Michael Fauscette

The Social Employee Manifesto

  Traditional relationships, roles and leadership models are being challenged every day in our post industrial, social web enabled, information driven, people centric business world. Old approaches to managing employees, with their roots in the industrial society are not adequate for hyper-connected, socially aware employees. We need a new paradigm for getting things done and for empowering a new breed of employee that does not function well in a hierarchal, top down, highly controlled environment.

So what does the social employee need to be successful? Here's a list of some things I think need to be considered in building a new and more productive work model:

• Social employees look for coaches and mentors not "bosses"
• Empowerment to take on business problems without micromanaging but within established guidelines.
• Social web policies and training.
• Freedom to choose hardware like mobile devices, laptops, etc. that fits their individual work style.
• Continuous access to the social web.
• The freedom and ability to form ad hoc workgroups as needed to address business issues and problems.
• People centric enterprise systems that are individually configurable
• Flexible work locations and schedules when practical
• Open and transparent executives
• Multi-point communication
• Co-branding - providing a place that nurtures strong personal brands that are combined with a strong corporate brand to gain extra impact on the marketplace
• Inclusive decision making culture
• Community
• Ethical and responsible as a world citizen
• Manage to successful outcomes not methods
• Shared control
• Clear business objectives supported by a flexible strategy

What the social employee brings to the business:

• Distributed micro-problem solving. Every employee can solve a small problem everyday. Distributed problem solving eliminates most large business issues before they get "big".
• Creativity
• Strong work ethic that can self manage to personal results and high levels of productivity
• Responsibility and accountability
• Strong personal brand
• Participates and is engaged with the business
• Ethical
• Effectively represents the corporate brand

This is a start anyway. This new social business model can, I believe, create a work environment that values the individual and increases employee productivity significantly with the correct balance of individual to corporate control. Striking that balance will no doubt take some experimentation and vary by industry and role but is critical in the emerging social business culture. It is not sufficient to only address the social customer in this new model, the new interaction models span customers, employees, suppliers and partners. You can't, IMHO expect to change corporate culture around customer engagement if you can't first create an environment for the social employee.

Apples, AT&T, iPhones, phone calls and value

  In the new age of the social customer we spend a lot of time talking about talking...well, or about the conversation with customers anyway. It's something that gets me very excited, the empowered customer, the connected customer amid an explosion of social communities, social media, and social tools... We're in the early stages of a transformation in business and especially in the customer service side of business we are starting to see some very promising results. Social CRM is the topic of the day but putting the "S" in CRM assumes that you're building on the base of solid customer centric business processes. So that brings me to my story...   

I was the perfect iPhone customer, loves gadgets, has to have the latest one, willing to experiment, tolerant of developing technology... I bought the first one just after they came out and frankly it changed my view of mobile computing completely. I've said as much on my blog and in speeches and presentations. It's a great mobile computing platform and the apps opened up all sorts of new mobile functionality. Each generation of the platform and the OS has added needed features and improved on that initial experience. From Apple's perspective, draconian control issues aside, it's a real home run, but it's missing one key bit of functionality, often you can't make old fashion phone calls on it and over the 3 years that I've used an iPhone that problem has gotten much worse. I don't know about you but I'm rather in need of that capability in my phones. I say "was" the perfect iPhone customer because I've decided to move away from it, but that decision mostly isn't Apple's fault. I continue to be a devoted Apple hardware/OS junkie and will happily use my MacBook Pro and my Wifi iPad. To me both of them are the best in their classes. Apple's choice to partner exclusively with AT&T cost them my phone business.

So what happened to drive this decision. I've been an AT&T customer for quite awhile, well actually I was a Cingular customer that AT&T bought. Three and a half years ago if you had asked me the Net Promoter question, would I recommend AT&T for wireless I would have without reservation said yes. Not that I was a completely satisfied customer, they've never had what I'd call stellar customer service, with their rigid IVR system and very, very, very long wait times for support, but they provided acceptable wireless service (generally when I made a phone call it worked and I could use SMS so I guess that's pretty much success for a phone company 3.5 years ago). But enter the real smart phone age and fast forward 3.5 years and I'm an angry customer. I would not, under any circumstances recommend AT&T wireless as a wireless carrier. That's a long way from I would recommend to I would never, how could that happen in a little over 3 years?

When I got my first shiny new iPhone I downloaded all sorts of apps and that's continued through all 3 versions. Lots of great apps have come out, social networks, blogging, location based services like train schedules including real time updates, FourSquare, augmented reality, games, note taking, RSS readers...I have pages and pages of apps and I use them every day. Heck I pay for a monthly unlimited data plan, have right from the start but guess what, I'm the reason AT&T can't provide even adequate wireless service. Yes, sadly, I thought that unlimited meant unlimited but I guess I was wrong. I'm now convinced that much of AT&T's business plan is built on charging for things that they believe you won't use...but surprise, some of us iPhone users actually use the data functions of the device (I realize this is quite the shocker to AT&T execs). Last year Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility actually said that publicly, the problems that AT&T is having is because of a few data hogs that use to much data (I thought unlimited data was unlimited, what was I thinking). I live in San Francisco and I often do business in Boston, NYC, Philadelphia and Washington DC and guess what, those areas are the worst for bandwidth and service. The interesting thing is that I have very strong signals most of the time in those markets but despite the signal I have terrible "luck" making simple phone calls. Now you might want to blame the hardware, after all this problem developed in the last 3 years but let me put that to rest. I also have a work provided Blackberry on AT&T and it has no better ability to make phone calls. Three different AT&T Twitter customer service agents have tried to help (and I applaud any efforts to reach out, don't get me wrong), but the universal solution suggestion is to switch the phone to the Edge network to make phone calls, it seems it's more stable and has more bandwidth (I suppose I should be glad they didn't say to use wifi for data to speed up the network)? I pay for 3G service but to make calls I need to switch the phone to a slower, older network, hmm, interesting. Dropped calls, call failure (they should change that error message to AT&Tfail), inability to connect, all common place and happening more and more often.

When I ordered my iPad I debated 3G or just wifi and then I had an idea, why not get a Verizon Mifi card, after all I could use it with 5 devices and maybe test out the rumors that Verizon provided a more stable network. It worked like a charm, connects every time no matter where I am. Then the first incident, opening day at SF Giants stadium this year (I live 2 blocks from the stadium) there was a a large influx of people in my neighborhood, and many of them must have been using AT&T smart phones because as the day wore on service degraded terribly. By mid-afternoon I had a 5 bar signal and couldn't make a call at all, then I had an idea. What if I used the Verizon Mifi card to connect my iPhone wifi and use Skype to call. It worked perfectly. I finally found a way around AT&T's poor network service...use my iPhone on Verizon through wifi and Skype. During Web 2.0 the same thing happened and finally I gave in to the idea that Verizon might be a viable alternative, but still no iPhone.

After some research I decided to give Verizon a try with the new HTC Incredible. It has great reviews and with all the additions to the Android marketplace the apps finally seem to be catching up, so off I went to give it a try. A stop at Best Buys (a company that totally gets customer service, they even sell the phones for the after rebate price without the rebate, which we all know is another scam...I mean at best we only use part of those rebate cards) and out I walked with a new Incredible (takes some backbone to name a phone incredible, by the way). I've had that phone for a couple of weeks and guess what? If has a feature that the AT&T iPhone and Blackberry don't...you can make phone calls with it. I was in DC last week and I had a 5 bar signal on the iPhone and Blackberry and could not make a call...on the Incredible, 1-2 bars and connected EVERY time. The verdict, the Incredible is almost as good as the iphone experience and with the added ability to use a network that has voice capabilities, thats a better choice for me. I have 5 lines on AT&T (or had), I'm switching them all to Verizon as the contracts expire. I'm even tempted to just pay the termination fee and be done with this mess...maybe

.

So what changed in 3 years? Here's what I think:

• AT&T way underestimated the iPhone data market and has not been able to catch up on the bandwidth issue. Actually I think they've invested in the coverage end of the network, and I agree that they have the "best" 3G coverage in the US...but coverage doesn't = bandwidth. They invested in coverage at the expense of bandwidth.
• AT&T has never been a customer centric organization and the addition of social CRM tools and processes simply can't change that culture...at least for now.
• AT&T exploited their exclusive clause and leveraged the fact that the iPhone was a great mobile computing platform to drive massive profits but didn't invest in the parts of their network that mattered.
• If Verizon had taken the exclusive deal from Apple they might now be in the same place as AT&T...but they're not and they've seen the start of this backlash and will avoid it in the future.
• The Android phones are catching up to the iPhone, and that's not a big surprise. They're a viable alternative to the the Apple / AT&T disaster.
• A totally different subject but I let my younger daughter switch to Verizon this weekend and pick a new phone. She had a Nokia slider that she was fond of but as soon as she saw the Kin 1 from Microsoft she fell in love. She's 11 and I'd say they might have something. My older daughter has a 3G iPhone and saw the Kin 2...that will be her next phone as soon as Best Buys gets it in stock. I discounted Microsoft and I was wrong, they have something that seems very strong in the teen to 20 something market, especially with the integrated networking and combo keyboard - touchscreen.
• A word to Apple, be careful which partner you choose, they're incompetence reflects on your brand too.

So that's my story, in the end it's about value and service. You can have an edge based on exclusive products or fast time to market but if you can't keep those customers satisfied no manner of social CRM can keep that customer. I think that the iPhone AT&T exclusive contract is one of the all time failures, they squandered a massive advantage. AT&T knows that if Verizon had an iPhone offering they would loose customers in droves, they even announced last week that they're raising the early termination fees to try and head off the defections (once again demonstrating how much they love their customers, don't fix the network just make it even harder and more expensive to leave the bad service). In the end it's about fundamentals, put your customer at the center of your process and business and you will be successful.

(I'm writing this from my hotel in Amsterdam, I'm speaking at WCIT tomorrow and happily using my iPhone and Blackberry on the quite excellent Vodafone network)

SAP SapphireNow 2010

Last week SAP employees, partners and customers gathered in both Orlando and Frankfurt (as well in virtual locations around the globe) for the annual Sapphire conference, this year recast as SapphireNow. For the first time the conference was run simultaneously in both locations through the miracle of Internet collaborative technologies. If nothing else it was a showcase for global collaboration run by a host of new anchors and visited by celebrities including Sir Richard Branson, Al Gore and General Colin Powell. It was also a chance for a somewhat beleaguered SAP, given its less than stellar financial performance over the last year or so, to showcase its new co-CEO's and their strategy for reinvigorating SAP. There was in general a lot of energy and activity around the conference among employees and partners, and spilling over to customer attendees. In particular the design / layout of the conference focused around a single exhibition hall that incorporated meeting areas, exhibits, and studios for small, medium and main stage gatherings. I'd say that considering the number of conferences I attend every year I'm fairly experienced in this area and for me, this is a best practice that other vendors could incorporate in their conference planning. The design kept everyone focused in the same space and helped to raise the overall energy level quite a bit.

The strategy, which was initially laid out in the Co-CEO roadshow earlier this year (see this post) and summed up in three pillars:

1. On demand

2. Mobile

3. Orchestration

delivered in three models:

1. On premise

2. On demand

3. On device

On demand and cloud were front and center in every keynote and many of the sessions throughout the event. As reported in my previous post there are two distinct focus areas for on demand apps, Business by Design (ByD), the fully functional end-to-end ERP for the mod market and Enterprise, stand alone apps that are intended as a way for enterprise SAP customers to get new functionality along side their existing ERP systems. The 2.5 release of ByD, the first multi-tenant version and according to SAP the scaleable release that will finally be offered beyond the few initial beta customers, was on display in the exhibition hall and is slated for release this summer (end of July is the rumor). ByD is targeted against the current mid market SaaS ERP players, Netsuite and Workday, as well as the on premise vendors, MS Dynamics, Epicor, Lawson, Sage, etc. ByD also is taking advantage of SAP's in-memory technology to increase the amount of real-time information available to the user (more on in-memory later in the post). The mid market segment that SAP is targeting is buying full ERP systems in the cloud, you only have to look at Netsuite's financial performance last year to see that, so ByD does have the potential to offer a growth opportunity to SAP if it is stable and as feature rich as they claim.

In the enterprise SaaS offerings SAP seems to be focusing on markets that have already proven to be fertile like sales force automation (SFA), talent management, travel & expense, etc (see this post for more information). I suppose these markets have proven that they are interested in SaaS delivery as there are already some strong players in each like salesforce.com in SFA, Taleo and Successfactors in talent management and Concur in travel & expense, but one does wonder why SAP would go after markets that already have strong leaders when there are a lot of markets in which SAP is strong on premise that they could attack with a SaaS offering. From a platform perspective SAP has three SaaS platforms, ByD, Frictionless and Coghead. It is not clear which platform will the their SaaS platform of choice going forward and in several meetings it was verified that the decision has not yet been made. It appears that the enterprise offerings are currently being build on either Coghead or Frictionless. None of the platforms are currently available as a PaaS offering although in discussion around partner strategy it would appear that they plan to move in that direction in the future. For the next release of ByD (r2.5) SAP wants to encourage partners to extend the functionality, especially to meet needs of different verticals. In general the partner ecosystem is featured prominently in SAP's cloud story.

Mobile and the on device pillar were present in almost every session. There were Blackberry apps, iPhone apps and the iPad was particularly popular. I saw quite a few iPad demos and SAP founder and Chairman Hasso Plattner even used one as a part of his ByD / in-memory demo during his keynote.

We did get more information on the SAP in-memory database technology although the use is still limited. During Hasso's keynote he discussed the move to in-memory technology and how customers could apply it in the near future in limited ways, stepping through 6 stages to the ultimate goal of fully operating on an in-memory database. In step one customers would use an appliance as their data warehouse / analysis solution added to their current installation of SAP. The appliance could be built on an HP blade with the in-memory database, which has a columnar compression algorithm and a solid state drive as the back up data store. I'm no expert in database technologies but it seems functionally to resemble the Oracle Exadata database machine (and other data warehouse appliances) which has smart flash cache and hybrid columnar compression. The difference seems to be that the Exadata cache predicts what data the user needs and caches that data, not the whole database while the SAP machine would cache the entire database.

Hasso demo'ed some ByD features that use in-memory technology to provide fast data access and analysis. From his end the demo was done completely on the iPad. I was very impressed with the iPad as an enterprise tool, I believe that its use in this capacity is starting to explode as more people get exposure to the UI and see its potential for business use.

Sustainability was also a prominent topic of discussion during the conference. This topic was very visible last year at Sapphire and has continued to gain momentum. Last year sustainability was focused on data center and energy use but this year it was more of a business focus across areas of opportunity from carbon management to environmental compliance.

Social also continues to be a hot topic for SAP. During the conference their new ideasourcing site was announced, powered by Jive software. The recently released social collaboration tool StreamWork was also a frequent topic of discussion. The tool is designed to facilitate decision making by bringing together people, information and process / business methods. Unlike salesforce.com Chatter, Novell Pulse and SocialCast, StreamWork is more focused on process driven collaboration than on ad hoc collaboration.

In general SAP is clearly a company in transition. There is renewed energy and excitement among employees and a great deal of activity. A lot of what was discussed at SapphireNow this year is future but if the level of activity continues there's no reason to believe that there won't be a lot of new and interesting developments this year. The next big milestone, the release of ByD 2.5 is rapidly approaching and is particularly important to reach to sustain the current momentum. The icing on the cake was the customer event on Wed night where Carlos Santana was the featured performer. The concert was excellent (but I'm a fan so I guess I'm biased).

SAS and Socialytics

SAS, a leader in business analytics, recently launched a new offering targeted around gaining business insight into the social web. Socialytics (which I explain in more detail here), is gaining momentum with several new or enhanced offerings available recently. I'm also getting a lot of questions from clients on the topic as they start to realize that creating and collecting social data is only a part of the picture. In a recent conversation with John Bastone from SAS I had the chance to explore their offering in greater detail.

Before I dive into the SAS solution, let me lay out what I think the key components are in a world class socialytics offering:

• Ability to aggregate (listen to) social data from user selectable sources, both public and private web, internal and external to the business
• Capability to apply natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics across multiple languages
• Capability to identify and monitor influencers
• Capability to monitor brand sentiment across a broad set of channels
• Backend integration (API's) to enterprise systems
• Ability to perform analysis on the intersection of existing corporate data and social data
• "Out of the box" standard dashboards and metrics
• Support and service offerings to help vendor clients customize the offering / metrics to specific business needs

Now let's look at SAS and its new offering, what they call social media analytics. The stated design goal for the SAS solution was to integrate, analyze and enable organizations to make business decisions on intelligence produced from online conversations (professional and consumer generated). The product is delivered in a SaaS model. SAS designed the system to serve as a continuous listening post to the social web, collecting and archiving all targeted (as defined by the customer) social media. The solution can predict future conversations based on analysis of historical data and provide user defined flexible sentiment analysis. From the social information defined by the solution users can take action on predefined routings and can automate certain actions based on defined workflows. Here's a marchitecture slide that shows the new system:

SAS identifies four basic use cases for the socialytics platform:

1. Brand and market tracking

2. Customer feedback management

3. PR and reputation tracking

4. Online media analysis

In addition to the product SAS is providing a wide range of consulting services to assist clients in setting up the system to their specific requirements. I think this is a critical piece of the socialytics offering for any vendor and I applaud SAS for the completeness of their solution. Every client will have specific requirements that cannot be easily packaged and will need this type of consulting. In addition the wide range of inputs, both social and enterprise data is very broad and that variability alone will require quite a bit of planning. Socialytics is an emerging market and has the potential to provide a great deal of value to businesses. These solutions will be of particular interest to companies with high profile brands, high consumer engagement brands, strong internet marketing programs, and industries in highly competitive, global verticals.

SAP acquires Sybase

+ This week SAP announced intentions to acquire Sybase in a deal that would be worth around $5.8B. Sybase, once a contender in the database wars of the 1990's, did about $1.2B last year, with over half of that revenue in the RDBMS market, placing them forth in database revenue share. That's not really that telling though, the RDBMS market is really consolidated in 3 vendors, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, who together make up over 85% of total sales. The rest of the market is divided among 25+ vendors with Sybase holding about 3.2% of the total market share. Today SAP customers run on the big 3, with Oracle holding the largest share in the customer base by a good margin. In fact SAP is rumored to be the largest reseller of Oracle databases. Sybase has 0 share, SAP does not run on Sybase (there's a whole story behind that statement, which in fact contributed greatly to Oracle's win in the database wars but I'll leave that for another time).

So why then, would SAP be interested in Sybase? In a recent briefing with the new SAP co-CEO's they shared their new strategy for the company. As a part of that strategy (explained in more detail here), three pillars were laid out: On demand, mobile and orchestration. It's the second pillar, mobile that seems to be the big driver behind the acquisition. By using the Sybase 365 mobile platform SAP should be able to bring it's enterprise apps to the mobile market much faster and possibly capitalize on the trend that is clearly accelerating around enterprise mobile. Sybase has some interesting components like mobile payments, alerts, m-commerce, etc. that could help SAP in verticals like retail and banking, and especially offer the potential of opening up more growth opportunities in emerging economies that tend to be much more mobile centric. The SAP "on device" strategy combined with Sybase's mobile platform could make SAP a player in enterprise mobile.

One other synergy with Sybase, at least according to SAP, is the combination of Sybase's technology (column stores) with SAP's in-memory processing technology in applications that require analytics in high volume environments (like financial services). There's been a lot of visibility around in-menory from the SAP execs, but there seems to be quite a bit of skepticism as to the real business opportunity that the new technology might open up for SAP. I guess this falls into the "it remains to be seen" category.

SAP's first strategic pillar, on demand or cloud computing, is critical for their business. Sybase does have capabilities in both public and private cloud as well as relationships with Amazon EC2 that are of interest from SAP. Private clouds could be particularly important to SAP's install base, who are today overwhelmingly on premise. In addition, SAP's european customers, due to EU and country level privacy laws, may be very interested in private cloud deployments.

Lithium Technologies acquires Scout Labs

M & A mania is heating up among social solution vendors. Attensity and Biz360, Lithium and Scout Labs, both increasing solution footprint and platform reach. For the last several years start ups have been springing up building out social business solutions and platforms. As is often the case, these new companies initially focused on a narrow part of the overall social business landscape. As they gain momentum (and customers) they learn what adjacent solutions their customers are seeking and start to look at expanding their footprint. This is a natural progression in tech business and something we've seen over and over. It seems that social business has reached the stage where customers are realizing value from their initial deployments and are looking to do more and carry their success farther,

Lithium's focus is on providing a complete social CRM platform for building and managing social support communities. While feature rich, with community management, mobile, knowledge base, reputation engine, content moderation, workflow, profile management, analytics and connectivity with leading CRM solutions, its focus was on the private label or branded customer community. With the proliferation of public social media and network sites and the growing popularity of using those sites for everything from purchase decision research to product support advice, it became obvious that the branded customer community was only a part of the complete picture of supporting and interacting with customers. The addition of Scout Labs' platform to the Lithium platform combines the branded community platform with a platform to monitor, measure and manage interactions on the public side of the social web. Now the branded support community can add the capabilities to hear what customers are saying in real time on public social networks and media channels, better monitor, understand and reach out to influencers outside the community to build relationships, add proactive customer support and engage customers more effectively in new product and marketing ideas with both platforms in the cloud. This holistic view of the customer, especially in the area of support, is essential and really starts to provide support to customers when, where and how they choose, which is IMHO the most important shift in thinking for effective social support initiatives.   

Virtualization, one path to the mobile enterprise?

Mobile is hot, no question about it, but the move to a mobile enterprise has some rocks in the road. On the one hand the current set of enterprise software is pretty short on mobile ready user interface. While there are some mobile versions available from vendors like salesforce.com, Netsuite, Oracle, etc., often the functionality is limited and device support is limited to maybe 2 or 3 mobile operating systems. From an IT perspective mobile is often controlled by specifying a corporate approved device and in many cases actually issuing that device to employees. While that used to be acceptable in today's "bring your own" technology environment, and with the proliferation of mobile device choices, many employees are simply going around IT to use their device of choice. From an IT view this presents many challenges and security risks (perceived or real). Even the simple process of providing email access can be a challenge in a multiple-device environment. 

So how do you provide IT with security and control, which is much more of a challenge with mobile devices, even over laptops, give access to all enterprise systems (and somehow provide a reasonable user experience) and accommodate user choice in devices? Enterprise vendors are scrambling to build out more mobile functionality but are hampered by the diverse set of mobile OS's and the difficulty and expense of porting functionality across the different platforms. There are some new mobile development platforms that can port to multiple OS's like Rhomobile, but not all ISV's are taking that route. From a corporate perspective many companies have chosen to just support Blackberry's Enterprise Server but more and more IT is getting pressure to open up to iPhones, Android based devices and the new Windows mobile. Enter Citrix Receiver, a new mobile virtualization technology. Virtualizing the desktop isn't new of course, but extending that concept to the mobile device is innovative and addresses many of the current enterprise mobile challenges. I've tired the demo apps on both iPhone and iPad and the experience is quite good. Through the virtualized mobile app you can access any enterprise assets securely and in an acceptable UI. There no risk from loosing the device (no jokes here about next gen iPhones please), remote wipe, etc., that's all handled through virtualization. The concept of "work.shift", something that I learned from Citrix at their Synergy conference this week, fits squarely into where I think the social employee is going. Employees want to work when, where and how they choose, bring their own devices (including laptops, which Citrix calls the BYOC or bring your own computer project, enabled by their desktop virtualization), and have a more web 2.0 like user experience. Citrix Receiver is the first example I've seen of virtualizing the mobile enterprise and from my perspective a very good option for balancing the needs for security and control from IT and the desires of the new social employee. 

 -- Post From My iPad

pearltrees, socializing and curating content on the web

Content of any type is not useful unless you can find it, organize it and interact with it. In the enterprise companies have tried many different schemes to try and get business content collected in a central repository, organized, tagged, version controlled, and searchable. This has often taken the route of "content management" systems. Content management systems to varying degrees, do an adequate job of getting some content into a controlled system environment. There are challenges with content management systems on two fronts though, getting content into the system in the first place (getting employees to participate in inputting content in some way) and getting the right content into the hands of the person who actually needs it. Search helps find content and tagging can increase searchability of course, but the whole system is only as good as the ability to input and tag the content, which inherently requires broad participation. To me it seems that the problem isn't management of content but the opposite, liberation of content. 

Curation of content is a concept that is gaining momentum across various media types online. If you want to learn more about curation you can check out CurationNation. The idea though, revolves around involving human interaction with content to filter and organize. Combined with the power of the social web, curation has the potential to change the way we collect, consume, organize and share content online. Socialization of content could take the form of curation if a social system was applied to the process. 

I had the pleasure this week of chatting with Patrice Lamothe, CEO of French startup pearltrees and since that meeting joining and using the pearltrees system. Here's a screenshot of my account:

 

 The concept is fairly simple really. Pearltrees is a social network with tools and processes to capture, organize and share web content or pearls. As you browse and read things online you can capture those "things" in your pearltrees (web pages, blogs, Tweets, etc.). The social aspect of pearltrees then allows your content to be viewed, searched and linked together by others with similar interest. You can add pearls from others into your trees and share the pearls in pearltrees, facebook, Twitter, email, permalink and also embedded in other web pages. Here's an embedded pearltree from my account:

Overall I'm starting to think that pearltrees is useful and that curation or socialization of content has a lot of application in the enterprise. An enterprise private label version of pearltrees, although not available today, could form the center of a social content process that would address many of the current content challenges for businesses. I'm enjoying using pearltrees for my own research although I'm looking forward to a non-flash version so that I can use it on my iPad, which has become my primary content consumption tool. (They are working on an HTML5 version for later this year)  

People as the Platform...and a facebook centric web?

In my mental journey of gaining some insight into what is happening on the social web and with the social business transformation one of my best mental models came about with the simple revelation that business was shifting from a process and tech centric approach to a people centric approach. This idea, that people become the platform for the social business, is to me very powerful and changed the way I was looking at the social web. Over the weekend I was reading over some research on facebook's F8 conference announcements to prep for a call with a client today and that same revelation hit again, facebook's announcements were really about replacing a hyperlink / page centric web with a people centric one. There it is again, people as the platform...

At the F8 conference facebook announced its intent to create the "open graph" by facilitating the ability to connect the web through a graph API and social plug-ins which could embed functions on a page: "like" (there's an example of this plug-in on this blog on the right, feel free to test it :) ), recommendations, log-in and a social bar. This idea of connecting through a social graph instead of the traditional hyperlink approach is very compelling and in fact changes the whole fabric of the web in many ways over time. As "like" buttons appear across the web people can share content back to facebook but more importantly provide real-time data on the popularity (ranking) of web pages/sites. All of these plug-ins make adding these features fast and simple. Using OAuth 2.0 standards facebook Connect 2.0 provides new auto-login features and simplifies extending and connecting for sites. The recommend plug-in creates a network of social data on preferences all linked through the individual and the social presence bar, a connection that provides presence and chat capabilities on each site. All of this provides social data on activity streams and preferences across the web focused on individuals and recorded in facebook.

The changes to facebook profiles themselves also play into this new way of connecting the web through people. If you look closely at your new profile you will see that instead of random bits of information about you stored on your profile you are now tied to other sites/pages that represent that information (for example I'm interested in Porsche, it used to say just that under interest, now Porsche is linked to the Porsche page where I can see that 3 of my friends also like Porsche). This all weaves together a mountain of connected social data that all resides in facebook...associated to you of course.

So what could the Open Graph mean for the web, competitors, partners and us? I suppose for individuals it could mean even less privacy (not that we aren't moving down the path to a more open web "life" anyway). It also means an even higher level of connectivity around and through your social network. As web content owners are compelled to organize content for easier sharing and indexing in the more social context facebook takes on a much more central role in finding and maintaining the social content and its association to people. Does facebook's new method for organizing social content replace Google PageRank? People (and facebook) move to a more central position in the web instead of hyperlinks and pages. What could this mean for other (or new) social networks? I think we continue in a hub and spoke web connectivity model so I don't think LinkedIn or Twitter become irrelevant by any means, but I do think they take on a somewhat different role to facebook if facebook continues to get the high level of adoption of the Open Graph. This new concept also seems to be opening up new partner opportunities, like facebook and Microsoft's Doc offering aimed squarely at Google Docs.

Salesforce.com, VMware partner to launch VMforce

Earlier this week salesforce.com and VMware announced a partnership to deploy a java-based platform as a service (PaaS) called VMforce. Unfortunately I was not able to attend the announcement briefing in person as I was in Boston attending a Novell analyst summit. I've since spent a bit of time catching up on the announcement and had some time to think about the implications for customers, partners and competitors. The developer preview won't be available until this Fall so we have some time before the announcement will have any real impact for anyone beyond the beta users but still it is an interesting development in the PaaS world. A lot has already been written on VMforce so I won't spend a lot of time digging into what the PaaS will look like but instead focus on what implications it might have on the industry and on the enterprise.

What is VMforce? VMware's SpringSource GM, Rod Johnson, provides this simple explanation on his blog:

"VMforce is a joint service from VMware and SalesForce. VMforce uses the Force.com physical infrastructure to run vSphere with a special customized vCloud layer that allows for seamless scaling and management. Above this layer VMforce runs SpringSource tc Server instances that provide the execution environment for the enterprise applications that run on VMforce. Spring applications can store their own enterprise data in the Force.com database or use data already resident there. All of these architecture details are seamlessly integrated into a single platform that allows the developer to interact with the server in the way they would with a local tc Server or Tomcat instance."

During his part of the announcement presentation salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff claimed that Java developers using the VMforce platform could build apps "5 times faster and for 1/2 the cost." Now short of conducting a primary research project after the developer preview is available this Fall I have no way to substantiate that claim, but I will say that after watching the demo of developing on the VMforce platform is does appear significantly faster than approaching development in a traditional Java dev process. Part of that simplification is provided by the Spring Framework IDE of course but the integration with Force.com does provide some interesting advantages.

I've believed for some time that PaaS has the potential to be a disruptor in the enterprise SW world, although that disruption was likely to take place over a long period of time. The disruption itself is caused by the assertion that developers can build and deploy custom enterprise apps in less time than it takes to deploy and customize a traditional package app and for lower cost. I admit that at first I was a skeptic on this topic but after working with several salesforce.com Force.com partners I am inclined to believe the claims. One of the hurdles to adoption of the Force.com PaaS has been the proprietary development language Apex. Not that its flawed in some way, but simply that it is different and not widely used. There are not a lot of experienced Apex developers and training and experience take time. Java on the other hand is in widespread use and there are an estimated 6 million Java developers (and a reported 2 million of them are using the SpringSource platform already). Take the value proposition of PaaS and add in the Java dev community and well, scale and adoption become a benefit not an obstacle. VMforce has the potential to rapidly accelerate the disruption of PaaS.

From a competitive standpoint this move by salesforce and VMware helps create two distinct platform camps, Java and .Net. Currently Google, Oracle, IBM and now VMforce are on the Java platform with Microsoft Azure as the .Net offering. There is an active .Net community but it does not rival the Java community. Java apps can be deployed on Azure but the VMforce platform seems to change the game in ease of use.

The other interesting benefit from this partnership is the combined Force.com assets (like Chatter, for example) with the vSphere and SpringSource assets, a strong proposition. The Java PaaS story is a good one for ISV and developers and I wouldn't be surprised to see quick adoption of the model once available...and remember there are a lot of Java apps already available that could be quickly moved to the cloud on VMforce. Add to that the ease of building and deploying mobile apps on the Java platform and the potential is even larger as mobile continues to gain share in the enterprise.