harmon.ie (pronounced “harmony”) provides on-premise software which enables tight integration between email clients and document management and document sharing tools, helping to reduce the number of tools individuals need to access in order to collaborate, and improving adoption of alternative collaboration tools within an organisation. This On the Radar briefing note follows a simple “ten questions” format, which we designed to provide a concise but thorough overview of a company and its products and services. We use this format to focus on the capability and suitability of small, specialist vendors – to help you build the best possible vendor shortlists when looking to make new technology investments.

This report is available to paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see the report’s library page for more information).

You can find the report here in our library.

This week, I attended IBM’s Lotusphere 2012, IBM’s annual customer and partner event which showcases the latest products and strategy in the area of collaboration. Like last year, “social business” was squarely at the centre of things, although there was a marked difference between the way the company positioned its social message this time when compared to last year. While Lotusphere 2011′s “Get Social. Do Business.” strapline and general sentiment was very much a call to action, this year I felt an interesting undercurrent of confidence and a sense of “fait accompli” in IBM’s message, reinforced by its new 2012 strapline “Business. Made Social.”

In parallel with the Lotusphere event, IBM hosted IBM Connect 2012, which comprised of a wealth of social business case studies, and was positioned as the event for the senior execs who wanted both ideas for how to take advantage of social business, and tips on best approaches. My personal favourite was Asian Paints, which has leveraged IBM Connections to support both internal collaboration and external customer engagement. Frankly, I was astonished by the sheer number of customers who stood up to share their experiences, although I do think that IBM missed an opportunity by not building in some sort of workshop element to the program to help attendees talk through their ideas and plans in a more structured way than simply over coffee at the event.

As usual, IBM used the Lotusphere platform to announce a number of new product capabilities and offerings, the most notable being these:

• IBM SmartCloud for Social Business – in line with other branding changes, IBM announced that their cloud-based collaboration offering, LotusLive, is being rebranded as IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, leaving  Notes/Domino as the only product retaining the Lotus branding. I think the rebranding is a sensible decision; despite efforts to expand the Lotus brand to include IBM’s other collaboration solutions, it is still limited to Notes/Domino in the minds of the majority. That said, the new name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and is likely to be abbreviated in some way which will inherently remove the value of it as a name anyway.
• Connections Mail – a relatively small feature which has had a significant reaction already, Connections Mail allows Connections users to access their Notes or Exchange mail and calendar directly from within Connections. At present, the functionality is deliberately limited, allowing viewing and searching of the inbox, as well as the ability to compose messages. There are no mail handling features (apart from the star or flag feature), but IBM figures that users who leverage the more advanced capabilities of Notes or Exchange will continue to use their mail client for that purpose anyway. I think there is room for a little more functionality than is currently provided though, such as assigning folders to a message and providing access to messages in folders, but to be fair IBM is waiting to see how people use this feature rather than trying to second guess its use. The purpose of Connections Mail is more about enabling Connections to be a hub for accessing all your information, be that mail, social or documents. Kinda in the same way that the Notes client is getting activity streams in its next version (oh yes, that was another announcement – it will be called Notes Social Edition, and is expected later this year).
• IBM Docs - also this week we saw the launch of the public beta of IBM’s cloud-based collaborative editing tool, IBM Docs. The tool, which was previously called LotusLive Symphony and codenamed Project Concorde, is now available through IBM’s hosted trial platform, Lotus Greenhouse, and is expected to finally become generally available later in 2012.

Aside from the key product announcements, what was particularly noticeable this year was the omnipresence of analytics. First introduced at last year’s Lotusphere through the integration of Cognos with Connections, this year pretty much every session referenced analytics in some way or another, emphasizing its important role in deriving ROI from these types of social investments. (While we’re on the topic of analytics, don’t forget to visit our online event focused on social analytics which launched this week – it’s free with no registration required, and it’s on-demand so you can dip in and out as you want.)

All in all, it’s fair to say that Lotusphere has come a long way in just a couple of years: what was once an intensely techy event, focused on product demos and unquestionably the territory of developers, has in the space of a couple of years transformed smoothly into a business-focused event, aimed at engaging with customers and partners at a strategic, enterprise-wide level, to help and support them in bringing about business change enabled by the social revolution. This is a very different approach to IBM’s biggest competitors in this space – Microsoft and Google – which both continue to position at a more technical level. There is still work to be done to tie up IBM’s top level social strategy with its product portfolio, but the company is investing significant resources in this strategy, and is benefiting from its incredible traction with IBM Connections.  Big ambitions, but IBM’s looking in good shape to succeed here.

Advisory clients can read our recently published Email strategy profile of IBM here.

Today we launched a new online, on-demand event focused on social analytics. As MWD’s Communications Director with responsibility for our online marketing and social media activities, this is a topic close to my heart. So it was with much interest that I listened to what my colleagues Angela Ashenden and Helena Schwenk had to say…

There are four webcasts to listen to, and we’ve purposefully made them short and sweet – long enough to give you some useful information and food for thought, but not so long to put you off even getting started. Time is money, right? Watch them at your leisure, skip about through the presentations using the interactive console and come back anytime you’ve got a few minutes to spare – they’ll be available to watch for a year. I’m confident though that what Angela and Helena have got to share will keep you there once you’ve started listening – it’s interesting stuff. By the way, the webcasts are free to watch, and you don’t need to register.

Click here to visit the event site to start each webcast. For now, here’s an introduction to each one:

1. Do you need social analytics? Here Angela provides an overview of the emerging trend of social analytics, comparing it with similar trends such as social media monitoring, and examining how it can help organisations derive value from its different social channels.

2. Enabling an integrated marketing strategy. In this presentation, Helena examines why marketing has become the focal point for many social analytic efforts and outlines the opportunities and challenges that may arise from its integration across marketing.

3. Alternative scenarios for social analytics. Angela outlines a variety of different contexts in which social analytics may be applied, contrasting public social media scenarios with those of more targeted internal or external social software implementations, and illustrating the role social analytics can play in delivering value from both investment areas.

4. Preparing your social analytics strategy. Helena outlines some vital next steps for any organisation looking to capitalise on its social media investment using social analytics, identifying potential pitfalls to be avoided and challenges which need to be overcome.

I was particularly taken with what Helena talks about in this slide:

I won’t spoil it for you and do a full recap here – you can listen to Helena here – but suffice it to say that this model certainly resonated with me. There’s certainly no shortage of tools available to help me count the impact of what we’re doing as a company… What’s fascinating me at the moment is how to take this to the next level and really make connections between social media and our other marketing activities as a springboard to better understanding our community and striking relationships and engagements with individuals. Sometimes that’s seemed a pretty big chasm to cross, and so far we’ve made some headway using a mix of advanced tools and some good old-fashioned, shirt-sleeves-rolled-up manpower to find our way forward (and for us, compelling content and advice is key of course – no tools can make up for a poor business proposition). But will there ever be a “silver bullet” social analytics engagement tool that will do the job of connecting all the dots at the press of a button? I’m not so sure. But I’ll leave it to Angela and Helena to let me know… If you’re a vendor of such technology, I’m sure you’ll be wanting to let them know.

To finish, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this event is brought to you free of charge thanks to the generous support of our sponsor*: SAS. After you’ve listened to the webcasts, why not check out the SAS ‘exhibitor booth’ page in our virtual exhibition hall? There you’ll find an overview of their social analytics offerings, as well as a wealth of other free resources, including a video and some report downloads.

So get started now and check out the event site. As always, let us know what you think. Use the feedback link on the event site and you’ll receive 10% off a selection of premium advisory reports.

* A note about sponsoring a MWD Advisors event: We’re grateful to our sponsors for their support. But just so you know, we designed and created the event content ourselves – it’s a completely independent and unbiased piece of work. We hope you find it useful. Do let us know.

Ever since I read Geoffrey Moore’s Future of IT paper introducing the concept of systems of engagement (published last year), I’ve had a slight uneasiness about the ongoing discourse. For a long time it was nothing I could put my finger on, but in some recent conversations about how technology can improve business agility, I finally realised what had been niggling me. In this blog I’m going to explain what I think is missing.

Systems of engagement vs. systems of record: a summary

If you’re not familiar with the narrative around systems of engagement, in brief it goes like this:

‘Systems of record’ – systems which manage core business information types and provide facilities for processing the information in place (think financial management, logistics, billing, CRM, and so on) – are no longer a source of competitive differentiation: they are a necessary condition of doing business, but because their capabilities are so commonplace their presence is merely table stakes. Increasingly, globalisation is forcing companies to focus more strongly on their core capabilities, and work more broadly and deeply with other companies and agencies to deliver value to customers. This means that communication and collaboration are more important than ever before. And this is where the concept of ‘systems of engagement’ comes in: the idea is that in this more distributed and  collaborative business environment, the ability to adopt the advanced communication and collaboration tools that people are familiar with in their home lives will become the new focus for competitive differentiation through technology in business environments.

Something’s missing

Before I go any further, I should be clear: I have nothing at all against the assertion that the business value of technology is shifting away from how well information is managed in place (by ‘systems of record’), towards how well information is communicated – between systems, people and organisations. I’m also absolutely in agreement with the assertion that social collaboration technologies have some really exciting roles to play in driving business improvement.

But based on my research and industry experience I think there’s something really important that’s omitted from the narrative that I’ve seen: and that’s to do with how the changing nature of value chains, combined with changing customer expectations, regulatory pressures and so on, is forcing a new kind of appraisal of how work needs to be supported by technology. Specifically, the key part of the ‘how’ here that we need to concentrate on is to do with the co-ordination of work.

It’s no longer enough (and in fact it hasn’t been enough for some years) to give people standalone tools (including those ‘systems of record’) and expect them to just get on with it and produce great work. The pressures highlighted above mean that to deliver great business performance, optimising work at the level of an individual’s contribution is a long way from enough; businesses need to be able to optimise how work gets done at a much larger scale.

However I’m not talking here about changes like the outcomes of the BPR programmes of the 1980s and 1990s – rigid process ‘improvements’ that ushered in massive changes to administration and operations through top-down diktat and only offered crude transactional ‘solutions’ that attempted to control information, the focus of work and change in a highly centralised fashion.

Instead we need to invest in systems and cultures that allow technology to be woven more closely into a broad range of types of work, where that work naturally happens, to help actively coordinate how work gets done between people, departments, and companies – and also, crucially, to gather intelligence and metrics that organisations can use to improve coordination and drive better business results.

Introducing ‘systems of co-ordination‘

Of course, anyone who’s been following my ramblings for a while will know that what I’m talking about is the application of Business Process Management (BPM) technologies and techniques*. These technologies and techniques, when used properly, create systems of co-ordination that enable businesses to systematically manage and improve their knowledge about ‘what works in work’ for them, and apply that knowledge directly in an operational context across people, departments and even corporate boundaries.

In his Future of IT analysis, Moore mentions co-ordination as a responsibility of systems engagement in passing, but I think that a mention in passing just isn’t enough. Given the length of time I’ve spent talking to companies that have implemented process improvement programmes and projects I might have too much bias colouring my view, but I think the value of these systems of co-ordination is just as crucial an element of business-technology strategy and investment as are systems of record and systems of engagement.

In an enterprise people don’t collaborate just for the fun of it – people collaborate to “get work done”. But how does knowledge about the best way to do work, and get the best results from work, get encoded, applied, managed and improved? Neither systems of record nor systems of engagement (at least, in terms of how the latter are painted in the discourse I’ve seen so far) have anything to offer in this respect.

Greasing the wheels between systems of engagement and systems of record

To my mind, then, the narrative needs to be refined. Businesses need to start to figure about the roles that systems of engagement should play in helping them maximise the effectiveness of business interactions, and consider how systems of engagement should play alongside systems of record: but crucially, the interface between systems of engagement and systems of record should not be a direct one. Between these two system layers – the grease between the wheels – should be systems of co-ordination.

What do you think? Am I the only one who thinks we need to look at this more closely? I’d love to hear your comments.

*There’s been a lot of debate about the limits of the applicability of some BPM technology in the face of different types of work – structured vs. unstructured, planned vs. unplanned, goal-oriented, collaborative, and so on – but I’m explicitly avoiding those details here and talking at a general level for the purposes of this piece.

Just before Christmas, TIBCO released its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results for 2011 (the intervening holiday is why I haven’t blogged about it until now).

While companies like Oracle struggle to deliver performance, TIBCO continues to march relentlessly on. And although it’s perhaps tempting (certainly in comparison to behemoths like Oracle) to paint TIBCO as a small player, its full-year revenue for 2011 was only a step away from the $1bn mark (at $920.2m). That’s 22% growth over 2010′s headline number: an impressive performance.

I mentioned back in early October that TIBCO has begun to extend its business way beyond that of its core enterprise middleware heritage, into new segments that are more line-of-business focused and which enable it to sell much more widely than its financial-services historical heartland. This seems to be continuing apace: a glance at the list of big customer wins sees a much more balanced list with significant contributions from telecoms, government, energy, manufacturing, life sciences and transport/logistics.

TIBCO’s tibbr enterprise social software platform was also called out explicitly in discussion of the results: it seems that this product – built in TIBCO’s labs rather than being acquired – is turning out to be one of the key levers that the company can use to get it into new conversations and relationships. TIBCO’s Spotfire analytics and visualisation technology is also responsible for a big chunk of the growth – as well as helping the company get into more and more deals outside of its historical industry base.

When it comes to BPM technology, ActiveMatrix BPM continues to grow but overall license sales here are a small contributor to TIBCO’s numbers. That’s also currently the case for Nimbus Partners’ business (acquired in August 2011). However BPM technology is actually core to many of TIBCO’s propositions – so over the coming year we’ll be looking for signs that this part of TIBCO’s portfolio is pulling its weight.

It’ll be really interesting to see where the company takes its business in 2012 as moves beyond the magic $1bn to the next step up in size. More acquisitions are on the horizon, I expect – both in core technology and also in industry-specific application and process areas. What do you think?

On Monday, Dallas-based online communities vendor Telligent announced its acquisition of Leverage Software in a move designed to bolster Telligent’s opportunity in this fiercely competitive market. The acquisition, which brings together two companies which both provide online communities solutions, follows quick on the heels of competitor Jive Software’s highly anticipated IPO last week, and highlights the need for the larger pure play vendors such as Telligent to capitalise on the interest around this market and stake out a more significant position for themselves in its future. In addition to the customer base Telligent is acquiring – Leverage Software powers over 250 communities serving more than a million users, with high profile customers including The Home Depot, Stanford University, HP and Hilton Hotels – the company has cited the Leverage team’s development expertise in SaaS-based solutions, user-centric design and mobile apps as significant factors in its decision. This appears to be a smart move for Telligent, feeding well into the company’s forward strategy, and reinforcing its position in the market. For Leverage Software customers, there is no immediate impact, with the new combined company pledging to continue their support, although in the longer term it is expected that the two community platforms will come together.

Clients can read our profile of Telligent’s online communities solution here.

In October at Openworld, Oracle announced the release of its new social collaboration platform, Oracle Social Network (OSN), with a (rather awkward) demo of the product by Larry Ellison. Yesterday, I finally got the chance to look a little bit closer at the product, and I have to say that I was rather impressed by what I saw.

Collaboration has always been a sticking point for Oracle – Oracle Beehive never had any significant success, and the company has always seemed to be struggling with how to position and present the wealth of collaborative capabilities it has to reach the right audience within enterprises. It has to be said that Oracle is far from trailblazing in the social collaboration space – it’s perhaps three years too late to market with OSN to claim such a title. However, through the in-depth demo that I and a couple of other analysts were given yesterday, it was clear that Oracle has spent that time carefully considering how to best deliver social capabilities in the context of an enterprise’s broader business applications.

As a standalone social CRM application, Oracle Social Network delivers a slick UI which leverages many of the social features which typify consumer social networks and online communities – status posting and threaded comments, activity feeds, integrated chat, groups, trending topics, profiles and the ability to follow individuals, for example. However, it also provides a number of features that are specifically business-focused, such as presence (both at the level of online/offline status, as well as highlighting where in the application someone is working), document management features such as check-in/out (enabling this in the context of an activity thread, not just in a separate documents area), and document preview, editing and annotation features (the annotations capability is rather neat, particularly its integration with the activity feed).

Like Salesforce.com with Chatter, Oracle Social Network has been tightly integrated with Oracle CRM to enable social collaboration in the context of particular customers, prospects or opportunities, but it also integrates with other Oracle business applications, such as ERP or human captial management (HCM), as well as (potentially) 3rd party and custom applications.

In contrast to previous Oracle collaboration products, I felt the UI was well-balanced – there is a lot of information and capability in there, but it doesn’t overwhelm the user, instead providing a sense of being able to easily see what is happening without too much digging, and yet without clutter.

I don’t know whether Oracle will be able to make this product fly in a way it never managed in previous collaboration software efforts, but the company certainly has an offering which stands out in the crowd. Perhaps it will be able to leverage OSN as an extension to its existing products like Salesforce.com does with Chatter; the integration would suggest that this is the primary route the company will take. However, outside the existing customer base, Oracle still has an uphill struggle to create a profile in this chaotic market, and while the demo will be a great tool for selling the product, there is still some serious work needed on the positioning. The price point will be a key factor here; pricing is not yet available. But I do wish Oracle luck as I’d like to see this product do well.

A couple of days ago I had an update call with Mindjet, the company that is best known for its mind mapping client application, Mind Manager. Historically, I’ve always found it slightly awkward to position the company in the broader collaboration software market that I follow, largely because, while Mind Manager is a productivity tool, it is not (or at least was not) in itself inherently collaborative in terms of the way it was designed to be used – i.e. as a personal productivity tool. However, over the last three years, the company has been trying to find ways to open up its market opportunity, and in doing so, has reached the point where today there is no question about its position as a collaboration software vendor.

One of the key challenges Mindjet has faced is a problem which can be likened to the dilemma Adobe faced with Acrobat several years back – i.e. how to change from being a company that just sells packaged applications to a small number of individuals in a large number of organisations, to a provider of enterprise solutions. In recent years, the company has tried a range of approaches to this problem, beginning with enabling collaborative online editing of mind maps via a SaaS-based service (Mindjet Connect, launched in June 2008), through offering collaboration tools which combine project-based tools with communications tools such as web conferencing and instant messaging, again as a SaaS service (Mindjet Catalyst, launched in October 2009), to identifying ways in which its core visualisation technologies could be applied in different contexts (Deal Navigator for Salesforce.com, launched in March 2010).

The latest product announcements (which were made back in September 2011) position its current portfolio as  a “collaborative work management” solution which provides a platform where teams can capture ideas, organise information, plan necessary activities, and action these in a tracked and managed way. The key products within this are:

• the new-and-improved Mindjet Connect, which combines the collaborative editing features of the original Mindjet Connect with the team workspace and document management capabilities of Catalyst, both of which are effectively succeeded by this latest Mindjet Connect release.
• Mindjet Cohuman, which is a social task management application that Mindjet acquired in August 2011. Cohuman applies social tools and techniques to the process of task and project management, for example using an activity feed to enable individuals to track events, actions and conversations which relate to their tasks or projects, or even just those they’re interested in.

Both Connect and Cohuman are delivered as a SaaS-based service, and are available via a “freemium” model, with the paid versions adding features necessary for larger deployments such as extra storage and administrative controls. Today, Mindjet has announced the formal release of Mindjet Connect, along with the first degree of integration between Connect and Cohuman, enabling project tasks to be exported from Connect to Cohuman, and tracked and managed through completion. There is still much to do here though, as Cohuman is still a very distinct product, with a completely different look and feel to Connect.

While this is the most convincing move yet in Mindjet’s efforts to carve out a new place for itself in the enterprise collaboration market, it is still early days, and it remains to be seen whether the company can raise its profile enough to survive the jostling in this crowded market. A key challenge, I think, is whether Mindjet can clearly identify and reach the right audience for this solution; while Mind Manager is a favourite tool of individuals in large, project-heavy enterprises, social collaboration tools such as these tend to favour the non-specialist user. The risk is that Mindjet falls between the two with its latest proposition. Do you use Mind Manager, and if so does this new positioning make sense to you?

I think it’s interesting that there seems to be an emerging trend that’s bringing social to project and task management – I blogged about Salesforce’s efforts with Do.com a week or so ago, plus it’s noticeable that Jive has changed direction somewhat over the last year to reinforce the task management capabilities in its product. And, of course, IBM was there first with Activities in Connections.

Is the emphasis on people and relationships waning in favour of focused, task-based collaboration enhancements? Perhaps because it’s easier to prove ROI in this context?

It would be great to hear your thoughts.

Yesterday I was briefed by Salesforce.com on their latest SaaS-based product in the collaboration space, Do.com. A result of their acquisition of Manymoon back in February, Do.com is a social project collaboration tool for small groups of up to 15 people, providing features such as task management, notes and discussions. Do.com is still currently in private beta, with public beta coming in a couple of weeks, but once it is fully released, Salesforce.com intends to provide it through a “freemium” model – i.e. a free version will include the core features of the tool, with the option to upgrade to a paid version to access (for example) advanced features, premium support, or perhaps to support larger groups of users.

The product itself, while showing plenty of scope for enhancement, is slick and intuitive, employing a simple task-oriented UI to enable individuals to create and allocate tasks for themselves or others. The task list allows you to categorise tasks in a way that suits you, grouping them into personalisable “sections” which may or may not correspond to the projects to which they belong. The social element is provided in a couple of ways; each task has a comments thread associated with it which captures users’ discussions around the task, as well as tracking edits to the task such as, for example, changes to the assignee or notifications that the task has been completed. Each project has its own activity feed which tracks both comments threads and changes or additions to the tasks associated with that project, and project members can comment inline against particular activities or notifications within the feed.

An interesting aspect to the application is that it has been developed as a “mobile first” app, i.e. the UI has been designed to work well on tablets first  and desktops/laptops second – the experience is the same on both. Notifications about your tasks and projects are delivered to your various devices as applicable – for example as emails, or as native pop-up notifications to your iPad or iPhone (note that iPad is the only tablet supported at present). The notes feature is interesting, providing a wiki-like platform for recording or tracking information; a line of text can be selected within an individual note, and a task created from it with a single button click. Documents can be attached to tasks, and you can create tasks and notes by emailing directly into Do.com.

Despite its immaturity, the product is already integrated with fellow SaaS services Google Apps and Dropbox, as well as (of course) the wider Salesforce.com offerings. The Google Apps integration is particularly noteworthy, leveraging the Gmail gadget framework to enable Do.com tasks to be created from an email, for example. There is also single sign on with Salesforce.com, Facebook and Google Apps.

While the app itself is very promising, what strikes me as most significant is the market that Salesforce.com is targeting with this product. Unlike its Sales Cloud or Service Cloud – or even Chatter – which are designed to serve large enterprises, Do.com is very clearly targeting the “prosumer” and small business markets. Not only is this an area where Salesforce.com is not experienced, but this is the second product this year from a major vendor to target small businesses – Microsoft, too, showed its interest in the SMB market during its launch of Office 365 back in June. However, with Do.com, Salesforce is focusing even farther down the scale, seeing it being not only a business tool, but something individuals will use in their personal lives as well, combining the two contexts within a single environment. This is interesting because it is explicitly blurring the boundaries between business and personal tools – something which is characterised by many of the social tools that have achieved massive growth over the last five years, and yet something that many organisations have considerable concerns about, whether for security or for governance reasons. For this reason, it makes sense that Salesforce is positioning Do.com as a small business tool, especially as this type of organisation tends to be more open to SaaS services.

But I wonder if and how Salesforce will eventually link these two strategies – the large enterprise against the small business – and what it intends to achieve with Do.com. Chatter was a logical extension to the Sales and Service Clouds, enabling Salesforce to broaden its applicability within its existing client base, i.e. beyond the sales and marketing and customer support departments. Do.com on the other hand is ignoring this existing customer base altogether. At the moment, that doesn’t make sense to me. I just hope there’s some clearer direction there that isn’t visible yet.

What’s your take on this? Is this a good or a bad move for Salesforce.com?

Earlier this week I had an interesting call with VMware’s CTO of SaaS and Application Services, Javier Soltero, to find out the thinking behind its acquisition of microblogging vendor, Socialcast, in May this year. As a collaboration analyst, I have not had any real contact with VMware up until now – at least, apart from through my discussions with Zimbra, the email and collaboration vendor that the company acquired from Yahoo! in early 2010. In fact, upon closer inspection, there is an emerging theme in VMware’s activities here – it bought a third company in April, SlideRocket, which has a new and interesting approach to presentation creation, sharing and management. So why is VMware taking such an interest in collaborative applications which are so far removed from its traditional business?

Well, as successful as the company has been in its flagship virtualisation business (for the year ending 31st December 2010, its revenues were $2.86 billion – up an impressive 41% on the previous year),  the company sensibly feels the need to plan ahead and identify new market opportunities which will enable it to continue its rate of growth and be seen as a trailblazer in the cloud. It is betting on two areas to enable this – targeting developer middleware (which is where another of its recent acquisitions – Springsource, which it paid $362m for in 2009 – comes in), and “end-user applications” by which it means both desktop virtualisation tools such as VMware ThinApp, and collaboration tools such as Zimbra and Socialcast. While VMware is not the first to see the attraction of the collaboration software market – a long line of large vendors have announced plays in this area in the last couple of years, including Cisco, Novell, Salesforce.com, Oracle and TIBCO – its approach is perhaps less immediately obvious; rather than coming to market with a big, social collaboration positioning, VMware is slowly and carefully working out its strategy, through a combination of acquisition and in-house development. As an example of this, Soltero outlined two projects that are currently underway at VMware and are designed to knit together and strengthen its emerging end-user applications play:

• Socialcast Strides – announced in September and currently in beta release, this is a lightweight work management application built on the Socialcast platform.

• Project Octopus - an as yet unreleased cloud-based file sharing service which leverages the Zimbra platform (but is not dependent on the organisation using Zimbra for mail).

Even at this relatively early stage in its move into this new market area, VMware is clear that it wants its end-user applications to be able to stand alone in the market – avoiding them requiring customers to have the underlying VMware stack in order to work – but at the same time, it also needs to have an integrated suite story which allows all the different components to work together seamlessly and logically if an organisation wants to implement the entire portfolio.

Right now, I’m open-minded to the possibility of VMware succeeding in its ambitions for this market – after all, while there are some that have struggled in the switch from an IT-focused sell to the business-focused sell needed for collaboration (such as Oracle and Cisco, for example), others have been surprisingly successful (such as TIBCO with Tibbr). However, it is clear that VMware still has a lot of work to do – (1) to flesh out its strategy here and fill in the gaps, either through further acquisitions or development, (2) to work out how it is going to brand Socialcast and its other new applications to take advantage of a brand which only currently has relevance to IT people rather than end-users (i.e. VMware), and (3) to retrain or hire a new sales force that is able to take this proposition to the business leaders who own the budget and purchasing decisions for social collaboration.

So not a small task, then.

Do you think this is a good move for VMware? I’d be interested in your thoughts.