ReadWriteEnterprise

An iPhone Visualization App That Syncs with the Cloud

Alex Williams — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:50:41 -0800

Roambi announced a pro version of its iPhone application this week that syncs with Salesforce.com and other cloud-based services or on-premsie sales environments. It's a visualization application, providing mobile workers with a pretty cool way to see sales information.

Integration is by far one of the most significant trends we are seeing in the enterprise space. It's a wave, really, marked this week by Salesforce.com and its move to turn the Force.com development platform into a service that makes all of its applications social.

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A good example of this trend are small companies like Roambi that can now reach into the enterprise by integrating with Salesforce.com and other cloud platforms like Google Apps.

We caught up with the founders of Roambi for a quick demo of their new pro product and how it syncs with both on-premse applications and SaaS services.

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Cisco iPhone Security App Reaches Across the Network

Alex Williams — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:49:34 -0800

iPhones are becoming a standard in the enterprise. And with the the iPhones, we are seeing a number of applications for a variety of different uses.

The latest is an application for security managers made by Cisco. The application alerts managers to threats in the enterprise so they may respond in real-tme to incidents that merit attention. It's now available in the iTunes store.

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Threats to the enterprise come in all forms. Malware is perhaps the biggest concern for security managers. Its various forms are constantly changing.

The Cisco app is networked to its Security Intelligence Operation (SIO). This group has different functions. It includes a threat monitoring network that includes 700,000 globally deployed Cisco security devices; a database of 40,000 vulnerabilities and 3,300 IPS signatures. Third-party data feeds are also watched. The SIO also includes a global team of more than 500 security analysts.

Real-time updates deliver information to the security manager.This information includes information from security devices, along with best-practice recommendations and other information for tracking threats and analyzing intelligence.

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Cloud Computing: Where to Next?

Alex Williams — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:04:00 -0800

In his keynote this morning, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff continued his critique on software companies for their lack of development and sense of entitlement. And not surprisingly, the full-on pitch continued for cloud computing with a parade of executives showing the applications they developed on Force.com.

About 19,000 people attended Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com event. Partners lined up to get on stage. David Girouard of Google showed a map with all their customers around the globe. He recounted a story with Eric Schmidt, who was astounded by the frustrations that CIO's expressed about the architecture they inherited. An Accenture executive said that cloud computing is here to stay. He showed the company's applications on Force.com. The Black Crowes performed last night. The pitch is fever high.

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What does this all say about the market? Is this an event that marks the point where cloud computing goes mainstream?

Have we reached the apex of cloud computing hype?

I asked the question on Twitter:

Gartner sees the hype this way:

Regardless, this has been a monumental week for cloud computing. The long established software companies have now lined up with their offering. Microsoft launched Azure. Salesforce.com unveiled Salesforce Chatter, Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2. IBM announced a cloud analytics platform that leverages Cognos, its business intelligence suite.

The more established companies carry the benefit of long established customer channels. IBM and Microsoft fit into this camp. Additionally, Microsoft appears to get it. The Azure platform integrates some open-source components. These companies face their own challenges as much internally as from the customer world. But their presence also means that cloud computing is close to being accepted in the enterprise mainstream.

Salesforce.com is a more interesting animal. Benioff is a very aggressive CEO. Business Week is calling him "The King of the Cloud." He is never shy to lampoon the established software companies in the market. He calls out his competitors like Sugar CRM, which is fighting right back with its own campaign: Behind The Smokescreen, a play on Benioff's new book: "Behind The Cloud."

Benioff has to show off his partners. He never misses an opportunity to tell you how many customers he has. In a way, he has to play this role. He has the big players running. He has to keep them running, on the defensive, so he can move in with Chatter across the enterprise. That's the trick right now for Benioff. Moving as fast as he possibly can to gain that permanent traction.

The hype is peaking. It's a different game for the entire market. It's a race now to win the mainstream.

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Sysomos Launches Heartbeat 2.0: Enterprise-Grade Social Media Monitoring

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:37:07 -0800

Sysomos just launched the next version of Heartbeat, the company's social media monitoring tool. Highlights of Heartbeat 2.0 include a redesigned user interface and Facebook integration. Sysomos' customers can now monitor public conversations on Facebook and manage their Facebook Pages right from within Heartbeat. The Facebook integration tracks user activity, top keywords and top fans on Facebook pages.

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Focus on Social Media Workflow

Heartbeat does not restrict the number of users per account. This is a good thing, given that one of Heartbeat's best features is its ability to assign tasks and follow-ups to other team members. Sysomos calls this the 'engagement stream' and while Heartbeat's ability to monitor social media streams is impressive, most of the workflow in an enterprise setting happens through these engagement streams.

Facebook Integration

As Sysomos's Nilesh Bansal told us earlier today, the company's customers really wanted to manage their Facebook accounts through Heartbeat. Even though it takes a bit to set up - and even though Facebook still doesn't make a lot of its data public - the integration actually turns out to be quite interesting and gives users a chance to manage their social media accounts in one place.

The Facebook integration shows a sentiment meter, as well as a tree graph with the most often used keywords in these postings. Even though Facebook doesn't offer a lot of public data yet, Bansal told us that the company tries to use whatever data it can get.

It is important to note that Heartbeat is not just a Twitter and Facebook tool. Sysomos also tracks blogs and forum postings. One of the most interesting aspects of Heartbeat is that it can find the most influential bloggers and Twitter users that write about your company (or competitors). Heartbeat also offers sentiment analysis and does a surprisingly good job at keeping spam tweets and blogs out of its index.

MAP: Social Media Analytics

Sysomos also offers MAP, the company's social media analytics tool. While Hearbeat is geared towards end-users in the enterprise, MAP is a fully-featured analytics tool. With this power, however, also comes a steep learning curve. MAP also doesn't feature any of Heartbeat's social media workflow features. We took a close look at MAP in an earlier review. Sysomos also offers a very helpful chart that compares the features of MAP and Heartbeat.

Pricing

With an entry-level price of $500 per month, Heartbeat is clearly not a consumer product. Most of Sysomos' customers buy packages that also include access to MAP and the company creates custom quotes for these customers. We have heard, however, that Sysomos plans to offer a free or less costly product for small businesses and consumers in the future.

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MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?

Alex Williams — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:13 -0800

Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.

MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.

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MindTouch Cloud is meant for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform.

It's also another example of how enterprise technologies are increasingly designed so the average business user may perform tasks that have traditionally been the domain of the IT department.

What differentiates MindTouch from Sharepoint and other services is its emphasis on the data. Users may collaborate across multiple enterprise systems and web applications.

MindTouch Cloud is an enterprise mashup service. Business critical information can be exported from enterprise systems and mashed up to create reports and build applications. It has the requirements for the enterprise, including authentication using LDAP, single-sign on security. Role management is built into the service with the capability to create new users, roles and groups.

Compare that to Salesforce Chatter and you see some similarities in how applications can be integrated to create an intelligent dashboard environment that fits into an enterprise environment.

MindTouch does need some work on its user interface. But it has all the features that can make it a valuable service for a business looking to build dashboards that can mashup enterprise data and external applications.

This is MindTouch's first cloud computing effort. Pricing starts at $7 per user per month.

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The Future of Salesforce.com? Twitter, Facebook and the Social Web

Alex Williams — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:01:25 -0800

Salesforce.com is offering the capability to integrate Facebook and Twitter into its sales and customer support offerings, another sign the company is making a full-shift to the social web.

How deep is this move? On stage this morning at Dreamforce, Mark Benioff called Facebook and Twitter a "phenomena," going on to say that the integration of the social web is the biggest development for the company in the past ten years.

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You see this in Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, two new offerings which are both built on Salesforce Chatter. The Salesforce Chatter application is an enterprise collaboration envrionment, which the company launched this morning.

Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 are essentially extensions of its sales and customer support services but with social features fully built in all aspects of the products.

Some of the features to be found in Service Cloud 2 Sales Cloud 2:

Twitter integration: In Sales Cloud 2, users may Twitter stream into Salesforce so sales people can engage in conversations with people and add that information into the sales funnel. In Service Cloud 2, customer support may follow Twitter and respond to people with real-time customer support.

Answers: This is a pretty cool feature. A Dell executive showed how an "Answer," tab can be added into Facebook where customers may pose their questions.

Mobile: A sign that moble apps are here to stay. Sales people may use the platform to send documents through the Salesforce platform.

These are a few of the features available with Service Cloud 2 and Sales Cloud 2. The majority of these features will be available in 2010.

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Salesforce.com Launches Social Enterprise Application at Dreamforce

Alex Williams — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:01:01 -0800

Salesforce.com launched a social enterprise application here at Dreamforce today that will allow companies to create their own private, social networks and integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social applications.

Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, the application serves as a secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform.

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The application models social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce.com Chatter provides the capability for customers to have profiles, feeds and groups. It will also integrate Twitter and Facebook so people may get these respective feeds into their social network environment. In addition, developers will have access to the 135,000 applications on the Force.com platform.

Some of the features with Salesforce Chatter:

Profiles: Includes contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo. We are seeing more profile features in Enterprise 2.0 applications. Starups like CubeTree are using profiles as an anchor for customers to connect.

Status Updates: A real-time activity stream - another sign that the real-time web is becoming a standard technology in the enterprise.

Feeds: Content and applications will be part of the activity stream. For example, when an update is made to the Salesforce CRM environment, it will ping the feed to notify subscribers.

Groups: Users may create their own groups to share content and updates.

Social Content: Documents such as spreadsheets can be integrated into a user's feed, similar to how a photo is shared on a social network like Facebook.

This has to be one of the more significant developments in how the enterprise is adopting the consumer web. It's another sign of the pervasiveness of social networks in people's lives.

On a broader front, this can only help the cause of Enterprise 2.0 style companies. Users benefit in terms of having another option for how they use the social web in their daily work.

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Microsoft Uses Geek Elite To Make Azure Launch A Smash Hit

Alex Williams — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:13:19 -0800

When you launch a make or break initiative like Windows Azure, you better get it right.

Well, from our vantage point, Microsoft got it right. How? In front of a sea of developers at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft trotted out a group of geek all-stars who showed how they are using Azure to do some pretty cool stuff.

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It's a sure way to show your chops when you get Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, Loic LeMeur of Seesmic and the CTO for the Cheezburger Network (I Can Has Cheezburger) to show off what they created on the Azure platform.

Mullenwegg appeared on stage to show that his company, Automattic, is fully supporting Azure. Automattic is the company behind Wordpress. His presence drove home how Azure will support PHP, MySQL and other open-source tools in additon to .NET. That's a great way to show how a company, built on proprietary technologies, is accepting the open nature of the web.

Showing off the geeks can only get you so far. You have to show the goods. And for about two hours, Microsoft showed repeatedly that Ray Ozzie's vision may be right on.

The code-named Dallas project may be the most interesting. It's a data service that provides access to information from the Associated Press, data.gov and other sources.
That's the power of cloud computing that we expect to see more of from companies across the enterprise. Azure is a window into how cloud computing changes everything simply by speeding up the delivery of actionable information. We see it time and again with the companies that come knocking here at ReadWriteWeb.

For example, FusionOps launched an on-demand, business intelligence service today. The company has the potential to disrupt the business intelligence market for ERP applications. How do they do it? They take huge models from SAP, put the data in the cloud and then integrate their rules based systems to visualize the data that sits deep in ERP systems. The application can be launched in a day. That's what's amazing. Using traditional tools, it would take a company six months to a year to do something similar at a significant cost.

Ozzie and the Developers

Ozzie needs support from developers. Bringing in the geek elite gives developers a reason to relate to what Azure provides.

Still, Microsoft is in no position to cheer too loud. They face competition at every turn in the cloud world. Amazon, Rackspace and of course, Google, have a good step on Microsoft.

But this launch should give competitors pause. It's no easy feat to garner support from people like Mullenweg. You better have something good, damn good in order for him to get on stage in front of his peers. He has everything on the line in such a situation.

But Mullenwegg said it himself a few years ago when talking about Wordpress. He said that when you launch a company, the feeling is awesome. In best cases, there are rave reviews. You feel elated. But then the moment passes and you are now in the desert where no one really cares about the launch anymore. You have to get across that desert to achieve success.

For Ozzie - it's time for that walk into the wild. Welcome to the desert.

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Rackspace Adds More Cloud-Based Services, Moves Down the Collaboration Path

Alex Williams — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:00:23 -0800

Rackspace is launching a new service called "Cloud Drive," that allows businesses to store, share and back up files in the Rackspace cloud.

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting companies but with more services being offered in the cloud, it is starting to look like it is also establishing a presence as a collaboration services provider.

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Pat Mathews, president of email and apps for Rackspace said this is exactly what is happening.

"We are definitely moving down the collaboration path with Cloud Drive," Mathews sad.

In reality, Rackspace is following a natural progression. With the ability to move IT to the cloud, Rackspace will have to deepen its collaboration service.

For instance, search is not a part of the current offering. But it is part of the roadmap and will become a critical service for customers as they move their files to the cloud. It's a focal reason why collaboration providers like Box.net put a heavy premium on search. Customers need the capability. Without it, the information can end up in folders without ever being touched again.

Some of the features that are part of Cloud Drive include:

Synchronized folders across one or more computers.
Syncronized version control to make sure colleagues are working with the most recent files.
Automatic data backups in the event of a hardware failure.

Complementing Cloud Drive is Rackspace Server Backup, which backs up applications and protects file server data. Its primary function is to back up Windows or Linux data.

Bot Cloud Drive and Rackspace Server Backup are powered by Jungle Disk, which Rackspace acquired last year.

Rackspace Cloud Drive costs $4 per user, per month. Rackspace Server Backup costs $5 per server, per month.

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Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It's Easier Than Sharepoint

Alex Williams — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:19:46 -0800

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting today, Google will provide templates that it claims makes it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets.

Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise. Employees using Google Sites may submit their own templates to a gallery, similar to the services that Sharepoint offers.

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Google Sites is making a clear strike against Microsoft which requires a certain level of technical skill to create a Sharepoint site.

The differences between Google and Microsoft are often quite striking. Microsoft is a document-centric organization. Sharepoint uses a file system architecture for customers to deposit their documents. With Sharepoint, companies may use a web inetrface to share their documents.

Google's approach is entirely web centric. Documents are web pages. Each document is a link, not a file. When documents are uploaded to Google, they are converted, so to speak, each document receiving its own unique URL.

It is this approach that you see with Google Sites. By being entirely web-centric, Google believes it is making it easier for employees to share information, act faster and cross-pollinate ideas.

It's difficult to say which approach is better though web converts will tell you that sharing web links is far easier than files. We agree with that point but the Sharepoint environment is tremendously popular. It has its core set of users who are happy that they can share documents in such a manner. Most organizations work in a document centric environment and are therefore comfortable with Sharepoint. It's an environment that many people trust.

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A Map To Better Understand The Cloud Ecosystem...And The Hype

Alex Williams — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:11:44 -0800

Trying to understand the basics of cloud computing is one matter but getting a grasp on the technologies across the different platforms is another issue entirely.

To try and simplify things just a bit, Appirio is offering a map that shows the cloud ecosystem. The map breaks out 70 different layers of technology across applications, platforms and infrastructure. The map is pretty sophisticated with the ability to drill down to understand the underlying technologies.

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Appirio is in the business of helping companies get into the cloud computing world so it is no surprise that the map has its own viewpoints on matters of the cloud.

From the Appirio blog:

"It (the map) distinguishes between offerings that are true cloud offerings vs. those that are "hosted" (single tenant / multi-instance) vs. those that are on-premise "private cloud"....not really a cloud at all.

Not really a cloud at all? Hmmm. There may be some who disagree with this view on cloud computing. Here's the take from Gartner's Tom Bittman:

That aside, the map will be pretty helpful to almost everyone with an interest in the cloud computing world. Here are a few of Appirio's conclusions:

You Want Hype, We Have Hype: Man, It's almost reminiscent of the podcasting hype a few years ago. Look at the map and you see that almost every tech company you can find has some take on the cloud. Cloud computing is at the top of Gartner's Hype Cycle. And, of course, we have Larry Ellison, who is having a blast poking fun at the world of cloud computing. Hmm....when the clouds clear, what companies in the ecosystem will turn to vapor?

The More You Share, The Better You Will Be: The name of the game is multi-tenancy. "This results in more than just economies of scale: multi-tenancy enables agility and innovation since there's only one code base to work off of, and customer behavior can be observed realtime."

It's Really Not That Clear At All: The lines are blurring out there. It's difficult to tell what's a cloud service and what is not. IBM, for instance, looks like it cuts across the spectrum. Where does it fit?

Kudos to Appirio. This is the kind of clarification that we need to get a better grasp on cloud computing and what it all means.

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Skype For Business Is a Go Now That Litigation Settled With eBay

Alex Williams — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:37:31 -0800

Skype's litigation woes with eBay had businesses a bit worried. Funding Skype in the enterprise looked risky with the potential that a judge could at some point pull the code base out from under Skype and leave businesses stranded.

But that's not an issue anymore. According to Network World, Skype now has rights to the code that is essential for the service to run. That means Skype for business is a green light for the companies seeking to use the VOIP service.

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Last month, eBay agreed to sell Skype to a consortium that included the founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, Skype retains the technology that would be required to service business users.

Using the Skype network can save companies and organizations millions of dollars per year in telecommunications costs. Call centers, international calls and a host of other services can be transferred to the Skype VOIP network.

Skype is making a big play in the corporate market. Earlier this year, the company announced Skype for SIP, which gives businesses the capability to hook a company's SIP infrastructure into the Skype network.

The beta program is underway with several PBX providers, including Cisco and Shoretel.

Still, the biggest issue is better integration. As one analyst said to Network World:

"It's a game changer," said Irwin Lazar, an analyst with Nemertes Research. "The level of frustration trying to get SIP to work can be enormous."

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Can Google and Microsoft Be Challenged with Open Source Search?

Alex Williams — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:56:20 -0800

Open-source search has some major advantages compared to its competitors.

First of all, it's free. Second, it stands up in comparison to the largest, proprietary search vendors. Third, there is a growing ecosystem around open-source search that makes it far easier to implement than ever before.

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The combination makes open-source search a potent alternative to Google and Microsoft, arguably two of the biggest players in the enterprise search market.

Lucid Imagination

Lucid Imagination considers itself a bit like Red Hat. The company provides services for Lucene and Apache Solr, open-source search technologies. This week, Lucid Imagination is releasing a certified version of Lucene 2.9. What this means is that Lucid has tested and debugged Lucene to make it palatable for organizations to implement.

As a Lucid executive said today, it's Lucene with a "shampoo and a blow dry." It can be integrated quickly into an enterprise search environment. For example, a major online retailer downloaded the certified version and had it running within a few days across its Canadian, German and United Kingdom sites.

Lucene is downloaded several thousand times a day. It is used by more than 4,000 organizations. Many organizations have switched to Lucene to replace proprietary search software products. Beyond the issue of cost, organizations are using Lucene's flexible and scalable architecture for developing highly sophisticated full-text search applications.

Compared to Lucene, Google Search Appliance prices according to the number of searches performed. This can get pretty costly for larger scale search efforts. The API can be customized to some extent but Google protects its core technology, which requires the customer to do some work arounds. Google is targeting enterprise customers to do search within Sharepoint and in a number of other ways in the Enterprise.

Earlier this month, Google announced Commerce Search, a service designed for e-tailers to customize searches for their products.

Microsoft is banking on Sharepoint to position its search functionality within the enterprise. In particular, with Sharepoint 2010, Microsoft will launch FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Based on the FAST search technology, it combines the FAST's high-end search capabilities with SharePoint.

But the issue here is again how much customization the customer can actually do with the search technology. Due to its proprietary nature, the customer has little control over how it can be customized. Customers are forced to wait to see what features Microsoft develops.

No doubt, Lucene is a super-hot player in the enterprise search market. And who's to gain? Enterprise customers who want world-class search at cost you just can't beat. Even better is the fact that one company, Lucid Imagination, is dedicated to supporting Lucene. The company has the chance to score big in the market, especially with certified offerings such as what they are providing for Lucene 2.9.

Open-source search is here to stay. The proprietary players in the market will continue to keep significant market share but open-source search has to be considered in the mix as more companies seek to take control of its search environments.

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Rackspace Says it's Closing the Gap with Amazon

Alex Williams — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:12:17 -0800

The chief executive of Rackspace says the company has closed the gap with Amazon, gaining significant market share in its cloud computing compared to a year ago.

In an interview with Reuters, Chief Executive Lanham Napier said a year ago Amazon was "incredibly far ahead," of Rackspace in the cloud computing market. But this year he said Rackspace has closed the gap with Amazon's web services business.

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Napier did not provide details about the gap nor how much Rackspace has gained on Amazon.

He did say the Rackspace cloud business contributed 10 percent to the company's revenue in the third quarter. Business for cloud computing services has been growing in excess of 100 percent per year. In the second quarter, the Rackspace cloud business grew 17 percent.

The cloud business does have its pitfalls, in particular in respect to the tight margins that come with offering the service. Napier said those tight margins have been offset by its hosting business. Rackspace provides hosting to large enterprises. Cloud computing services are primarily provided to customers for hosting websites and renting servers that can be scaled up and back down at any time.

But can this scenario continue? Competition is only starting in the cloud computing market. Rackspace competes with other cloud computing providers such as Joyent. Microsoft will soon enter the game.

The key will be in how to add margins to the cloud business. Depending on traditional hosting business may get tricky if more of that business goes to the cloud, too.

Amazon seems to be fighting that battle on a daily basis. They continue to add features but have to respond to market pressures with competitive pricing. The company recently announced it was dropping prices for its EC2 service.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a RWW sponsor.

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Google Executive Says Companies Can Get Rid of Microsoft Office...Next Year

Alex Williams — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:34:04 -0800

The Google executive in charge of Google Enterprise is talking smack about Microsoft Office, saying that firms will be able to get rid of the software suite in one year's time.

Man, those are some fighting words. The remarks came from Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division, in an interview with ZDNet Asia.

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In context, what Girouard says does make sense. Open formats are the rule these days and proprietary formats like those from Microsoft will have less of an appeal. But it may not be just Google that rules the enterprise. Microsoft SaaS offerings will become more robust and a number of new players are making headway.

Girouard, one of four presidents at Google, said that in a year's time, Google Docs will have a "point of capacity," that will be enough for people to make the switch from Microsoft Office.

He admitted that at this point, Google Docs is much less mature but efforts are underway to add 30 to 50 new features and performance upgrades that will put it in a position to work for the "vast majority" of users.

He added that Microsoft Office will never go away but as it stands it is overkill for most users. In his words, Office will be more for specialty users.

Hubris? Perhaps. Microsoft still has a huge lead and its Sharepoint product is really the future for Microsoft's place in the enterprise.

But open formats are what's hot. Young people are used to the way the Internet works. They have access to so much information that it is critical for them to port it to where they want it to be. Girouard says this movement will spread into the enterprise.

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