Michael Fauscette

Redefining the enterprise user experience

I wrote recently about the growing phenomenon of employees circumventing corporate policy and tools to solve business problems using their on tools, both hardware and software and even process. This "BYO" culture, I believe, is partially fueled with the increasing desire to mimic the web 2.0 user experience that we're growing accustomed to in our "personal" online lives. It's also fueled by a change to a culture of individual empowerment that has accompanied adoption of the social web. I also want to emphasize that I don't think this change is generational, but is in fact cross-generational, what I like to call Gen"S" (that's Gen social in case that wasn't obvious). Most of the recent survey data supports that concept, that social adoption is crossing all generational boundaries and creating a group that has some similarities beyond generation. One of those similarities seems to be an aversion to "traditional" enterprise software and its somewhat dated user interfaces (UI). The traditional UI tends to be complex, often difficult to navigate, hard to learn, a challenge to remember procedures for processes that are not done routinely like exception processing and unsupportive of ad hoc processes and collaboration. Portals don't help that experience, by the way...opening a window to multiple systems in one place still uses the original UI in the end, even if you can arrange the widgets on the portal however you choose. The traditional enterprise UI is in stark contrast to the UI of familiar web 2.0 tools that we are growing accustom to using on a frequent basis.

There's another underlying issue around the current user experience that, although it may seem disconnected, is not. The last couple of years has seen some shift in enterprise IT behavior that I think may be a new pattern. Budgetary constraints have forced companies to focus IT spending on the highest return SW which often has led them to put a hold on changes to the core ERP systems. Enterprise companies continued to invest in SW but that investment was often in deep vertical applications that offer the highest competitive advantage. The concept of maintaining core ERP systems basically without upgrade for a longer period of time is of course counter to the behavior that vendors preach but I wonder if this behavior might not be a part of the "new normal"...maintain the core ERP, spend and expand on high value items like vertical apps, social collaboration tools, social CRM and social platforms. I'm talking specifically about enterprise by the way, this does not apply to the SMB market in the same way. SMB buying behavior is different and I believe they are actually in the opposite part of the ERP cycle, currently investing in full systems to replace disparate and incomplete systems, especially cloud-based ERP (although I do think SMB's will also invest in social solutions over the next few years). My point with this is that in a time when employees / users are looking for a different user experience companies (at least enterprises) are not changing core systems at near the pace they did before 2008 so even if there was a new UI and experience available from ERP vendors (which there isn't), the chances of it getting implemented are very low if it is a part of the core system.

What do employees want from their enterprise SW user experience? Here are a few of the things that come to mind in no particular order:

• A way to connect with, work with and share with other employees
• A better way to find out who does what inside the enterprise
• A UI for enterprise SW systems that looks and works more like facebook, Google Wave, or some other simplified but powerful web 2.0 tools. The UI should be able to aggregate information from and interact with people (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, etc.), enterprise SW systems and public social channels in a user configurable and selectable way.
• A way to contribute content easily to various projects and systems ranging from employee training to product manuals.
• A simple way to form group mashups or ad hoc workgroups.
• Presence in a simple, manageable method
• Content sharing not content management
• A simple way to execute project tasks and understand work interdependencies while reporting status to a configurable group of interested and involved individuals
• A system / method to integrate and utilize various communication channels ranging from (and as diverse as) telephone to Twitter
• A simple way to find "things" in the enterprise, people, content, data, information...search
• A way to aggregate and use social data (socialytics) and combine that data with other enterprise data to form analysis in a social context.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other things to add so feel free to do so in the comments please. So what's the real challenge then? To do both "fix" or better yet build a new enterprise user experience AND maintain the core systems in a somewhat static state. It strikes me that there are a couple of ways to approach this. One would be to sort of decouple the UI from the systems through some sort of mashup platform that could be used to build and deploy a new UI across the enterprise (I suppose that also includes the capability for UI level integrations). There are a few of these types of mashup platforms emerging but I haven't seen anything so far that is complete enough to do what I am suggesting. Another approach is to provide an application that sits on top of the enterprise (or maybe that's in between the enterprise systems, people and the outside world) that provides features and functions that provide the new and desired user experience. I have seen two applications that I think are version 1's of this concept, salesforce Chatter and Novell Pulse (it also seems like IBM's Lotus Connections is moving in this direction but I'm not as familiar with it as the other two). And of course in new enterprise systems we have to take these new requirements and needs to heart and significantly change our current user experience going forward.

#scrmsummit

Last week in I joined a group of social CRM experts and representatives from 14 software vendors for a 2 day social CRM summit. The event, led by noted CRM author, blogger and consultant Paul Greenberg and BPT Partners, was held in Herndon, VA (see the pic above, taken from the Westin Dulles during the snow storm that kept most of us there an extra day or so). The event generated some great discussions and networking opportunities. One of the biggest take aways for me is that SCRM is still on the bleeding edge new zone and there are some really smart people that are defining and refining it on an almost daily basis. I also believe that it's on the edge of trendy and is starting to attract some people around the edges that are trying to jump on the band wagon and yet, are not "experts" in CRM at all. I won't go through my whole social business speech again, but I do want to emphasize again that social business and SCRM are not social media or social networking. They are not defined by the consumer tools like Twitter and Facebook either. Social Biz and SCRM are about changing corporate culture and about relationships, IMHO. I also am joining Paul in the decision to stop trying to define and debate the definition of SCRM...it's time to do. OK, enough of that, on with today's point. There are some excellent write ups already published (CRM Strategies Blog and Brent's Social CRM Blog) on the summit so I won't try to recount the whole event, but instead I think I'll just hit on a few points that I think are worth repeating:

• CRM taught companies how to "manage" customer relationships, SCRM admits that companies cannot manage customer relationships...customers own their relationship with the company
• Web 2.0 empowered the individual. The world is becoming individual / customer centric and this often breaks current business logic.
• Web 2.0 has taught us very different behaviors, expectations and ways of interacting. Customer's translate these new behaviors into the expectation of near real-time interactions with companies. They want the experience to mimic other online interactions and want the experience to be personalized and delivered up "when, where and how" they want.
• The social customer wants a "self-managed' experience and expects the company to provide the plumbing.
• Customer centricity: the conversation is controlled by the customer.
• SCRM moves the point from management to engagement.
• The old saying of "like me good" not like me bad" is even more important in today's online world. Trust filtering is an important key to building trust. Video could add quite a bit to the "trust factor", visual cues are still very powerful
• SCRM is an extension of traditional CRM not a replacement. The underlying data is important, especially when tied to new sources of social data and coupled with socialytics.
• People are the new platform (yes, I've written about it before, but it applies to all people in a social biz, customers, employees, partners, suppliers...) The focus is not on technology or process anymore, it's on people.
• Make the customer a part of your business (duh). Think "mom and pop" business from main street USA only at scale.
• The goal is customer engagement and engagement comes from providing experiences to the customer. Create an experience for your customer, don't just "sell" them something...the strength is in emotions and emotional ties.
• Social business is a new business model that incorporates a company philosophy and culture of transparency and honest relationships with employees, customers and partners.
• Stop focusing inward... our web sites are designed for us, customer service is designed for the company (it is CUSTOMER service after all), we sell what we have not what the customer wants... focus on the people.

This is only a small list of the excellent topics we discussed last week, take a look at the other posts to see more details. Here's another post that incorporates some of the topics from last week from Mitch Lieberman. You might also want to check out Michael Krigsman's ZDNet blog that incorporates a video interview that Michael conducted with me and Forrester analyst Dr Natalie Petouhoff talking about SCRM and social business that we recorded last week at the summit.

Concur Fusion 2010 - the Travel & Expense Cloud goes mobile

This week in Boca Raton, FL Concur users gathered to listen to company executives and partners talk about Concur's travel and expense management solutions and preview some new directions for the company. As with all user conferences the week saw a number of key announcements on product enhancements and new partnerships. In general I think Concur is leveraging some of the key technology and business trends that are starting to gain momentum and will be "hot" topics over the next few years. Concur itself is using some social business concepts in its product development processes, for example. For me, this was an exciting conference and I saw a company that is committed to listening to and delivering for its customers.

On the partner front Concur had two major announcements. The first was a deepening of its previous relationship with American Express. Concur's T&E management solution is the solution of choice for AMEX and the AMEX sales force is coming up to speed over the last year and continuing for the next few years, so that they can sell Concur's solutions into the AMEX customer base. Over time this has the potential to drive an increasing share of Concur's new business. The second announcement is the intent to tightly integrate Concur's solutions with Amadeus, a global travel industry technology and solution provider. This integration, slated for release later this year, includes making Amadeus distribution technology available in Concur Clickbook Travel and pulling travel booking from Amadeus eTravel Management back into Concur Expense. With Amadeus strong presence in Europe this partnership should help increase Concur's footprint there while giving Amadeus a stronger presence in the US market.

Concur is investing heavily in providing mobile travel solutions on three platforms, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. The mobile app is an extension of the decktop travel and expense management solution and provides the capability to view and manage itineraries, book rental cars, hotels, dining reservation and taxi's, enter expenses and manage / review expense reports. There's even the capability to capture receipt images and send them along with expense reports. The mobile functionality is extended by incorporating other 3rd party functionality for things taxis (RideCharge), an approach that could open up all sorts of services to the mobile user. The move to mobile for Concur is interesting for another reason, it is a new focus (or I should say adds new focus) as in the past the focus customers for Concur were the travel managers and the expense department. Adding focus on the end traveler adds a lot of value to the user base, IMHO and is the right strategy in an environment that is starting to shift focus to the individual (or as I've said before, as the people become the platform). This is a first version of the mobile app and there is a lot of interesting things on the roadmap as Concur moves forward, things like leveraging location awareness for a variety of functions (from finding hotels, restaurants, etc. to automating milage reporting on expenses), integrating social networks, and adding Android support.

As icing on the Concur cake, they also reported FY2010 Q1 earnings this week. They had a strong quarter with 16% year over year growth with total revenue reaching $67.7M.

Some Predictions for 2010

2009 is thankfully behind us and its time to turn our attention to 2010 in ernest. Every year at this time teams of analysts all over IDC get together and produce top ten predictions documents in their coverage areas. My group, Software Business Solutions is no exception, we're putting the finishing touches on our document this weekend. I have a joint breakfast briefing with Henry Morris and Steve Hendrick this Tuesday, 1/26 to highlight predictions from the 3 major WW IDC software groups. Contributing to the predictions from my group: Mary Wardley, Albert Pang, Amy Konary, Robert Mahowald, Sanjeev Pal, Darren Bibby, Steve White, Virginia Agee, Mira Perry and Caroline Dangson.

I'm not going to share the whole document in this post, if you want that you'll have to check it out on the IDC site (should be up in a week or so), but I do want to share the predictions that we came up with this year. From a trends perspective the predictions theme is the "new normal" and they fell into a few buckets; social business, mobile, next gen apps / cloud and lasting change. Here are our predictions:

1. The social business movement gains momentum through the cultural shift that is enabled by social enabled applications that are formed from the intersection of collaboration, content, search, communities, CRM and the current web 2.0 tools like blogs, wiki’s, microblogs, etc. with 50%+ of the Fortune 500 initiating social business projects this year.

2. Software vendors, recognizing that "one size does not fit all" with partner programs, will move to an a-la-carte benefit structure versus a long list of perks with diluted value.

3. The great divide will come to an end between horizontal and vertical applications for the enterprise.

4. As a fundamental part of the Social Business transformation businesses shift their focus from technology and process to people, who in effect become the new enterprise platform.

5. Cloud infrastructure computing moves squarely into the mainstream as a significant number of the Fortune 1000 companies adopt the utility computing model demonstrated by moving a portion of their “sandbox” apps into production on public clouds.

6. In response to a productivity spike, VARs, SIs and ISVs will turn in force to contracting (virtual staffing) and partnering. Vendor programs will adapt to support these new models.

7. "There's an app for that": Mobile becomes the new enterprise desktop with more than 50% of US workers accessing applications via a mobile device.

8. The 'new normal' will give rise to increased end-user buying power causing extreme pressure on existing vendors to mold offerings and giving opportunity to aggressive suppliers.

9. A software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7B decline in WW new license revenues in 2010.

10. Cloudsourcing becomes a major alternative for companies looking to outsource non-core business processes (software-in-a-service).

So there you have it, what other predictions did we miss for enterprise applications and their vendors and partners?

Update on the "local" wars

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Google's (now failed) attempt to buy Yelp. In that post I pointed out a couple of reasons why I thought Yelp was falling behind services like FourSquare, Gowalla, etc. There were a few things that I thought made the newer services "better", context aware location based check-in that can be shared with your network on Facebook, Twitter, etc., the ability to tie your Yelp community to your existing community for the added trust that accompanies your established network and augmented reality. I talked about reaching local markets, something that Google and many others find very appealing and Yelp has done quite well, in this post on hyper-local. This last weekend Yelp announced the addition of a few new features on its iPhone app that completely closed the gap on the other apps that I had mentioned. Specifically Yelp added:

• A friend finder feature that let's you find your Facebook friends and friends in your iPhone address book. In effect tying Yelp to your trust networks.
• Check-ins. Now you can broadcast your location to your friends and share tips, info, etc. on Yelp, Facebook and Twitter. It includes push notifications and the ability to show check-ins as well as find near-by friends who have check-in. You can also attain "regular" status for businesses you visit regularly.
• Share via Facebook Connect and Twitter
• Updates to the augmented reality feature, Monocle, that adds check-ins and a map view to the reviews already available.
• Access to your Yelp profile from the iPhone.

All-in-all a very strong move by Yelp to address the issues that were starting to make them somewhat dated in the mobile local apps arena. I've just started using the new features so I'll update this after I have a higher comfort level with them.

Hyper-connected

I woke up this morning and did what I do most mornings, reached for my iPhone sitting next to my bed to start catching up on what I missed while I was sleeping. Let's see, a few Twitter DM's (handily sent to SMS) to answer, a few Facebook comments (SMS again) and mail, a couple of txt messages that didn't wake me up, notifications from Gowalla and FourSquare, a txt from Ribbit of a voice mail I missed last night...stumble into the kitchen for a Monster drink and then sit down at the MacBook to give Twitter a better look, check in on Facebook and flip through Netnewswire for interesting info to read and post to Twitter, work on a blog post idea, a quick check of email (ugh, a couple of hundred piled up since yesterday) and the day's started. After some breakfast I have to take my daughters to Barnes and Noble (I can't convince them to switch to a Kindle, my preferred always connected reading device) so throw iPhone in 1 pocket, Blackberry in the other...OK, yes I'm an extreme case but lets face it, more and more, we're connected to our networks all the time. In a recent IDC survey 40.3% of respondents reported using a smart phone at least 2 times per workday to connect to the Internet (source IDC Nov 2009, n=4710, US based). Two years ago in another US based survey of the ~32% of respondents that used the Internet on a mobile device they spent an average of 45 hours per week online, 38 stationary and 7 hours per week on the mobile (n=3176) (and I'm sure that number has gone up since 2008). According to Neilsen Online in 2008 roughly 72.5% of the total US population used the Internet (or 220,141,969 people) increasing to 74.1% in 2009 (227,719,000 people). That would make mobile users 70,445,430 people in 2008 and 91,770, 757 people in 2009. With the expansion of wifi, especially of free wifi, which is now getting very available even at 30K feet as more and more airlines add support, and the ability to connect extends almost everywhere.

As the general population becomes more mobile, as we become more and more connected through the social web and as the lines between business and personal get blurrier are we moving to a place where we are in fact, always connected. "Always" is relative of course, I mean, people do still disconnect at times, even the most connected of us run away for a short periods. It seems to me though, that the disconnected time gets less and less. Now I know that I'm affected but what I call the "edges" effect...people who live on the edges of the US in general, seem to be early adopters of technology (and no, I have no scientific or survey data to support this theory, just a lot of years observing that behavior). I remember during the Internet bubble using Webvan. I loved Webvan, you ordered groceries online and they showed up at your house; you could even save the shopping list and just reorder it each week (or whatever period you wanted)...fantastic really. Kozmo.com was another great one, you ordered just about anything from them and they'd deliver...videos, sandwiches, whatever you wanted. Order and their army of moped enabled delivery people mobilized to procure and deliver! I remember trying to explain these to friends and relatives in other parts of the country and mostly all I got were blank stares...I think my mom believed it was some sort of plot to get her to eat old produce or something. Lesson learned, what sounds good in San Francisco may not sound that way to the middle of the US. I've learned to use that as a sort of litmus of start up ideas, "what would they say about the idea in Cleveland, Kansas City or some other middle of the country city", just to see if its something that has a prayer of getting to any sort of widespread adoption.

Anyway, I'm rambling, back to the topic of hyper-connectivity. Individually we are more and more connected, both to the Internet and through the internet / social web to each other. That connectivity moves easily over to the business world. Businesses are interconnected to supply chain, partners, employees, customers and even competitors. This interdependence or ecosystem, has very different modes of interaction than independent people, businesses, etc. Independent organizations focus internally, interdependent organizations must focus externally. This is one of the fundamental changes that are creeping into businesses today and part of the foundation of the transition to a social business. Hyper-connectivity opens us up to more, different and better ways of interacting and collaborating. It also can strain old paradigms and stress old modes of interaction (maybe that falls in the "progress has its price" bucket). For me, adjusting to hyper-connectivity has not really required any effort but I suppose some of us will find the price too high.

Hyper-local

The recent rumors around Google acquiring Yelp (which of course have subsequently fallen through) and my recent use of several location based apps like FourSquare and EveryBlock caused me to start thinking about the emerging re-focus on local business. I think that several technologies have finally matured enough to have a real impact for local businesses to effectively reach potential customers in new and compelling ways. Local businesses, or as we like to refer to them, the "long tail", are plentiful, diverse and difficult to reach. SW companies intuitively know that there's money in that long tail, but few have successfully managed to extract any of it. I'm specifically talking about the "small" in the small and medium business market. Certainly Microsoft, Sage, Intuit and others have managed to build solid businesses in the medium business space. And I guess Intuit's QuickBooks product line is the standard in small bookkeeping. Where it gets sticky (and frankly, where the most opportunity lies) is in helping local businesses attract and keep customers. Google would love to come up with a way to reach these businesses and get them into the fold. So far, at least from an Internet perspective, Yelp is the only company that has made any progress to speak of (and obviously the reason Google was interested in acquiring Yelp).

Yelp's approach is interesting as it combines community with crowdsourcing and user generated content to gain influence which it can then leverage to sell ads. The real asset then is the legions of loyal reviewers that regularly generate content on the site. Those reviewers vie for prestige and recognition in the community and the ones that are successful get to attend "exclusive" Yelp events in addition to the recognition of the community. To monetize the site Yelp has put local account reps in place to sell ads. There's quite a bit of "pounding the pavement" in the model but it is proving effective.

What did people do before Yelp, used the Yellow Pages I guess. At least the Yellow Pages were the last successful business model for reaching and engaging these small, local businesses. There were some attempts to translate the Yellow Pages to the online world, most notably Yahoo and even AT&T but thankfully they really haven't gained much influence. I suppose there are still people and communities of people that use the print or online yellow pages but it seems like its going the same way as print media. Anyway, where is this all going? Several trends, I think, will start impacting hyper-local this year, mobile, context aware apps (most notably location awareness), and the social web. Yelp leverages social web of course and does have a mobile app that's location aware already. I wonder though, will apps like FourSquare, with its ability to serve up location specific offers and specials, start to erode some of Yelp's local clout? The game portion of FourSquare (and Gowalla as well) does seem to be drawing more people into participating and if the momentum continues could offer local businesses a very targeted way to reach prospective customers.

There are other approaches that could help reach into hyper-local that combine context awareness with augmented reality and even user generated content. Apps like Wikitude and cyclopedia, for example could make a run at local advertising and embed them into their AR features. GraffitiGeo could also be a contender in this space, as it adds in user generated location specific "notes" or Graffiti and crowdsourcing votes for or against local businesses. And EveryBlock, which is owned by MSNBC, is another interesting play in the hyper-local online news and information aggregation space. Currently EveryBlock ha Google Ads on the site, but you have to think that they could garner some share if the site continues to attract new users. And what about google, will they make their own play to try and capture some of the new hyper-local ad revenue?

Top Tech Disruptors of the 2000's

Every decade seems to carry a set of defining themes in tech. For the 1990's it was the move to client / server, the emergence of the transaction web and the frenzy to "solve" the Y2K threat (and perhaps the rise of the Internet bubble). The 2000's started with a fizzle as the world realized that the Y2K "threat" was a non-event and continued with a loud pop as the Internet "bubble" burst. Beyond that somewhat inauspicious beginnings though, we had an active and productive decade in tech with many disruptors and advances that set up the next decade as one that will see dramatic change in tech.

So what are the key developments and disruptions from the last decade? Here are, IMHO, the most important developments of the last decade:

1. Mobile: The 2000's will be known as the decade that put the Internet in our pockets. Apple, with its introduction of the iPhone and the apps store changed everything. Yes there were so called "smart phones" before the iPhone but they were a shadow of the power that Apple put in our hands with the first (and arguably still the best) mobile computing platform. Mobile is the key that opened or at least accelerated many of the other disruptions in the 2000's.

2. Cloud: We opened the decade with the applications service provider (ASP) or hosted business model starting to make small (very small) inroads against on premise apps and we leave the decade with full blown concept called cloud computing disrupting the software world. Salesforce.com led the charge first in the apps market and then breaking ground again in the platform as a service (PaaS) market with its Force.com platform. Cloud computing has broken out into 3 distinct "layers", cloud apps (like Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud), PaaS (Force.com and Netsuite's Suitecloud for example) and cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2, Rackspace, etc.). A 4th layer started to emerge in 2009, Cloudsourcing (I wrote about it here), or software in a service that combines business process outsourcing and cloud apps into a single offering. I believe we will see a lot more from cloudsourcing offerings in 2010. I could spend a lot of time predicting where I think the cloud is moving as we step into 2010, but I'll save that for the upcoming predictions post.

3. Social Web: This last decade will be remembered as the time that the social web grew up. It did have roots in the late 90's of course, but the move from the transaction web to the social web happened during the 2000's as blogging matured as a media form, social networking redefined on line relationships, and microblogging set a new standard for real time information sharing. The social web has proven to be transgenerational and transformative on the consumer side. For business we started with enterprise 2.0, which often focused more on internal enterprise processes, social media, which manifest the use of web 2.0 tools for outbound business (like Twitter, blogging, etc.), social CRM and finally, as we leave the 2000's, the more holistic social business movement. Social business starts to combine all of these different movements into an internal and external business strategy to transform the way people interact. One other concept should be mentioned in this context, in fact I almost made it its own separate disruption, collective intelligence. So much of the value in the social web for business comes from the application of the concept of collective intelligence to solving business problems and deciding which products or services to build / sell.

4. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): A few years ago...actually for a good part of the last decade, SW vendors talked about SOA. First vendors released apps that were SOA "enabled" and now we're seeing the release of "native" SOA apps across the next few years. SOA is important but I do think that some vendors over-played the SOA card where customers were concerned. Frankly I'm not so sure how much customers cared about SOA, they certainly cared about the results, easier integration and in a world that is increasingly seeing IT departments with apps both on premise and in the cloud integration is an even higher priority. To me buying an app with SOA is like buying a house with modern, up to code plumbing; I'd certainly care if it wasn't there or didn't work, but its not a factor in why I would buy the house.

5. Context aware apps: Building apps that react appropriately to the real-time context of their use is a concept that we've talked about for quite a few years. Over the last few years (especially the last 2 years) we've started to see good examples of this concept in software and devices. Probably the most prevalent example is in mobility where augmented reality apps are making some headway in using location to provide a variety of information ranging from user generated tags and reviews of restaurants, coffee shops, bars and clubs to tour guide-like information on local landmarks (I discuss this more in this post). Smart devices that combine SW and HW to provide contextual information are also starting to become available (Fedex SenseAware, for example). There are other enterprise examples as well, things like analytics that provide relevant information to users based on who is using the app (role) and what specific function they are performing.

6. Influence: OK, influence isn't a technology disruption, but instead it was significantly disrupted by technology over the last decade. The social web has caused a huge shift in the way we look at influence in almost all industries. Since I'm in the technology influence business it's easy for me to see just how broad and deep this disruption is causing change. The analyst business is certainly feeling the impact of this disruption and the changing channels and models that accompany it. Content used to be where a great deal of the value was for tech analysts firms, for example, but because of the changes content is now becoming something that is available in ever increasing quantities for free. This change alone has caused a massive ripple in media, especially print. Don't get me wrong, content is still important, its just not the point of value, instead the influence itself is the point of value. Taking this further, content establishes influence and influence and content establish credibility. Companies will pay for credibility in the form of consulting for example. Blogs, microblogs (Twitter), online videos, podcasts and social networks are increasingly the center of building / increasing influence.

7. Real-time: The web is becoming real-time through channels like Twitter and search is following this trend (see this post). Today people look to the web for breaking news and real-time information sharing (conversations). This has all sorts of implications for traditional media and for all consumers of information. The evolution of real-time search fuels this shift and will make the web both the channel and the source for real-time information gathering.

8. Connectedness / people as the platform: The last decade has seen the start of a shift in focus in the enterprise from technology to people. As people become the platform technology becomes the enabler for this process. Mobile combined with our always on culture is accelerating the shift both personally and in the enterprise.

9. Consolidation in tech: The last decade was in many ways defined by the massive consolidation across the tech vendor landscape. Many of the major brands of the 1990's are no longer independent companies but instead part of the remaining few mega-tech vendors. Oracle of course led this movement with something like 60 acquisitions in 5 years but many of the other mega-vendors did major acquisitions as well. Multi-brand product portfolios, something seen often in other industries, has become a very viable and profitable business model in tech. Here are two posts that talk more about the impact of this new landscape: 1 and 2

Well that's my list. Now some may ask why Google didn't make the list. I debated this with myself quite a bit. I do think that Google has the potential to be a disruptor in the enterprise but this list is about disruptions that have already started and I just don't see Google's influence as that strong in the enterprise yet. Certainly they're the powerhouse in search and I believe that they have the potential to be a powerhouse in mobile with Android. The other things they're working on, including Google Apps, Wave, etc. are all interesting but I still think we're at the wait and see point. Come back and check this list in another 10 years, maybe Google is a major disruption by then...

2009 Retrospective

It's that time of year again, you know, the time to look back at the year and think about all that's happened (and hopefully what we've learned that might help look forward into next year). It was a tough year from many different fronts, the economy spawned hardships that ranged from slower business to loss of jobs and houses on unprecedented scale. No industry was immune from the downturn and high tech certainly has seen its share of troubles. In spite of all the negatives there were some bright spots. Several tech trends that were emerging only last year moved mainstream with the help of the economic crisis.

Every year at IDC in Dec / Jan we do a series of predictions that start with high level predictions developed by a team of senior analysts that support IDC Chief Analyst Frank Gens and then move on through each major research group. Last year my group published the following predictions:

1. The 2008 Financial Crisis Will Drive Accelerated Growth of Software-as-a-Service–Based Solutions

2. Several Large Software Vendors Will Restructure Their Partner Program Tiers in 2009.

3. Open Source Software Gets the Boost to the "Mainstream" by the Effect of the Economy and the Subsequent Change in Buying Behaviors.

4. Partner Analytics Will Come of Age in 2009 as Vendors Seek Partner Quality over Partner Quantity.

5. Compliance, Litigation Preparedness, and Business Process Efficiency Will Continue to Drive Content Management Budgets.

6. Partners Will Create Several New "Partner Run" Partner-to-Partner Communities in 2009.

7. Consumer-Born Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools Will Permeate New Customer and Partner Initiatives.

8. An Economic and Technological Perfect Storm Will Raise the Enterprise 2.0 Ship Higher than Others.

9. Platform as a Service Will Create a "Custom" Alternative for Vertical-Specific Solutions, Putting Pressure on the Major Enterprise Software Vendors to Develop or Acquire a Platform-as-a-Service Offering.

10. Next-Generation Enterprise Applications Vendors Will Win the Trifecta of Business Models.

Looking at the predictions the first thing that strikes me is that we need to make these more measurable and in fact that is our plan for this year. That said, how did we do in calling this year? #1 is pretty easy, SaaS (or cloud apps) did see very strong growth, well over 30%, in an enterprise software market that was just about flat overall. Most of the SaaS vendors saw good to very good growth as was evidenced by the strong quarterly reports from the public pure-play SaaS vendors. I'd say we get an A+ on this one and I feel confident that SaaS / cloud apps are now an accepted deployment option in both the SMB and enterprise markets that will continue to see rapid growth for the next several years.

For #2 we also did fine, several large SW vendors make changes to their partners programs that ranged from redefining criteria for program levels to adding things like specialization certification as a new differentiator (Oracle Specialized). I'd say this one gets an A.

Open Source SW, much like SaaS, did see a boost from the economy and we put the overall growth this year at ~34%. The rest of the story though is that in talking with CIO's in companies that ranged from mid-sized all the way to large enterprise it is now very common for IT organizations to have an OSS strategy and to have incorporated some use of OSS in the stack. Often now the use of OSS has grown out of just system infrastructure software and is moving up into the middleware and apps layers. I'd give us an A on this one as well.

Partner analytics is an area of partner program development that IDC has supported for quite some time. Using deep analytics to support partner program decisions and policies is a best practice. Sometimes selecting and collecting the "right" metrics on partners is difficult and while many programs do use them, the use of deeper analytics could still be improved. I'd say some progress was made last year but I don't feel like the inroads were as good as we had hoped. I'd give #4 a C.

Compliance, litigation preparedness and business process efficiency are still key factors in enterprise software deployments and their impact continued to drive some spending in content management in spite of the economy, although growth dropped to flat or slightly negative as the economy stayed weak and companies delayed SW spend decisions. We do see a good bounce-back next year though, with growth jumping up above 5% as budget controls start to relax a little. I'd have to call #5 a B-.

Partner-to-partner (P2P) networking has been a hot topic for the last few years. The major vendors have tried to build programs and offer assistance that encourages go-to-market relationships among its partner ecosystems. A few independent organizations have grown up among partners as well (IAMCP for Microsoft partners, for example). We expected to see more of these independent organizations this last year but in reality, it seems like the severity of the economy took the attention off any of these new initiatives for the most part. Grade on this one, D.

#'s 7 & 8 were probably the biggest home runs this year. We've watched as social networking and social media turned into social software solutions and social business initiatives. There's tremendous momentum across internal and external business processes and operations to look to the social web for the next generation of tools to facilitate relationships and collaboration. We're now talking about things like social CRM, social product design, social marketing and social supply chain management. Internally we are starting to see the convergence of collaboration, search, content management, and communications into social software as well. We also saw most of the major SW vendors use social tools in their partner programs. We're seeing widespread use of social software to change the way vendors interact with partners including blogs, wiki's, and even customer facing initiatives like SAP's Ecohub. Overall I'd give both 7 & 8 and A+.

Platform as a service (PaaS) has increased in importance and is getting much more attention from ISV's and SI's. Much of the progress this year was driven by Salesforce.com's Force.com PaaS and its efforts to recruit new partners. Netsuite also rolled out its PaaS offering, Suitecloud and hired a new ISV partner executive to build a community. While both of these initiatives are gaining momentum its still slow going on both the ISV and the prospect sides. The vendors are gaining traction though and some very strong hybrid partners are emerging (for example Appirio, who is a partner with salesforce.com, Google and Amazon). There's also movement from the major SW vendors with Microsoft launching Azure and SAP announcing the intent to have a PaaS offering next year. Overall I'd have to rate this prediction a solid B+, good progress but maybe not as much traction yet.

The hybrid business model, or vendors that offer on premise, SaaS and outsourced processes is gaining among larger SW vendors. Particularly the blending of, or offering customer flexibility through both on prem and SaaS seems to be the prevailing model moving forward for Oracle, Microsoft and even SAP (although most of their offerings are slated to launch next year). The third option is getting renewed attention as software in a service or cloudsourcing, although non of the major vendors have moved in that direction directly. It now seems that cloudsourcing will be a fertile ground for a new generation of process outsourcing partners that are emerging and taking advantage of the SaaS model with a services wrapper. Overall on this prediction I'd say we hit a solid B, with a new model emerging around outsourcing that wasn't really on the radar last year.

So there you have the report card from 2009. Look for our new set of predictions mid January and if you'd like to discuss them in person join Henry Morris, Steve Hendricks and me for a complimentary breakfast briefing, Envisioning the New Normal: IDC Software Predictions 2010 on Jan 26th in Burlingame, CA.

What I've discovered about Twitter

Over the last weekend I noticed a Tweet from analyst colleague Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) about a interesting project. The idea, dubbed #MonTwit, is to get a group of blogger / analysts to write about the same topic on the same day (today, to be exact). I love the idea and of course I'm a big fan of Twitter so I figured I'd join in.

I joined Twitter in June of 2008, somewhat late to the party in reality but I was experimenting with several types of social media at the time and got around to Twitter in June. There were only a few IDC analysts on Twitter back them and most of them were not that active. I went through the standard use cycle (at least from what I've seen); for the first month or so I was a Twitter voyeur (or as some people say a Twitter lurker) and mostly observed. Once I started to get the basic rhythm down I went into stage 2, the "ham sandwich" stage where the mundane was supposed to somehow be interesting. In fairness I also started sharing some of what I was working on and who I was talking to and over time I evolved out of the mundane and started to develop my own style and use cases. Getting followers was very slow going at first until I decided to just go out and find people in my industry and follow them. I stumbled across Carter Lusher (@carterlusher) from SageCircle (actually he follow me, he's great at finding analysts on Twitter) and realized he followed a lot of the people I was interested in so I used his list as a good start at my expansion. This was 3 or 4 months into the experiment and I think that was really when I found my own use cases and felt like I understood "Twitter etiquette". Most importantly I started to recognize that it was a conversation and that the more you gave into the community the more you got back.

Once I was over around 500 followers I realized that I couldn't stay on top of the noise through the Twitter web client so I asked my Twitter community for advice and started trying different desktop and iPhone clients. For quite a while I used Tweetdeck on my MacBook but earlier this year I switched to Seesmic Desktop, which I still use today. The key for the desktop for me is a strong ability to segment my community into groups so that I can get what I need when I need it. I also like the support for Twitter lists and the Facebook integration. On my iPhone I use several clients, mostly Tweetdeck and Tweetie 2 presently. On my Blackberry I like Seesmic for BB.

I am often asked how I use Twitter and what benefit do I get from that use from people who are not on Twitter or who have not used it for any length of time. One of the first discoveries for me was that you really can't understand Twitter until you use it for awhile. It's like most social networks, immersion is really the only way to gain that understanding. I use Twitter for: 1. sharing information (relevant links, live Tweeting events, interesting things I learn from clients and end users, what I'm working on as well as post on this blog), 2. real-time breaking news, 3. information gathering (especially useful to follow events to which I am unable to attend), 4. short, quick data trending (ask a question, get lot's of relevant answers), 5. "meeting" people in my industry, networking, 6. communication (for me, much more effective for real-time comms than email, but then I hate email), and 7. conversations. One of my favorite fallouts of my involvement in Twitter has been the Tweetups and the people I've transitioned from just a Twitter connection to a real, face-to-face connection. I've met some very interesting people and connect with many of them both here in San Francisco and when I visit other cities. The community grows all the time and more and more I am able to connect on and off line with some great people.

Twitter is definitely an acquired taste and everyone defines their own use cases. That's one of the great things about it, you can make it what you want...be involved a little or a lot, it's your choice. The confined nature of the Tweet keeps things direct and clear for me. A day never goes by that I don't learn something from Twitter, so for me, that's real value. The more you put in, the more you get out...