Onward to enterprise collaboration

Too much noise on enterprise collaboration (EC) suite Beehive from Oracle Open World (OOW) in San Francisco.

The expression EC is indeed an oxymoron according to specialist Oliver Marks. Do people collaborate in any enterprise, really? Don’t they bitch one another? Have marketing ever been in love with production? Have the CFO ever appreciated salesman’s travails or ever bothered how sales bring up the topline numbers quarter over quarter? Nothing can be farther from reality.

But yet that’s what Beehive seeks to do – to extract the synergies of having people work more closely together saving money and be more efficient. Often large enterprises have no open editorial environment beyond just news being gathered from all around. At a price of $120 per user seat this is not a system for most small or medium sized businesses but rather a secure solution that can be integrated with existing enterprise infrastructure. Should work well with office workflow systems since the design fits clients that ask for ‘collaboration that works within the structure of our existing business’. The new openness allows integration with SAP or other competitors, and a set of web services that will run on different server platforms - Solaris, Linux, Microsoft.

Oracle take great pains to point out that they are addressing existing customer needs in providing a system that reinforces regulatory needs. Mark Brown, Senior Director of Beehive Business Strategy, cited the recent leak of politician Sara Palin’s private email and increasing regulatory compliance of the financial industry as examples of the need for tighter infrastructure oversight.

Great. But as a true blue consultant, I worry about sales hurdle. How will the CIO get its budget past the CFO? C-level people are either too secretive or even paranoid to freely use collaboration suites that leave a trail. (They can’t say “this was not what I meant” or say “I told you so” later if the stuff sucks). They are more comfortable with over-the-phone-requests that come with in-built “that-wasn’t-me” flexibility. Will they let in a feature that they will never use at such an expense? ;-)

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Can't beat'em? Join'em...

If this happens, the enterprise IT universe is sure to be disrupted. Very violently perhaps. Will Oracle bite it?

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If it doesn't, SAP / Microsoft / HP will be more than happy to - even if it takes cannibalizing their own in-house initiatives to turn on-demand from on-premise models.

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Cloud fails to capture

Cloud computing may be the in-thing, but if early fanfare is to go by, don't play the requiem music for enterprise software just yet. Those folks with their heads in the clouds about online productivity tools doing serious damage to Microsoft's Office got a reality check recently -- some stats showing just how far away that may be.

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A sampling of U.S. PC users by research outfit NPD found that 73% had never even heard of Google Docs, the search sovereign's collaborative word-processing tool, or any other manifestations of cloud computing. An additional 21 percent had heard of such things, but never tried them. And by the time you get down to those who use the online tools often and to the exclusion of a desktop suite, you have to squint to see the 0.3 percent.

Those numbers tempted some to rush out a declaration that the concept of Web 2.0 office suite was DOA. "The scant adoption makes some sense of Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, which went into broad beta last week. The service clearly is designed to be an adjunct to Office desktop software rather than a Web-based alternative," writes Joe Wilcox. "If NPD's numbers are indicative of real-world usage, Microsoft hasn't much to worry from Google Docs and Spreadsheets or other online alternatives. Maybe too many people make too much about the Web 2.0 threat to Office."

Or maybe too many people made too much of it too early. "We're in the early stages of the 'hybrid phase' of personal productivity applications, when most people will use Web apps to extend rather than replace their old Office apps," writes Nick Carr. "This phase will play out over a number of years as the Web technologies mature, at which point it will become natural to use purely Web-based apps (with, probably, continued local caching of data and program code). ... Once people get used to using the online apps at home or at school, they may well find the idea of buying an expensive piece of software, installing it on their hard drive, and regularly patching and updating it to be awfully old-fashioned. That's the scenario that should be of greatest immediate concern to Microsoft, and it's a scenario that is beginning to play out, even if the numbers aren't yet huge."

But can Enterprise suites get smug and choose to be un-sexy…? Hardly. Here’s to their tomorrow.

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"Make the high mountain bow its head; make the river yield its way."

If entries of LCCs like Southwest Airlines in the US and Air Deccan in India drove airfares down to the floor and shook up the smug industry majors from their cocky slumber, it was the entry of SaaS operators like Salesforce and Netsuite that did enterprise vendors like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and HP in. As bloggers showered huge praises on SaaS vendors’ pricing model and beat up that adopted by enterprise gorillas post after post, they knew their bluff had been called. Good friend and fellow blogger Vinnie Mirchandani draws a parallel to EDLP model of Wal-Mart in that superb post.

Now I hear SAP is taking a page out of the playbooks of Salesforce and NetSuite, a company majority-owned by Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison that filed in July to go public. The news is that SAP will unveil on Wednesday a line of business management programs to be delivered over the Web. Microsoft and other large software companies are also starting to make a similar shift.

Pricing and delivery innovation combined with power of blogosphere – deadly combo to bring down monsters what years of customer harangue couldn’t…?

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