Who Needs Enterprise Facebook?
February 25th, 2008 by Ross Chevalier
Technically or socially? From a technical perspective not a lot of people. We already have file sharing, we already have whiteboarding, we already have instant messaging, we already have email. Socially however, the practice has huge impact.
In a study conducted at General Motors of Canada, the CIO learned that to hire new people into the company in “white collar” jobs, GM had to be able to offer software tools similar to those available in the public space. In fact to be able to hire good people who fit into that younger demographic a lot of different requirements became obvious. The new hires expected and demanded this style of application, along with flexible work hours, work from home, and modern and powerful IT tools. They didn’t want to be forced to work with green screen tools, generic Windows or older versions of popular apps.
This isn’t unique. I hear this very consistently from companies of all sizes. Interestingly we aren’t the only people seeing this. Over at BEA they are actually selling an app that they call Enterprise Facebook. Entry price is $100K. With Teaming + Conferencing we are in an ideal position to take a leadership position in this important growing market, in my opinion anyway.
I think this is true for a number of reasons. First, the demand already exists, so we don’t have the timelag associated with being too early or having to wait for the demand wave to reach useful proportions. Secondly, the pre-existing offerings haven’t gained the legs that the vendors would like. We all hear people talking about Sharepoint, but when you get into it, we discover that really it’s mostly used as a web skin to a file system. Third, and I think most relevant long term, the majority of the offerings in the public space don’t make client and server side requirements onerous. Let’s be open and honest here, Sharepoint does have wonderful function, so long as you are willing to lock in on Windows Server, Windows Desktop, Office Professional 2007, Outlook 2007, Sharepoint Server 2007, Live Communications Server and on and on and on. Many independent reviewers say Sharepoint is completely open so long as your definition of open is at minimum eleven proprietary servers per hosting site.
By bringing Sitescape into the Novell family, we strengthen our position on teaming and conferencing, and increase our leverage. T+C is mixed source, the hallmark of what we bring to the marketplace, that right balance of proprietary and open source that serves customers well. We have the opportunity space to take a leadership position. While T+C falls into the Workgroup Business, we should all remember that customers may not care about our internal structure and that by positioning ourselves as thought leaders in this space, ie “we’ve taken a thought leadership position in this space” – go ahead be bold, we win. We become what we say. Every organization we deal with, as well as those we don’t, are thinking about this type of service somehow. Their positions on the road vary. Our opportunity is to set a pinion for Novell as the freedom oriented choice that prevents vendor lock in and that is priced competitively.
Some of us have felt we are late to the game. I assure you we aren’t. I was working on a Brainshare presentation on Social Networking yesterday and on one slide use about twenty different social network logos to make the point that the market is exploding. My seventeen year old daughter looked over my shoulder and said only one thing. “Dad, you’ve missed a few”
Until next time.
Ross
