and Adobe: Applications Enriching The Platfom

Salesforce.com and Adobe have entered a partnership that allows developers to create rich Internet and desktop applications in the cloud. The partnership is just one more example of how an ecosystem is developing between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors and application developers.

In recent weeks Salesforce.com has partnered with a host of companies, including Box.net last week and an integration with Cisco earlier this month.

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The partnership with Adobe means that users may create enterprise applications on the Force.com platform.

Developers may create applications that are launched through a browser using Adobe Flash technology or on the desktop using Adobe Air.

This is intriguing. We’ve seen a number of consumer application developed using Adobe Air, including Tweetdeck, the rich Twitter application that has grown immensely in popularity. The partnership with Salesforce.com means that developers may create similar applications through the integration of third-party API’s that may provide another means for enterprise customers to create their own social applications.

We know there are any variety of ways to create applications for the enterprise but the relationship between Adobe and Saleforce.com demonstrates how easy it is becoming to create rich applications for specific, business purposes.

The simplicity is evident in the way developers create applications using Adobe Flash Builder. It’s a as simple as drag and drop to add such features as calendars, grids, charts, buttons and all the other elements to make the user interface compelling for the user.

On the desktop, the data is synced to the Salesforce.com environment via an API, creating an integrated platform for users.

Remember how third-party applications accelerated Facebook’s growth? A similar model is emerging in the SasS world. Applications are making SaaS platfoms rich integrated environments, tailored to the business user. Development is far easier than ever before, making it possible to create tools that can enrich the experience for the user by viewing data in ways that helps them take faster action without the need for an IT administrator or analyst to present it in a way that makes sense.

The release preview for Adobe Flash Builder is available at force.com. The product will be fully available in the first half of 2010.

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Rumor: Google In Talks to Acquire Brightcove for $500-$700 Million

According to a tweet by Mark Glaser from PBS’s MediaShift, Google is in talks with the white-label Internet video provider Brightcove and wants to acquire the company for up to $700 million. Brightcove’s customers include a large variety of large enterprises such as the New York Times, Showtime, Universal Music, AMC, AOL, and the Weather Channel. If this rumors turns out to be true, this acquisition would easily turn Google into the dominant commercial Web video provider.

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While Brightcove started out as a consumer video service, the company’s half-hearted attempts at convincing consumers to host their videos on Brightcove.TV came to an end when Brightcove shut down that site in November 2007. Last November, Brightcove also shut down its free Brightcove Network, which featured content from roughly 40,000 publishing partners.

This June, Brightcove’s CEO Jeremy Allaire told Sillicon Alley Insider that the company was now profitable and that he expected the company to see a 50% revenue growth in 2009.

Is Google Buying Brightcove’s Tech or Its Customers?

While Google could obviously offer the same kind of services Brightcove currently offers on its own YouTube platform, Brightcove has already locked in most of the customers that Google would also be competing for. Also, while YouTube was designed as a consumer platform (even as Google is slowly moving to featuring more commercial content on the site), Brightcove has set up a platform that gives enterprise customers the flexibility and metrics they need. In the end, though, if this rumor is true, Google is most likely more interested in Brightcove’s customer base than in its technology.

We asked both Google and Brightcove for a comment about this rumor and will update the post when/if we hear from them.

Update: as Dan Rayburn points out in the comments below and on his blog, Brightcove’s setup requires its customers to use third-party content-delivery networks like Limelight to stream their videos. If Google really acquires Brightcove, this could turn out to be a problem, as it would keep Google from being able to use YouTube’s (cheap) infrastructure.

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The economy changes the course of chip design at Hot Chips conference

The Hot Chips conference that runs Sunday through Tuesday at Stanford University will capture the evolution of the chip industry. This conference offers the first chance to see how the global economic crisis is affecting the leading edge of the design of semiconductors, which are used in all things electronic and are like the plankton of the digital ecosystem.

One palpable trend is the tough economy’s effect on the conference itself. Last year, over 700 people attended, but so far only about 400 are signed up. The conference is aimed at chip engineers, who are affected by industry cutbacks, overseas oursourcing, and tight travel budgets.

Big iron still dominates, but with attention to low power

While chips often take four years today and aren’t tied to economic ups and downs, the permanent changes in the global economy still have effects in on chip design.

During the dotcom bust, enterprise customers shifted away from “big iron” server chips such as Intel’s Itanium to more power efficient and lower-cost Opteron from Advanced Micro Devices. Intel will have details on its latest version of its Nehalem EX high-end server chips, while AMD will talk about its Magny Cours chips for low-end blade servers. The companies will also talk about the advances in their high-end consumer chips.

Chip makers are still designing “big iron” chips that have the highest performance for the most difficult computing tasks. IBM will unveil Power 7, the next version of its high-performance chips for corporate data centers. Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle, with its own chip programs facing an uncertain future) will describe Rainbow Falls, the code-name for its successor to its Niagara chip, which is a many headed beast that can serve lots of web pages to lots of users at the same time.

All of those chips have all sorts of power-saving features that big iron chips once ignored. Even though this low-power shift started many years ago, it is still propagating its way through the chip industry.

The shift to smaller portable chips continues

One of the biggest new categories beyond big iron is the shift to what we might call “little iron.” Intel will talk about Moorestown, a version of its Atom chip, which is aimed at netbooks (smaller than laptops) and web-browsing gadgets that iIntel calls “mobile Internet devices.”

Intel is also evidently going to talk about the trend toward putting graphics and microprocessors on the same chip. Westmere is Intel’s first 32-nanometer chip that is going into production later this year. It is coupled with a companion graphics chip that could eventually be put onto the same piece of silicon as the microprocessor.

Nvidia will show off the latest in its Ion platform, which provides a graphics boost for high-end netbooks and other small devices.

Parallel computing picks up as a trend

In the past decade, other factors have become just as important as better performance. Those new trends are reflected in the rest of the talks, said Ralph Wittig, one of the organizers of the conference, in an interview.

Parallel computing — or doing lots of things at the same time with multiple processors on a chip — is the subject of multiple talks including the keynote speech by Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of graphics chip maker Nvidia. He will talk about Nvidia’s multi-year crusade to use the parallel computing capabilities of graphics chips to handle chores beyond graphics. The so-called GPU computing (graphics processing unit) trend has taken off in the past couple of years and is starting to see mainstream usage in applications such as fixing flaws in video imagery.

It’s also interesting to see computing spread to other devices. NXP will talk about a chip it designed for liquid-crystal display TVs. NEC and Hitachi will both make presentations about sophisticated processors for car navigation devices, which were once so dumb they would hardly merit papers at a chip design conference.

On Wednesday, Rich Hilleman, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, will talk about the chip needs of game hardware devices and how games continue to push the leading edge of chip design, as games require more realistic imagery and accurate physics.

Startups aren’t shut out of the chip design game yet

As chip design becomes more expensive, it has become the domain of big companies. But it’s encouraging to see startups on the list of talks. SiTime will talk about its designs for high-speed clocks that are used to keep the split-second pace in chips.

Convey Computer will talk about its design for a high-performance server chip. The company’s hybrid chips feature both standard Intel-based computing capabilities as well as customizable features, giving the chip multiple personalities that can be adapted to a variety of uses.

Nallatech will make a presentation about its “field programmable gate array” or configurable chips that can accelerate apps in supercomputers. And Arches Computing will talk about FPGA technology for high-performance computing hardware that can reconfigure itself for different tasks. And Silicon Blue will also describe an effort to create low-power FPGAs to rival market leaders Xilinx and Altera.

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