Dennis Howlett & the end of Software

Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet has a well-thought out, and downright brilliant piece about two camps divided over social software in the enterprise, one camp represented by most monster software companies that enter the enterprise at that painful point known as IT. The other, from newer and more agile challengers is slipping in through marketing departments concerned with actually having relationships with customers.

One exception to the big guys, he mentions is SAP (sponsor of my Global Survey of Social Media), who he writes: "

I’m thinking that SAP is realizing that it could get much closer to the millions of people who use its software rather than the IT shops that buy their stuff. The challenge, which Merritt thinks doesn’t get solved for another 2-5 years, is how companies like SAP adapt their software design strategies to accommodate this new reality. Enter the startups."

I'll let Dennis sing the SAP praises. My focus is on that 2-5 years span. What enterprise decision makers need to understand is that when you are big and cumbersome, 2-5 years translates into tomorrow morning. What it means to small and agile challengers like Jive Software, is that the crack in the door where they have inserted a foot is likely to get wider sooner.

What Dennis overlooks is the number of younger people who will be taking over the decision maker seats in the world's enterprises over the next 2-5 years. The guy who was inclined to do it the way it was always done is going to be replaced by someone perhaps more inclined to speak to the more human-oriented Jive Software rep, than the more data-centric Sharepoint.

Perhaps it may be my perpetual Pollyanna view of a social media revolution, but Dennis' post makes me think that we are having the sort of little incidents in the enterprise that will make a big difference. I think the tipping point is coming in those next 2-5 years, for some companies, perhaps sooner.

Comments

[Sam Lawrence]

@Lawrence
Got it, so this is stuff is just a buzzword. Thanks for clarifying.

Love to share a panel with you, seems like we have lots to talk about.

In the meantime, the Miami-Dade case study from a year ago you referenced can be read about here: http://tinyurl.com/32nxro

My favorite quote:
"For Microsoft, SharePoint is a critical engine to increase sales of a broad array of its other software. In 2003 the company made a basic form of SharePoint available as a free download with Windows Server, a version of Windows for the large corporate computers of customers like Miami-Dade schools. The hope was that the customers would seek -- and pay for -- a newer version of the program with more collaboration features and would then go on to buy other Microsoft software....

The catch: To squeeze all of the functionality out of SharePoint, Microsoft customers need to buy extra software from the company if they don't already have it. For instance, features in the latest version of SharePoint will work only with Microsoft's Office 2007, the newest version of the business software suite. That could be a beneficial connection for Office, as Microsoft struggles to convince some business to upgrade to Office 2007 when their current Office setup works fine."

And here is an example of Sharepoint's worldwide community site: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.aspx

See ya on the panel!

[Lawrence Liu]

@Sam, the link you provided points to an open source advocate’s outsider’s view of the Miami Dade School’s implementation of SharePoint. To stay consistent with that tactic, perhaps you’d like me to talk with your prospective customers about your product then? I’m sure that I’d be pretty good at it (not!). :-) Here’s what the Miami Dade Schools folks actually had to say about SharePoint: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/business/innovation/casestudy/miamidade.mspx. Yup, they really love it, and so do their (over 1 million!) students, teachers, and parents.

Re: “Enterprise 2.0,” – yes, I’ll stick with my position that it’s merely a buzzword. Like I blogged (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/lliu/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=13) about awhile back, technology that enables organizational change and optimizes business productivity should not be named by technologist or technopundits.

And hey, what’s wrong with the SharePoint Community Portal (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint) that I personally (yes, just me) maintain in my spare time? While it may not satisfy your definition of a community site (wow, yours (http://www.jivesoftware.com/community) looks so nice and shiny) and it certainly doesn’t showcase all of the social computing capabilities of SharePoint, it solved my most urgent business problem, which was the need to provide a central collection of links to and syndicate content from the many existing useful SharePoint community resources around the world. I didn’t want to distract their users or divert their traffic; rather, I wanted to send more users their way because #1 enemy of community self-sustainability is fragmentation. And this brings me back full circle to where this whole “conversation” started more than a week ago when I blogged (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/lliu/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=19) about the need for technology vendors to first ask customers what business problem(s) they’re trying to solve. If you had first asked me what business problem I was trying to solve with the SharePoint Community Portal before you insinuated its lack of features, I wouldn’t have wasted a few minutes of time typing this response. I hope that for your sake and your company’s, your prospective customers are at least as forgiving.

[Mike Gotta]

Lawrence and I have been discussing similar perspectives on the role of large platforms (SharePoint, Lotus Connections) and social software (see below). One theme that comes up time and time again when I talk to business and IT decision makers can be summarized as "technology stewardship".

IBM and Microsoft represent a large piece of the social software portfolio within large enterprises. The vendor that does the better job of building out the partner ecosystem will win over the long run. The core platform needs to be modular, loosely coupled, open APIs (e.g., REST), etc. Marc Andreessen in a 9/7/2007 post is a good point of reference. The vendor steward needs to allow their modules to be swapped out - for the data to be accessible, etc.

I really don't see either IBM or Microsoft doing all that great of a job when it comes to opening up the platform and building out the ecosystem by working with partners that also compete with certain capabilities (blogs, wikis, etc). The door is open now for Oracle to step in.

Jive, Traction, Connectbeam, and others (Awareness, WordPress, Drupal) all have very credible solutions. But, IT organizations cite risks such as: increased integration costs, infrastructure overlap, operational complexity and so on. And the belief that a single vendor eventually will solve the problem.

Microsoft has selected a few vendors to fill gaps (NewsGator, Confluence and Socialtext). Microsoft's Community Kit is tactical in my opinion. IBM has announced a deal with Socialtext and has done some integration with Attensa and NewsGator as well. But to complete the solution, you need to look at parts of the Lotus portfolio that some companiess may not want to pursue (given a SharePoint and Exchange investment).

There's no clear right or wrong decision. As I pointed out in these posts - people need to define the decision criteria and make these investments in the context of a reference architecture. This problem is age-old: large vendor is already in-house - market disruption occurs - new vendors deliver faster - older vendors take longer and delivers initial solution that is not that great - new vendors get some market share - older vendors finally respond with "full force" and smaller vendors either are acquired, fail or a few actually break out by differentiating themselves, focusing on verticals or extending the larger platform in some way (from competitor to partner).

http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/03/of-bread-butt-1.html

http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/03/building-a-ro-1.html

[Gabor]

What is a Frankensuite? Seems to me that the person who keeps bringing it up does not understand the term called Smart Enterprise Suites coined by Gartner. If anyone cares to dig deep within an enterprise, they will find at least 30 to 50 siloed point solutions that some departments have brought in and created a huge mess when it comes to cost, complexity, integration and compliance risk. Remember what happened with IM a few years ago? Smart Enterprise Suites have an important function in that they can provide a common foundation on which these siloed apps can be built. Instead of attacking IT, you need to understand their challenge to tie it all together and make it run, after departments bring in applications without understanding the consequences that affect other parts of the enterprise. The enterprise is not the same as ad-hoc communities on the Web. Web 2.0 will not solve the integration problems. End users demand new tools such as for Social Computing. It is important to understand that the best way to deliver these is on a common platform called the Smart Enterprise Suite.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Folks

One of the most interesting threads I've seen on the subject, so thanks.

Rather than debate the nuances, we're actually putting some of these "social" ideas to work in a very large enterprise -- with spectacular results.

If you're interested, you can follow our journey at http://chucksblog.typepad.com/a_journey_in_social_media/

Cheers!

[Sam Lawrence]

This is a fantastic thread and it's great to see a company like Microsoft having to get used to things like competition. They'll become a more awake company because they have such fantastic "David" competitors across their P&Ls (Apple vs Vista; Google vs Microhoo; and Jive vs Sharepoint). It just shows how important the space is, how big of an issue it is for Microsoft and how much disruption for them is really going on.

It's very true that all these competitors are "Davids" to the Microsoft -Blue Monster- Goliath. And remember, David is that kid with the slingshot who won.

Great conversation.

[Brendon]

@olivermarks it is great to see you like SharePoint so much, as it gives you that customizable foundation for your developers, allows IT to have the strong controls they need to implement and gives your business the flexibility to create from the UI.

@sam it appears you are slamming Microsoft for having a free product. Would you suggest that they give away products and not hope that someone buys their other products? That seems a bit silly to me and I doubt that you would do that. In fact the open source community doesn't even do that. They give their software away and they try to charge for enhancements or services.

@Gabor you hit the nail on the head. The challenges that we face in Enterprise 2.0 are very different than the ones solved by Web 2.0. Although we can use lessons learned from Web 2.0 they do not always map directly to the Enterprise.

[@olivermarks]

Brendon: Our environment is 100% open source/can see and manipulate all code installed behind the firewall. The only MS we are currently running is xp on user desktops, although the majority of our java developers are coding on Macs. I think Sharepoint is a fine product and if an enterprise choses to go down the MS path it can be an excellent solution.

I personally am keen on a modular approach, using app components to create a tailored solution to business needs which can be evolved over time.

I've compared 'Smart Enterprise Suites' to those 70's 'Music Centers' http://www.thecatalogshop.co.uk/images/music-centre-70s.jpg
on panel discussions before: you purchase the one stop solution - turntable, tape deck, 8 track etc in one big box. # years later you're trying to plug your ipod and your bluray player into it. The manufacturer doesn't support any of this (if they still exist)so you either get out the soldering iron and duct tape, buy a shiny new 'Smart Music Suite' or you start again by buying separate components.

I believe Atlassian, Jive et al (and for example in the case of Business Process Management, which the big 'Smart Enterprise Suites' models have woven in, Intalio) offer a very flexible and constantly innovative multi tier component based solution which is a real challenge to the hegemony of the bigger players at this point...

[Oliver Young]

Clearly I'm a bit late to this conversation, but kudos to Mike Gotta for effectively articulating how web services are the single most critical piece of this puzzle. I was a bit shocked that "REST" and "API" had yet to come up.

In my mind the question is not who is going to provide Enterprise 2.0 or social functionality to the enterprise but whose platform will that functionality be built upon. David functionality plugging into Goliath platforms, and both delivering profitable and sustainable businesses to completely satisfied business and IT customers is a very real possibility we shouldn't lose site of.

[Gabor]

So just a few comments here. Seems that people still do not understand what SharePoint is. It is both a product, and a platform. It is a religious debate that will never be won, but let's realize that MS offers one of the most powerful integrated development environments, and I would bet there are several MS partners building some really cool social networking and KM products on the SharePoint platform. Jive is a really cool collaboration product. I think Microsoft would be happy to work with Jive, just like they are working with Atlassian. Instead of letting religious debates get in the way, let's be pragmatic and figure out how to solve customer problems, knowing that mixed environments are here to stay. It is not a zero-sum game. Let's also understand that having a cool collaboration product is not the whole solution. Collaboration is part of the Big Picture of ECM, Compliance and Knowledge Management. Finally, what is wrong with trying to make money on software? That is what people try to do in a Knowledge-based economy. Jive is one of them, unless I am mistaken. Bottom line: I don't see why anyone could not build a product just as cool, or even more cool, using SharePoint as a platform.

[Dennis Howlett]

I disagree with @Oliver Young on the 'web services' thing - way too broad. The killer here is search but that one's for another day.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Shel, we have never met but do respect your POV and that of Dennis. I also help CIOs negotiate against the "monster" software vendors you talk about so am very familiar with their flaws and economics.

But seriously, the young who take over companies are still going to need accounting, security, supply chain, trading, billing and bunch more functionality. Is social software going to do that for them or make all that unnecessary?

I am amazed how arrogant the category of social software really is. Why does it feel the need to boil the ocean, change the enterprise? It has its role particularly in collaboration - but along side not instead of CRM, SCM, ERP, security, telecom and a bunch of other software categories. It needs to do its job well, not worry about the rest of the enterprise.

When it hones its focus and shows appropriate payback, it will find the CIO or IT is not the enemy. Just a bunch of folks trying to juggle a wide range of competing technology initiatives.

[Sam Lawrence]

FYI, ZDNet picked up on these posts and has a good roll-up perspective. You can find the article here:

Is IT becoming extinct?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=666