Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

• Project home pages can be “iGoogle-ized“. Users can personalize their home pages with drag and drop widgets.
• Cloud Participation: businesses can open up content to be shared with external business partners. Jive hosts the “cloud” where this content is uploaded and shared. The business can then draw its content back in once it’s done collaborating. In 2.0 only individual content items (documents) can be shared in this way. In future releases, entire workspaces can be shared in the cloud.
• Enhanced Reporting: Business departments can get metrics on who’s participating and who’s connecting. Good way to measure ROI, and this is key for management adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
• Social Graphs: The informal and formal networks are modeled in the Clearspace application. Clearspace 2.0 automatically derives formal networks through integration to directory services (i.e. Active Directory), and models informal networks by monitoring how users interact with each other.
• Jotlet Acquisition: Jotlet will enhance the project management features in Clearspace in upcoming releases.

Most importantly, Jive continues its focus on people, something that is lost with other “competitors” like Sharepoint. People are by far an organization’s greatest asset, and Jive’s recognition of this fact will see it emerge as the leader in the social productivity space (if it isn’t already).

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.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Being a linguist at heart (I majored in Spanish in university) I thought I might simplify this approach by defining several business requirements for a telecommunications company:

1. Provision broadband internet for residential customers.
2. Provision broadband internet for small business customers.
3. Send customers an invoice monthly.

The first thing to notice is the lexicon has been standardized. When I mean “provision” I say “provision”, not “activate” or “setup”. “Customers” are not “clients” or “accounts”.

Next, sentence structure. All of the nouns in this sentence represent core data entities, the adjectives (attributes of the nouns) represent types that extend the core data entities, and the verbs represent actions that can happen to the object pronoun (data entity) of the sentence. Each of these needs to be supported by the enterprise architecture.

Let’s analyze the first requirement more closely: Provision broadband internet service for residential customers. Verbs are highlighted in yellow, adjectives in green, nouns in blue and prepositions in red.

• There are two core data entities, “service” and “customer”.
• We need a provisioning business function for services (“service” being the object pronoun of the sentence).
• “service” entities can be of type “internet”, and “internet services” can be of type “broadband”.
• “customer” entities can be type “residential”.

Furthermore, prepositions show us relationships between core data entities. In this case we see that “customers” and “services” have at least a one to one relationship (meaning a customer can have at least one service).

Applying the same analysis to all of the requirements, we’d end up with the following, semi-normalized data model:

We’d also end up with two business services (think SOA), one that sends invoices on a monthly basis, and another that provisions internet services.

Sure, this is simplified, but the requirements gathering process, when done in this way, can tell an Enterprise Architect a lot about the core data entities and functions an organization needs to support to do business. He can then perform a gap analysis to understand where his current-state architecture is deficient in supporting this future-state view.

• Contribution
• Participation
• Skills
• Role

CE2.0 is an “enterprise facebook” application (and I don’t think it’s available yet) and looks intriguing. It’s ability to measure community equity will go a long way to encourage uptake as users compete for top equity scores. I’ll definitelyh be keeping an eye on this app as it seems very promising.

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.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.

Avenue A Razorfish is now evolving their wiki to include more features. I’d like to direct you to their blog post which contains an embedded slideshare presentation that explains their approach. They’ve definitely got some great ideas.

1. Enterprise Search: Enable “Discovery” across legacy content repositories. The enterprise can realize the benefit of the investment it’s already made in content management and knowledge capture.
2. Social Collaboration: Deploy social collaboration tools to catalyze the generation of persisted tacit knowledge. Remove the barriers to content publishing and idea refinement.
3. Mashups: Create a set of widgets that sit on top of legacy systems and social collaboration tools. Provide an easy way to for non-technical users to create rich, dynamic applications (like QEDwiki or Yahoo Pipes).

In this way the traditional organization can implement SLATES (and social networking and mashups) in a staged manner and slowly adapt to social collaboration during the process.

Update: Check out Lisa Hoover’s article for some great insight into Versionate (I’m quoted in the last couple of paragraphs).

Versionate, a new wiki tailored toward the enterprise, has just launched and is getting a lot of coverage. When I read about it I quickly headed over to the site and checked out the screencast. Versionate does a lot of things right, namely:

1. Simple, intuitive, easy to use UI
2. Integrated search capability
3. Strong compatibility with MS Office and other products

And it’s point number 3 that really separates Versionate from the competition. Myself and others within the Enterprise 2.0 community have long held that successful collaboration software must play well with MS Office. Knowledge workers will continue to use Word and Excel for years to come – we cannot expect them to abandon these tools immediately (no matter how hard we try). This means collaboration software must compliment the MS Office offering, and Versionate does just that.

Want to create a wiki page? Upload a Word document. Want to edit a wiki page? Edit it in your browser or in Word or in Open Office Writer etc. Want to revert back to a previous version of a document – version control is included and easy to use.

I can see a few features that Versionate could benefit from, however. These include:

1. The use of tags to compliment its folder-like categorization structure
2. Integrated blogging
3. Richer, facebook-like user profiles
4. A downloadable version (as mentioned on Techcrunch) to mitigate data security concerns as the current version follows the SaaS model

In my opinion Versionate is raising the bar for wiki software. I’d expect to see other wiki vendors following Versionate’s “play with MS Office” example in the near future.

But in doing my research on open source options, it strikes me as odd that no one has created an open source E2.0 application that integrates Mediawiki (wiki), WordPress (blogging), bbPress (discussion), elgg (social networking) and scuttle (social bookmarking). All of these are PHP-based and open source, so integrating them would seem like an obvious thing to do.

I know that Avenue-A-Razorfish has tweaked Mediawiki to integrate more E2.0 features, but it doesn’t seem that they’ve released the fruits of their effort to the public.

The technical challenge to overcome with integration of disparate applications would be:

• Single Sign-on: Users login once and are then logged in to each application
• Integrated Tags: Each application has its own concept of tag. Tags need to be shared.
• Look and Feel: Styles and themes need to be the same across the suite to give the appearance of cohesiveness.
• I’m sure there are more…

Spikesource did something similar with Suite Two which is worth checking out if you haven’t already.
Maybe I’ll rise to the challenge, brush up on my PHP programming skills, and give it a shot.

• A Google Mini or Google Search Appliance
• Scuttle – an open source, delicious-like social bookmarking application
• Xalan – a Java-based, open source XSLT engine

The Value Proposition
The idea behind this is this: when a user performs a search, each of the results on the page display social bookmarking information (tags and “saved by” count) if that URL has been bookmarked by somebody within the enterprise. This helps the searcher make an more informed choice when deciding which content to look at. If somebody else inside the enterprise has found a relevant content item to be helpful then perhaps the searcher should look at it first. It also exposes the searcher to others within the enterprise who have a mutual interest in the content being looked for.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo
Out of the box the Google Search Appliance provides a great amount of flexibility in modifying how search page behaves and feels. This is done through modifying the default XSLT (which produces a UI nearly identical to google.com). So, ideally all I’d have to do to include scuttle into the search results is use the document() XSLT function invoke a scuttle API that returns XML data about the URL (including the tag list and saved by count). I could then aggregate this XML with Google results XML displaying a seamless result to the user. Unfortunately the Google Search Appliance XSLT engine does not support the document() function, so I’m left to run an external XSLT engine – hence Xalan.

So, here’s what I did:

1. Downloaded Xalan and made some minor tweaks to the “SimpleServlet” demo application (class and package name change, modified the configuration to use my XSLT and invoke the Google Search Appliance to retrieve the results in XML format).
2. Packaged the modified version of the “SimpleServlet” and deployed it on my Tomcat instance.
3. Copied the Default XSLT style sheet from the Google Search Appliance, and modified it starting at line 2398 (the XSLT template for a snippet) adding code to invoke the Scuttle API and incorporate tags and saved by count at the bottom of the snippet. Saved the XSLT and bundled it with my “SimpleServlet” war file.
4. Copied the scuttle “posts_get.php” API and made a new API that returns bookmark information for a given URL.

That’s it. Users now access my custom web application to perform enterprise searches (instead if using the default GSA frontend), but so far so good. Hopefully one day Google will support the document() function so we can do integration like this using the XSLT engine on the appliance. That would certainly make life a lot easier.

• 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!