Social Glass

A recent press release from businesswire.com highlights Mindtouch’s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger). Mindtouch creates a product called Deki Wiki, an open source wiki and community platform. They make money by selling enterprise support subscriptions, a model that is increasing in popularity.

According to the press release, Mindtouch has seen a 100% increase in active installations (200,000 in total) since last year, and is being used by major organizations including FedEx, Microsoft, and EMC (made famous by Chuck Hollis who chronicled EMC’s adoption of Clearspace).

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Aaron Fulkerson is a pretty switched on guy, so I’m expecting Mindtouch to have more and more of an impact on the Enterprise 2.0 market as each quarter passes.

During my career as a Manager with a Management Consulting firm I worked with two guys, Nate Nash and Jay Hariani, based in Washington DC who embraced Enterprise 2.0 like I’ve never seen anybody do before. They spearheaded a corporate initiative to rollout social computing software fighting battle after battle to convince more traditional folks of the value proposition.

These guys work in the emerging markets segment and frequently go to places like Kabul and Amman for work. Last year they put an outline for a proposal in a wiki for one of their clients and asked for help from across the organization to add content. Members of our firm from four different countries contributed with their various areas of expertise. That’s what you call collective intelligence, baby (although I’m not sure we actually won the work).

And despite their travels to dangerous places, they’ve managed to find internet access where ever they go and have put together an excellent blog on Enterprise 2.0, called e2oh.com. They have awesome insight as to how E2.0 can positively influence emerging markets. It’s a must read and a worth edition to your RSS reader.

Jay Nate, for example, writes about his experiences doing business in the middle east, where for one client called the “Ministry”, he says:

I look around the Minsitry and I am confounded as to how there are so many people working there who are clearly unqualified. But none of that matters in these places. It is all about who you know, how long you have known them, and how much they know about you. That is power. That is the business model. This is where social software within the enterprise can and will thrive almost immediately.

Plus you’ve gotta love this picture of Nate with his grenade launcher:

Thought I’d throw a provocative question out there.

Is anybody actually making money on Enterprise 2.0? When I say “anybody”, I mean software vendors and professional services organizations. And when I say “make money”, I mean “making a profit”.

You see it seems to me that profitability might help substantiate the market. It would mean that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a theory or a term upheld by a bunch of jaded ex-consultants turned corporate hippies. And, selfishly speaking, it just might make me feel better.

Comments welcome as always.

I must say I’ve gotta love Jive’s new approach to marketing. I took a picture of something I received from them the other day in the mail - a condom wrapper. It’s hard to read (took the photo with my iPhone), but across the top it says:

“Protect Against: Sharepointitis, email clogging & blogules.”

Then below “Clearspace”, it reads:

“collaborate from top to bottom”

Jive provides a link to jivesoftware.com/condom where you can view these condom wrappers with better resolution. I like the approach Sam!

I recently had a discussion with Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software, about his take on social computing in 2008.  I’ve written about Jive several times and have been impressed with Clearspace - Jive’s Enterprise 2.0, social productivity application.  Below is a summary some of the things Sam and I discussed. 

Jive - Company Background

Jive Software was founded 7 years ago and, until recently, was entirely self funded.  In 2007 Jive Software received $15 million in funding from Sequoia Capital (although they’ve been profitable from the beginning) - the same firm that financed the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Youtube and Meebo.  Sam’s take on Sequoia was that they weren’t just bankers, they actually add business value. 

At the beginning of last year, Jive had 35 employees.  Today they have over 100 and anticipate continued growth in 2008.  Sam mentioned that going public isn’t a business goal, but that if they do go public it’ll simply be a “means to an end”.

Jive has over 2,000 business customers, 250 of which have purchased Clearspace. 

The Enterprise 2.0 Market

I asked Sam what his reaction was to Jevon’s post about the Enterprise 2.0 Market, where Jevon asked “Is there such thing as an Enterprise 2.0 market? If so, can you sell in to it? If not: are there startups trying to sell to customers who don’t exist?”  Sam’s take on this is that there absolutely is an Enterprise 2.0 market, how else could they be making money with Clearspace if there was no market?  Sam went on to compare the E2.0 market to the CRM market of 10 years ago, where people argued that customer relationship management couldn’t be generalized.   But try making this argument now with companies like Siebel (Oracle) and they’d probably laugh at you.

Sam also pointed out that Google is a huge player when it comes to Enterprise 2.0.  They’ve recently announced that Google Sites - an evolution of JotSpot - will be released in 2008.  “Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration”.  Google’s focus on social computing within the enterprise is validating the Enterprise 2.0 market.  Sam thinks that Enterprise 2.0 vendors like Jive Software will benefit greatly from this as they can ride the tidalwave created by Google.  Companies will become more aware of what Enterprise 2.0 is in 2008.

2008

Jive is a firm believer in social productivity.  When it comes down to it, social computing is about getting work done efficiently.  In 2007 Jive’s focus was on building a compelling collaboration suite.  In 2008, they’ll focus more on enhancing social productivity in the following ways:

• Relevant Visibility - who’s working on what and what matters most
• Influence - encouraging productive behavior and resource alignment by allocating resources where they’re needed most
• Management - knowing the truth of what’s happening and focusing the attention of others

Jive also is a firm believer in harnessing the knowledge of the customer community with products like Clearspace X and will be focusing a lot of attention here in 2008.   

Sam also believes the competition between Jive and traditional IT vendors like IBM and Oracle, “2.0″ pure play vendors and CMS providers will intensify in 2008 as the market gains more traction. 

Clearspace is also often compared to Sharepoint, so I asked Sam what his take on competition with Microsoft was.  Sam argued that Sharepoint, although it has a lot of great features, is more file centric.  Clearspace, on the other hand, is focused around collaboration.  In this way the business driver is different between why one company would buy one product over the other.

In Conclusion

Jive Software will continue its incredible growth in 2008 and will be more widely recognized as a leader in the Enterprise 2.0 space.  I think this growth might also attract larger enterprise players to consider acquiring Jive to gain a stronger foothold in the market.  Keep an eye on Jive in 2008.