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.

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:

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.

“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!

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.

I’d like to direct your attention to a post by Jevon MacDonald called Enterprise 2.0: Where the f$#@ is my market? where he asks:

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?

and answers by stating:

There is no Enterprise 2.0 market. Enterprise 2.0 budgets do not exist, except where some early adoptors create them, and there is no Enterprise 2.0 sales cycle. There are very few incentive available to experts right now and the discontinuity that has arisen in the concept is a symptom of that.

Jevon goes on to argue that an Enterprise 2.0 Software Market is validated only when there is a problem that software can solve on its own. Otherwise “The people who are making the most money off this term right now are consultants who are helping their clients navigate some of the fluff from the substance”.

I agree with this. As a consultant I’ve always considered Enterprise 2.0 to be more about shifting corporate culture than introducing new technology (although I write a lot about technology in this blog). I remember a quote from Paula Thornton where she wrote “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

When implementing Enterprise 2.0 we need to include strategies to change old school mindsets and get people to ask “why shouldn’t I share this information” instead of “why should I share this information”, for example.

Jevon does go on to say that Enterprise 2.0 software can be successful when focusing on industry verticals where, after a series of successful implementations there, a broader, more horizontal market might appear. Check out his post here.

Update: http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamthomas/the-enterprise-knowledge-market-v12.

As demonstrated, the Enterprise Knowledge Market efficiently discovers and exposes enterprise information assets in an effort to recognize the knowledge workers who author them. The most valuable information assets are given the most visibility. Visibility leads to recognition, and knowledge workers compete for recognition. Competition fuels participation, and participation increases the number of qualify knowledge assets at the enterprise’s disposal. This raises the likelihood that innovative ideas will be discovered, and innovation helps the enterprise remain competitive.

internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

The founders are quoted as saying “At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius”. And so far the marketplace has been working for them. An idea from an administrative staff member lead to a contract with Hasbro, for example.

What Rite-Solutions is fantastic, but I think it could be extended to include other knowledge items that aren’t explicitly submitted to be “traded”. Why not create a discovery application that measures statistics on content items (similar to Google Analytics) to create a value index for them. Statistics about:

• Page Views
• RSS Subscriber Count
• User Rating
• Incoming Links

could be used to programmatically generate the index. This raises the visibility of content generated by authors may not have thought to submit it to the marketplace for consideration by the broader organization and provides more comprehensive coverage of potential innovative content as a result.

• Search: Google Enterprise Search
• Links: Page Rank
• Authoring: Google Apps for the Enterprise, JotSpot, Blogger, YouTube
• Tags (Social Bookmarking): Google Base
• Extensions: Adsense
• Signals: Google Reader, Feedburner

We musn’t forget Orkut, Google’s Social Networking application (Social Networking is one key element that is missing from SLATES), as this could easily be bundled into the commercial offering as well.

All of these applications are, or can be, converted for commercial use using either the cheaper SaaS model for economies of scale as Google has done with Google Apps, or packaged as a more expensive Appliance. In my experience larger companies feel better when they control their data, so the appliance option for them might be more compelling.

As a consumer, we already get single sign on to most of these applications. For example, when I sign in to GMail I can access Google Reader or Google Base without signing in again, and this cohesiveness is fundamental for user acceptance of any Enterprise 2.0 solution.

I also see a lot of potential for Adsense in the Extensions camp, where instead of promoting ads as one would do in the consumer world, companies will promote presentations, deadlines, important documents and highlight employee contributions using Adsense technology.

Enterprise YouTube could also significantly change the way people blog inside the firewall. Imagine your engineering team recording and uploading their status updates on a biweekly basis, or your boss sending you an email with a video message about his meeting in Shanghai yesterday, and having all of these video blogs stored in a searcheable repository.

As of now all Google really offers in the Enterprise 2.0 space is Enterprise Search (and I think Search is the first and most important element), and Docs and Spreadsheets (online, collaborative versions of Excel and Word). I’d bet money that Google will come to the market with a more compelling offering in the near term.

Why is Jive worth a look? Clearspace is an application that provides a cohesive set of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, tagging, social profiles and document management. By “cohesive” I mean to point out that it’s not a loosely coupled set of disparate applications. And I emphasize document management as many corporate citizens I’ve spoken to about Enterprise 2.0 note this to be a capability that is lacking in most solutions. Document management is crucial to maturing content and innovation.

Clearspace also has an impressive “reputation generation” system (which is very customizable) and I can see a lot of relevance here when trying to create incentives for contribution. Imagine attributing a dollar value to a user’s reputation when bonuses are allocated at year end.

But perhaps the greatest feature Clearspace brings to the market is its monolithic security model. Enterprises that have invested in Directory Services (such as Active Directory) can integrate these into Clearspace and properly secure content inside the application using pre-established roles and groups. From my experience security is the number one concern around Enterprise 2.0 so this is a big selling point.

Jive also realizes that Enterprise 2.0 extends beyond the firewall to external parties (i.e. business partners). They provide an intriguing mechanism for pushing content into a SaaS cloud for temporary external collaboration, then pulling the output of said activity back behind the firewall for protection.

One downside is the seat-based licensing model. Enterprise 2.0 prides itself on organic growth and adoption, and this is hindered if companies have to buy more licenses before knowledge workers can use the system.

Jive also takes a philosophical stance on social networking, saying networking for the sake of it doesn’t add much value (i.e. how much value do you get out of LinkedIn if you’re not a recruiter?) and that we should instead focus on social productivity – the collaborative benefits one gains by being connected to people (as I understand it). Personally I think social networking has benefits in its own right, especially when we think of creating networks based on groups of interest of subject matter expertise, and I think this is likely a key component to the discovery process.

Regardless, Jive is definitely worth a look!

The second event was less significant, but there is another large company employs person who’s title is “Catalyst of Magic”? No joke. And this person also reports directly to the “C” level and is active in evangelizing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 internally.

I must say these are encouraging signs that the larger corporations get it.

As Paula Thornton wrote, “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

Hear hear.

In this day and age where competition is global and products and services are cheap due to the increasing economic potency of emerging markets, innovation is the only means through which organizations can remain competitive.  Price is no longer an area where organizations can hope to compete.  They must instead foster an environment that encourages innovation and produces a constant stream of innovative services and solutions.  Many executives believe that they are the innovators for their companies, but in reality the capacity for 1000′s of employees to come up with innovative ideas far outweighs that of 10 or so top-level executives.

Most organizations have failed to tap into one of their richest assets – the tacit knowledge of their workforce. There is often a large distance between formal procedural documentation and how work actually is done. Furthermore, divisions within large companies often fail to collaborate effectively because they don’t know who else within the organization has similar interests or is working on similar initiatives, or they can’t find the information they need and end up re-inventing the wheel.

Enterprise 2.0 – the state of the art in collaborative software modeled after Web 2.0 techniques and patterns – provides an ecosystem that encourages innovation, facilitates the capture of tacit data, and creates a spirit of collaboration due to the participatory and social nature of its technologies. This allows enterprises to become more efficient due to increased sharing and discovery of knowledge, and helps enterprises maintain competitive advantage by fostering innovation from within.

..a mechanism which allows people to trade, normally governed by the theory of supply and demand…

Markets operate in a “…space, actual or metaphorical”, called the marketplace. A simple example of this are farmer’s markets where farmers showcase their crops and livestock on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. Potential consumers locate goods they’re interested in by wandering through the marketplace and purchase what appeals to them. The price of goods fluctuates throughout the day based on supply and demand principles – if a farmer is having a tough time selling his tomatoes he might start offering special discounts (and these special discounts can be heard by everyone – you’d know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been to one of these things) to increase demand.

The Enterprise Knowledge Market
In the same sense Enterprise 2.0 is a virtual marketplace for knowledge, where knowledge workers, through the Discovery process, “wander through” corporate knowledge assets and consume what interests them. Knowledge workers also compete with each other as producers, not on price, but on the usefulness of their information. Usefulness relates to recognition, and recognition is good for a knowledge worker’s career.

The value of a knowledge asset, then, doesn’t have a $ figure associated with it, but is instead related to the demand for said asset, which can be determined by:

• the number of people who subscribe to it
• the number of incoming links to it

Google.com does a great job of placing useful content toward the top of it search results page, and the enterprise version of Google does the same. But the enterprise knowledge marketplace, the Discovery process, needs to be more than just Search.

With the stock market I can receive constant updates on the value of stocks and follow the supply/demand fluctuation in real-time (represented by price variance). Inside the enterprise, if I had services similar to that which Technorati provides, I could better understand the supply/demand for corporate knowledge assets. Technorati ranks the value of blogs based on incoming links, but inside the enterprise this needs to be extended to include subscriber counts (feedburner) and other knowledge assets (not just blogs). I could then, in real-time, understand the value the organization places on content items by reviewing subscriber and incoming link counts, which would fluctuate in much the same way stock prices do. This platform, combined with enterprise search, augments the Discovery process and increases the effectiveness of my Enterprise Knowledge Market.

And it’s having an effective Enterprise Knowledge Market that’s key to driving participation and recognition.  If knowledge worker contributions can be discovered and valued, knowledge workers have a huge, self-motivated, incentive to contribute, and that makes the enterprise better off as a whole.