Enterprise Web 2.0

Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today's social computing conversations

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:55:38 +0000

Though smaller than in year's past, Germany's CeBIT trade show in Hanover this week remains one of the giants of the industry and is a must-attend event for much of Europe's technology leaders. For the last two years, I have been participating in Webciety, a show within a show that explores the emerging 21st century digital lifestyle. Here is a breakdown of how Europe is looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and how it affects us as well.

The Facebook imperative for enterprise software

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:57:11 +0000

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the well-known CRM and cloud computing company (and now soon-to-be social software vendor) wrote a guest post on TechCrunch late last week making the case for “why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.” What then does this mean for the future of IT and what impacts will social computing ultimately have on the enterprise.

Making government more open and social

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:33:39 +0000

Can social tools and community-based approaches truly help our government function better and operate more efficiently? Will open access to government data create important new opportunities for citizens and increase transparency? As we'll see, these two questions are currently top-of-mind in many public sector policy discussions this year. The questions also herald underlying forces at work in the government landscape in many countries around the world, including the United states. Here are some of the initiatives that are taking place this year and what's happening with Government 2.0 as 2010 begins to heat up.

Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:43:49 +0000

Two significant and closely related trends in enterprise computing this year are the growth of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and social computing. By most accounts, both are gaining ground fairly rapidly while still not being used for core business functions or mission critical applications in most large firms, at least not yet. Here's a breakdown of what Enterprise 2.0 technologies and products to watch this year.

First impressions of Google Buzz: Smart, useful, long road ahead

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:18 +0000

Earlier this afternoon Google Buzz went live after a comprehensive launch event streamed live over YouTube. Buzz is a brand-new social tool that helps users to share updates, links, photos, videos, and more with the online world at large. Aimed at consumers and eventually enterprises, Buzz is Google's most serious Social Web play yet. Find out why with my detailed breakdown and analysis.

SAP's 12Sprints joins the social enterprise bandwagon

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:23:47 +0000

I spent some time this morning working with SAP's new 12Sprints collaboration service, which was announced earlier this week. Available free in open beta immediately, it's a cloud-based service that's a cross between Basecamp and Google Wave and is ostensibly designed for team collaboration. Not incidentally, 12Sprints is also clearly a social application and it includes viral invitation, extensive commenting and discussion capabilities, and interesting new twists on measuring community opinion such as real time consensus tracking. Here's my analysis and breakdown.

Social CRM: Ground zero for Enterprise 2.0 in 2010

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:14:32 +0000

There's been some debate recently on whether Social CRM is part of the broader Enterprise 2.0 story. I try to answer the question and explore some of the latest thinking on social business and how it can help transform the customer relationship for real competitive advantage.

The app store: The new "must-have" digital business model

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:14:18 +0000

Amazon announced today that it was opening up its Kindle reader device to 3rd party applications to be distributed later this year in the Kindle Store. This news was just one more in a string of announcements from platform vendors large and small that they're getting the message: The app store model that Apple has proved so successfully with the iPhone is becoming the next frontier when it comes to next-generation software distribution that creates clear value for both customers and companies alike. What will then mean for software distribution models of the future? You can bet they will look a lot like the Apple App Store...

The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:38:24 +0000

The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social Web as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally alter the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. However, despite the movement of social computing into our daily lives we're all clearly on a long journey together as the technologies themselves emerge from infancy. The state-of-the-art today when it comes to the social computing environments that surround us now -- in our browsers, mobile devices, and elsewhere -- underscore how much more we have left to do to make these new modes of digital conversation and discourse become mature, efficient, safe, and truly useful. Fortunately the Web doesn't stand still and there continues continues to be rapid research and development when it comes to the mechanics of today's online social universe. There are many new efforts under way to refine and improve the world of social media, some of which we'll explore here and many which are just beginning...

Fixing IT in the cloud computing era

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:41:28 +0000

The reality of cloud computing as it exists today already offers significant potential to IT departments that want to cut costs, lighten their infrastructure footprint, and adopt agile new technologies. Whether it's private clouds or public ones, all signs point towards it being one of the top new approaches for enterprise IT for 2010. This is coming right at a time when traditional enterprise models for IT have come under increasingly sharp criticism for failure to perform, including most recently SOA and just about any "big system" enterprise project these days. Most would agree that something needs to change, and the cloud might be the first compelling escape route from a long-standing conundrum: How can we connect information technology directly to the business in a much more effective and less failure-prone way than we do now? I explore the latest debate surround enterprise IT and how cloud computing will augment or even entirely replace IT eventually.