Enterprise Web 2.0

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.

ZDNet's Enterprise Web 2.0: The top 10 posts of 2009

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:17:12 +0000

As we get ready to enter the final year of the decade, here's a round-up of what you found interesting here on Enterprise Web 2.0 based on actual readership. We'll see what the new year brings us but 2009 was full of notable developments that will have a lasting impact to way we using technology in business. This year was a significant one for next-generation IT and business, particularly with the rapid rise of cloud computing and emerging trends in social computing. The "Great Recession" of 2009 itself was also a significant topic as well as strategic business transformation using Web 2.0 technologies. Based on what readers here found most interesting or otherwise worthy of their attention, here's a breakdown of what the top 10 posts here on ZDNet's Enterprise Web 2.0, in reverse order.

Enterprise 2.0: The 2009 year in review

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:51:48 +0000

It's that time of year again, when we look back at the year that was while making next year's technology and business predictions. 2009 was an exciting year across the board for all things Web 2.0 in the enterprise and related topics. I often find that it's when we take time to look back at the big picture that we get the best sense for what's actually happening in the marketplace today. I'm starting first with Enterprise 2.0 here in this post and then cloud computing and next-generation SOA over the next couple of weeks, with the year-in-reviews first and then predictions, so please stay tuned.

What will power next-generation businesses?

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:13:50 +0000

The ongoing and seemingly inexorable decline of traditional media continues to be the canonical example of what happens when the ground rules get changed in an industry that is fundamentally unable to adapt to new market conditions. A great analysis recently posted by Umair Haque at Harvard Business underscores the point: The so-called new normal is starting to seem more and more foreign the deeper we go into the 21st century than most organizations may yet be willing to believe. Here's an exploration of what will likely drive forward next-generation businesses in the 21st century.

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Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:13:50 +0000

The cloud computing battleground takes shape. Will it be winner-take-all?

Dion Hinchcliffe — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:03:04 +0000

This year has been one of relatively grand alliances between emerging cloud computing vendors as they fill holes in their capabilities and try to create appealing one-stop enterprise cloud services. We’ve seen major announcements so far from IBM and Juniper, Cisco/EMC/VMware, and most recently BMC and Salesforce. There are many other smaller initiatives that have formed as well and all of these efforts underscore several key points for those businesses trying to understand the real strategic benefits of the cloud including cost, agility, and scalability. In the end we have some momentus choices; here's how to take the high road when it comes to enterprise cloud computing.

Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:33:33 +0000

The next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations. This morning’s announcement here at Dreamforce today from Salesforce of Chatter, an enterprise-class realization of Facebook and Twitter, is further evidence of the industry’s push for social Web capabilities for business activities. Early indications are [...]