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Archive for the ‘collaboration’ Category

Free MWD webinar: When BPM and Collaboration collide

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Are you interested in developments in BPM and/or collaboration? Perhaps you’re engaged in initiatives in one or both of these areas, or you’re interested in understanding how these elements of the IT industry are shifting… if so, would you like an early Christmas present?

OK, it’s not exactly in the same league as a bottle of your favourite whisky, a must-have high-fashion piece or a day at Gleneagles, but it’s not in the league of bad socks either…

As our lead analyst on the topic of BPM I’ve been busy working behind the scenes with our lead Collaboration analyst Angela Ashenden (see her excellent Collaboration blog) on a theme of research that we’ll be developing and delivering throughout 2010, looking at how the worlds of Business Process Management and Collaboration are coming together. We’re finding that this is a topic with a lot of interest and resonance within our existing client base and we think it’ll continue to be a vital consideration through 2010 and beyond.

Our first deliverable is a freely-available webinar, open to all, called “When BPM and Collaboration collide”. It’ll be 25-30 minutes long and will provide an overview of the related topics of Social, Collaborative and Dynamic BPM. In it we’ll:

highlight the synergies between collaboration technologies and today’s BPM programmes
look at the main drivers for interest in these synergies and why these topics are so important now
look at what the business value of combining these two technology areas looks like
look at the potential of new developments in the market and show how opportunities are likely to develop over the next 12 months.

The webinar will be available on-demand from next Monday, but we don’t want this to be a one-way broadcast. Once you’ve viewed the webinar, we’d be very happy indeed to receive your questions and we’ll do our very best to answer them all – we’ll provide details of how you can submit questions at the end of the presentation.

All you need to do to access the webinar from Monday Dec 14th is to make sure you sign up for (free) Guest Pass access to our site, if you’re not already registered. If you’d like us to send you a link to the webinar on Monday just email us in advance; alternatively, look out for an update on this blog on Monday – I’ll provide the link then.

We hope you find the webinar useful – and please feel free to tell your friends!

Tags: MWD
Posted in BPM, collaboration, social software | 1 Comment »

Collaboration continues to take a back seat at Adobe

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Our whip-smart Principal Collaboration Analyst, Angela Ashenden, has published some great blog entries recently. Over on her Collaboration blog, she hammers out why Adobe is in danger of missing a significant opportunity. Here’s a great quote:

Adobe seems to struggle with how to address the collaboration market opportunity. Little real progress has been made since it acquired the Connect Pro technology (then called Macromedia Breeze) … despite having technology which competes well from a functional perspective with vendors such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft and IBM (and a much slicker interface), it remains relatively unknown in this market.

You can read the full post here.

If you’re interested in our Collaboration research and Angela’s opinions in the Collaboration space, you’ll be wanting to subscribe to the feed…

Posted in Adobe, collaboration | No Comments »

Collaboration momentum building in 2009; what do CIOs think about IT Governance?

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

A few days ago the results of our second CIO UK poll were published in this piece – CIO Debate: Collaboration is building momentum in 2009. The poll corroborated earlier research that we carried out for our Collaboration advisory service in the summer of last year, in conjunction with the guys at Freeform Dynamics.

The headline findings: despite all the hype, collaboration adoption is still just getting underway. A big part of the reason for this is the difficulty of justifying big up-front infrastructure investments. Where collaboration is growing fastest, though, it’s business activities “at the edge” – those involved in interactions with external parties – which seem to be driving things along. There is a significant amount of appetite for collaboration technology, though, and our research indicates that 2009 will be quite a strong year for collaboration technology adoption.

Our third CIO UK poll is now live at cio.mwdadvisors.com, and this time we’re asking a handful of questions about approaches to IT Governance. How many organisations are pursuing formal IT Governance programmes, and if so what are the reasons? Are they basing their efforts on established frameworks like COBIT and ISO 38500? And what are their plans going forward? Those are some of the questions we’re looking to explore.

If you’re a CIO or IT Director – or you know someone who is – please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the link)! We’ll be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic in the next few weeks.

Posted in CIO, MWD, collaboration, governance, poll | No Comments »

SaaS takes centre stage at Lotusphere

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

One year on from the launch of IBM Lotus’s first home-grown effort in the world of software-as-a-service, codenamed project “Bluehouse”, SaaS is again top of the news agenda at Lotusphere 2009, and shows up as an underlying theme across the event’s big stories.

The main headline was the launch of LotusLive, a new brand for the company’s cloud-based services, which will incorporate Bluehouse, Sametime Unyte Meetings, Sametime Unyte Events and Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, as well as a all future offerings in this space, one of which I’ll come to in a moment. In line with the new branding, each of the above products will be renamed, with the aforementioned products becoming “LotusLive Engage”, “LotusLive Meetings”, “LotusLive Events” and “LotusLive Notes” respectively.

Alongside this was more detail about last week’s announcement of IBM’s intent to acquire the assets of Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based provider of white-label, SaaS-based webmail services. Upon completion, IBM plans to offer the Outblaze technology as part of LotusLive, under the name LotusLive iNotes. In addition to adding breadth to the LotusLive portfolio which it is selling direct, IBM sees the Outblaze acquisition as providing a new business model, helping the company to develop the SaaS reseller channel through value-added services.

Other major news from Lotusphere centred on partnering activities at IBM, and again SaaS played a central role – Salesforce.com integration with LotusLive Engage and Lotus Notes, integration between the LinkedIn business social network and contacts within LotusLive Engage, and between LotusLive Engage and Skype for VoIP calls.

IBM is clearly determined to show it has a credible story in SaaS, and is working hard to deliver a portfolio which mirrors its breadth in the on-premise software space. The biggest opportunity for IBM in SaaS – particularly with the Engage offering – is clearly the SMB market, and it will be interesting to see whether it is successful here, or whether LotusLive simply becomes an extension of its established enterprise portfolio. In any case, these announcements demonstrate that it is prepared to square up to Microsoft in the battle for supremacy in the cloud.

Keep your eyes open for a new report on Collaboration-as-a-Service which we’ll be publishing within the MWD Collaboration advisory service over the next couple of weeks.

Posted in SaaS, collaboration, ibm | 1 Comment »

Interviewing Avaya on Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP)

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The other week I participated in a podcast interview with Avaya’s Gordon Loader, discussing Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). This is something that Avaya’s been talking about for some time, but it’s only recently that it’s taken a little more form as an idea. The confluence of trends in collaboration, unified communications and BPM is something that’s very interesting to us, given our active collaboration and BPM research programmes.

In the interview, Gordon and I discuss what CEBP is; why it’s interesting; what the potential benefits are; and we also touch a little on how you can get started in exploring where CEBP might add value in your organisation. We talk not only about the kind of “firefighting” scenarios that come most immediately to mind (using telephony and/or messaging to make contact with people when there’s some kind of process problem that needs urgent resolution) – but also process scenarios related to sales and marketing, product development, and more. It’s worth a listen, I think!

You can find the podcast interview here (though you’ll need to register with ETM as a subscriber to access the audio itself). The title of the page is a little misleading, as we don’t just talk about “how Avaya defines CEBP”…don’t let that put you off.

Posted in BPM, avaya, collaboration, podcast | No Comments »

Microsoft announces Office Communications Server R2

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Almost 12 months to the day after Microsoft launched its realtime messaging, presence and conferencing server, Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), the company today announced the follow-up release of the product, referred to as “R2″.

Currently in private beta testing (and due for public release in February 2009) , OCS R2 enhancements focus largely on telephony-based features, for example enabling individuals to dial into the audio part of a web conference without the need to be online, as well as support for SIP trunking. There is also a strong leaning towards supporting call centre and admininstrative roles within organisations. OCS R2 includes a dedicated “attendant console”, which allows individuals to act as delegates so that, for example, a PA or central receptionist would be able to manage incoming calls. In a similar vein, a “response groups” feature enables a single call to be routed to multiple users in turn until it finds someone who is available. The new release also provides support for additional mobile platforms – acknowledging that perhaps some people don’t use Window Mobile – and includes two-way “single number reach”, which extends the existing support for the use of a single number to ring an individual at all of their locations (office, mobile, home, etc.) at once, so that calls from any of those locations appear to come from that number.

The new version also marks the introduction of the persistent chat technology that came from Microsoft’s acquisition of Parlano in October 2007, and provides for more seemless integration with Office Communicator for desktop sharing, as well as support for HD video and improved call monitoring.

This new product release highlights the growing convergence between the historically separate worlds of software and telephony, with vendors on both sides extending their reach into the other market in a bid to deliver collaboration and/or unified communications. From my perspective (which you can see here), it is becoming increasingly difficult to consider these two vendor markets as distinct, although at the business end the budgets continue to be split in the majority of organisations. What is clear is that communication is a major underpinning of any strategy for improving collaborative working practices, and as organisations’ implementations of such practices mature, the technology convergence will only increase.

If you are embarking on a collaboration initiative, you need to consider the role of your telephony infrastructure as part of that initiative. Furthermore, you need to think about the integration that will be necessary to ensure that that you don’t introduce communication stovepipes and bottlenecks that will constrain the value of your collaboration investment. Finally, you should look to vendors who are able to sit on both sides of the collaboration software/telephony divide (our collaboration assessments and vendor comparison tool should help).

You can see our assessment of Microsoft’s collaboration portfolio (pre-OCS R2) here.

Posted in Microsoft, collaboration | No Comments »

Cisco strengthens collaboration portfolio

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Cisco today announced its acquisition (which is expected to close by the end of October) of email and calendaring startup, PostPath, for the princely sum of approximately $215 million. The PostPath offering is Linux-based, and has been designed to drop into a Microsoft network as an alternative to Exchange, with the company claiming to offer an easier migration path from Exchange 5.5 to PostPath than from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007.

This acquisition is a logical step for Cisco, which acquired conferencing vendor WebEx in May 2007, followed by policy management vendor Securent in November. Cisco wants to be a major competitor in the collaboration software market, leveraging its communications background to move up the business software stack. With the exception of its small business email offering WebEx Mail, email and personal calendaring has been a noticeable weak spot in the Cisco portfolio, and by building the PostPath technology into the SaaS-delivered WebEx Connect product (which is gradually becoming the platform for all things collaboration at Cisco), the acquisition means it can offer an alternative to customers, and further fleshes out the Cisco collaboration stack.

The previously stagnant email market has seen a flush of activity recently, with hosted email services such as Google’s Gmail introducing increasingly viable alternatives to the costs of maintaining an in-house Exchange environment. While it is unlikely that players such as Google and Cisco will making a major dent Microsoft’s Exchange market share in the short term, the competition can only be healthy, and at least prompt Microsoft to address the challenges posed.

I have yet to speak to Cisco directly about the acquisition, so I remain quite speculative about how significant a role the company sees this technology playing in the overall collaboration portfolio. $215 million is a considerable purchase price, although it pales into insignificance next to the $3.2 billion the company paid for WebEx last year. Whether the value of the PostPath technology will justify that investment however, remains to be seen. Integration is a key factor in the WebEx Connect strategy, so it will be interesting to see how effectively Cisco can leverage the PostPath features across the breadth of the collaboration portfolio, rather than simply adding a check in the “email and calendaring” box. For organisations considering hosted collaboration offerings such as WebEx Connect, this acquisition could make Cisco a more interesting proposition, especially if Cisco can leverage the Exchange migration strategy touted by PostPath in combination with both PostPath’s and WebEx’s Outlook integration.

Posted in Cisco, Microsoft, PostPath, collaboration, google | No Comments »

New Collaboration Service Launch!

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

We are delighted to announce the launch of our second Continuous Advisory Service (CAS), which focuses on collaboration. Following the same format as our BPM Continuous Advisory Service (introduced in May), the Collaboration service offers a combination of in-depth reports, an interactive online vendor comparison tool, and optional analyst access relating to topics covered within the service.

The service launch sees the publication of our first Strategic Insight report, which examines the relationship between collaboration and knowledge management, and our first Market Insight report, which assesses the value of consumer social networking standards such as OpenSocial within the enterprise.

In parallel with the new premium service, we have published four new reports into our free “Guest pass” research library: two reports which outline our approach to assessing collaboration software, and two new Vendor Capability Assessments (VCA) which focus on the collaboration software portfolios of Microsoft and IBM respectively.

If you want to have a look at the Collaboration Continuous Advisory Service for yourself, we’re offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial here.

Posted in MWD, collaboration | No Comments »

Collaborative mind mapping

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

I don’t usually blog about individual briefings from vendors, but I’ve just had a fascinating briefing from Mindjet, a company which has developed an interactive, collaborative mind mapping solution based on its established personal mind mapping technology. Mindjet Connect allows multiple users to synchronously edit a central mind map, seeing what each other is editing in real time while maintaining full versioning and rollback, and combining this with communications-centric collaboration capabilities such as group chat, video conferencing, whiteboarding and desktop sharing. With almost 20 years of engineering and market experience, Mindjet should be in a good position to recognise the potential of its core solution, but what I think is interesting is that the company has created a slick, powerful and flexible collaborative application which sets a standard for many of the current new wave of collaboration software vendors. Where many talk about the power and innovation of wikis, I think the new Mindjet Connect solution competes very favourably in this space. I’ll be writing an On The Radar report on Mindjet soon.

Posted in Mindjet, collaboration | 2 Comments »

On IT-business alignment and related things