About six months ago, when I saw that ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley was planning on releasing a book titled "Microsoft 2.0 - How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era", I pre-ordered it immediately on Amazon. Mary Jo's blog is one that I have been reading for quite some time and I can't think of anyone who provides better insight on what Microsoft is thinking than she does. I finally received that book a few weeks ago and have been reading it in my spare time. Unfortunately, I am not the world's fastest reader.
I like the way that the book is written. It reads like a CIA brief should be. This is no sexed-up Iraq brief, but a clearly laid out organized analysis of Microsoft, the company, the state unto itself, the empire. The prime thesis is that Microsoft is organizing for life without Bill and beyond. In attempt to make itself relevant in a world that seems to be passing it by, Microsoft is hiring and promoting new people and to challenge its fundamental thinking. Or not. She writes as though she is an insider, or more closely to a spy network watching its every move. HUMINT, ELINT, SIGINT, MASINT, analysis etc. are all at work here to provide a comprehensive picture for anyone ready to wage battle with Microsoft.
The book is organized into the language and buzzwords, the people and the "Baby Bills", near term radar on visible product, big bet or long-term, strategic products, and the business model challenges, both tried/true and untried/unavoidable models. The style of writing is very approachable and conversational and reflects the style of her blog, much of which I assume the material has been culled from. This in no way detracts from the usefulness of the book for someone, like Alfresco and the rest of the ECM industry, who both has to deal with and compete with Microsoft. The summary cut-outs on each page are also very good for just browsing the book and picking up something new. Microsoft's empire is wide and unwieldy, so it is difficult to pay attention to all parts, but the summaries help draw in or back attention. The only thing lacking are some charts and diagrams for all this fits together, particularly an org chart.
For someone in open source, the people section was particularly interesting. My assumption was that Steve Ballmer was the primary antagonist against open source, which was validated. (Something I have experienced first hand!) However, the wan characterization of "Borgized" Ray Ozzie were interesting. Even as Chief Architect, his power is obviously limited by the raft of Microsoft Lifers and Baby Bills. It reminds me of the de-classified intelligence analyses that I used to read on the Soviet Military in the 70s and 80s - who are the apparatchiks and who are the reformers? What Mary Jo clearly states is that although outwardly Microsoft is trying to change its stance toward open source, the company is schizophrenic and confused towards it. Ballmer in the space of 5 minutes can say that open source must pay its way and then say that he wants Windows to be the platform of open source innovation such as evolution of PHP. Mary Jo says. "So, has the 'Open Source = Evil' wall fallen? ... In a word, no." Poor old Bill Hilf.
She also asks if SharePoint is Microsoft's next killer OS. This is a topic that she explored on her blog late last year. She says that in an attempt to avoid blatant violation of US DoJ instructions against baking integration of other Microsoft products into the operating system, Microsoft is taking the route of baking in reliance on SharePoint and charging very pricey CALs to use Microsoft servers. She says, "On the server side of the house, Microsoft slowly but surely has been tying more and more of its products to SharePoint...Microsoft is gunning to make SharePoint Server and Services an inextricable piece of its customers' product fabric." Wake up and smell the coffee EMC and IBM! Microsoft is ready to use the new monopoly, Office, which she says has a 95% market share to beat into a new server lock in.
I really like the following quote in the buzzword section, "What does Microsoft mean by 'interoperable'? Anything that can run on multiple versions of Windows, the old saying goes."
Definitely a recommended read for anyone in the software industry regardless of whether you partner or compete with Microsoft or most like both.
Me in a Davos collaboration session on building new resilience into business
Where I last left you, I was on my way to Davos and the World Economic Forum. I tried twittering to keep up with what was going on, but it's really tricky spending any time writing when you are at an event like that. In the central lobby area, there are only a few seats and I would always see Justin Fox, correspondent for Time Magazine, occupying some of the few sofas along with his wife and other "Young Global Pioneers" of the World Economic Forum. I asked Justin if he had been to any of the sessions, which he said he had, but it seemed like he was always blogging. It was good that he was there though. He had a Mac and I could borrow a recharge every once in a while.
A giant YouTuber addressing 1000 people in the WEF plenary hall, while the President of Switzerland sitting alone below him is probably trying to figure out what is going on.
Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, apologizing for mistakenly showing the previously shown video for the video greetings from George Bush. Sorry George! (BTW, I doubt you will ever see George Bush at Davos. Alliances and Internationalism are not really his thing.)
That's the problem when there is so much stuff going on. You need to sit down and digest a huge amount of information, impressions, emotions and sheer overwhelmingness. The year before, I wrote one blog and missed so much, so I thought I should really just experience this and then write it down. Now I won't be able to get on with writing my blog properly until I do. So forgive this somewhat rambling post.
Robert Scoble interviewing Vinod Khosla. Scoble doesn't have a problem keeping up his blog.
About a week after Davos, a friend of mine asked me who I met this year at Davos. Ironically, the only person I could think of was Emma Thompson and a bunch of CEOs. So, I start where I finished last time. On the plane back from Zurich to London, I saw Emma waiting for her luggage and I just had to say hello. I asked her how she like Davos. Her response was, "Wasn't that amazing! I must write it down!" At the time, I thought yeah, me too and I will get to it on Monday. Five months later...
In reality, I met a lot more people. I met Tony Blair and Bono, which I thought was pretty cool. I tried to get up early(ish) and at 8am in the morning one day I just saw Blair walking down a white, glistening snow covered street with only a couple of people in tow. I just reached out as I walked in the opposite direction and said "Hello Mr. Blair." With a politician's instinct, he grinned, said hello, shook my hand and moved on. Bono came tumbling out of some party the night before along with Queen Raina of Jordan and her entourage from London, and few other celebrities. I was in an WEF IT Governors meeting where guys like Bill Gates and Michael Dell were supposed to be, but were probably at the same party. Being at Davos is part of being in elevated circles, but even the elevated circles have their upper levels.
Passing Henry Kissinger in the hall
Compared to the previous year, the US political events were far less overwhelming given the current presidential elections, but the global politics portions was at least as interesting. Hanging around after Condoleeza Rice's speech, I saw Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch also hanging around me along with Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan. I doubt they recognized me though. I was invited to a breakfast session with Purvez Musharraf, who was much more articulate and persuasive than I expected. I got some flack from some people of even attending, but I sat next to Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children UK, who I figured if she was interested in different opinions of what was going, why could I be. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and the blogger Robert Scoble were there as well and you can read Scoble's account of what happened. I saw Gordon Brown in a couple of sessions, but at the time I was no where near as furious with him then as I am now.
Hamid Karzai in a rush. (So I just didn't have good camera with me. :-( )
Pervez Musharraf talking over a croissant at breakfast
Technology definitely took a back seat to Social Enterprise this year. Although there were still luminaries, some of which I got introduced to thanks to Brian Behlendorf (man that guy networks well), it was guys like Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus that took center stage. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, scoffed at being called legendary after being introduced after Muhammad Yunus, the man who created Microfinance. Unlike last year where Web 2.0 was a major theme, people who are trying to change the lives of people using the forces of capitalism and entrepreneurialism rightly were given the spotlight. Most of them you would never heard of, but they seem to really be making a difference in the developing world. One you may have heard of is Nicholas Negroponte, who I sat next to at a lunch after he mistakenly tried to steal mine. We have since exchanged emails about how Alfresco and open source might be able to help the One Laptop Per Child initiative. If open source can help serve up content to all those OLPC systems, so much the better.
Nicholas Negroponte with blogger Jeff Jarvis taking notes. Sorry this is a scary picture, but I was sitting right next to the guy when he was speaking.
Most people at Davos are business people. Emma Thompson apparently described the crowd on BBC Radio 4 as a bunch of gray, middle aged businessmen in suits. (Well excuse me Emma!) There were in all the sessions and the vast majority of them are extremely nice and sociable. It was pretty cool hanging out with the Accel guys, Joe Schoendorf and Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, drinking 50 year old Bordeaux wine. I shared a taxi with George Soros, who stole a place from my friend Magid Abraham, CEO of ComScore. Soros then had the misfortune of me plugging at him on the future of the dollar and pound. Eventually, he asked me what I did and I explained about Alfresco. George then said, "I *like* open source." So here's a scoop for you, George Soros is bearish on the US economy, the dollar, the pound and George Bush and bullish on China, India, and Open Source.
Nobel Prize Winner, Muhammad Yunus
I attended a panel on Strategy in a Networked World with Sam DiPiazza, CEO of PWC, Chris Conde of Sungard, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Michael Porter, business professor at the Harvard Business School, and moderated by Tom Stewart, editor of the Harvard Business Review. I have met all of them and they are all nice, grey, middle aged and in suits, although Benioff stands out as being different. He is a bit younger, dresses more informally and is less likely to listen to what you are saying. I was in a collaboration session with him, business people from Cisco, HP, Sun and social entrepreneurs at the front line bringing in water, power and connectivity. Chris Gopalakrishan, COO of Infosys, actually knows a lot more about the 3rd world than most. Yet Mark was trying to tell him and others that the solution to poverty, disease and privation is a Web 2.0 center in villages running Salesforce.com.
Marc Benioff telling us how its gonna be
The dinners and parties continued to be the most impressive and fun part of Davos. The Accel party is definitely one of the highlights. One moment at this year's party that I really liked was being able to introduce Michael Porter to Tim O'Reilly. Tim definitely knew who Michael Porter was, but Michael had no idea that Tim was the one who started a lot of all this Web 2.0 stuff. If Tim O'Reilly came away impressed, this event must be something else. Also, I am hanging around talking to people waiting to chat with Larry Page and find I am talking to the CEO of Mattel. Good thing I didn't ask him about toys from China. One of the Accel guys introduced me to the video blogger Loic LeMeur and I said, "I know you! You're famous." Immediately afterwards is the Google party with absolutely everyone in there. I attended a great "Eat Local" dinner hosted by Chez Panisse owner, Alice Waters, and the theater director Peter Sellars. The food was absolutely fabulous and it was really nice to meet Alice since I have enjoyed her food since my days in Berkeley, although Sergey Brin got a lot more attention. The Nerd's Dinner was also fascinating with so many famous tech people, I couldn't possibly list them here. That I have to blog separately.
I tried to get a picture of Michael Porter when he wasn't moving his hands. I failed. He is very animated.
In the end though, it is the people who make you think that have the most lasting impression. As always, it is great pleasure to hang around Geoffrey Moore, from whom I always learn something. I was also very pleased to meet Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and his wife. On the last night, I hung out with he and his wife and discovered he is a great jazz pianist. However, I learned about his next book about the Millennial generation joining the work force. The futurist Paul Saffo, the host of the Nerd's Dinner makes me feel like a real laggard. I am still in awe of Tim O'Reilly. Although I don't agree with some of what Tom Friedman writes, I still respect his perspective, which as influential when we started Alfresco, and I got to meet him this time and learn about his next book about Green Technology.
Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics
Finally, Bill Gates got me thinking a lot. His speech on what he is doing next was well worth attending. Bill's thesis is that if we can apply the principles of capitalism to solving the world's problems, we can eradicate hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change. Market and financial incentives alone are insufficient. We should all acting based upon self-interest and incentivized to work in that self-interest. Governments can help with tax incentives, but giving recognition to those companies and individuals are potentially more powerful. Companies should also be incentivized not to give money, but talent, which in turn provides recognition of the individual and organization making a difference. This recognition can be its own market-based reward since it will benefit the company in the competitive marketplace. This approach can be used to provide not just manpower, but solutions to accessibility of information, medicine and healthcare.
Bill Gates talking about what he is planning next.
Perhaps Google thought of this all along, but it seems like Bill has a point. As much as that pains me to say, clearly the programs and techniques that we have used in the past have not worked and we need to try something else. Maybe its time to try Bill's plan. I was challenged by one of the more liberal participants to not even think that. He said, "It's easy for him to say that. He's a billionaire. He made his money with blood money stealing from the poor children of the world." That's a bit extreme and I was just as culpable in this guy's eyes for even suggesting it, but I think it's worth exploring.
Mitch Kapoor
If you have gotten this far, well done. Now that I have this one out of the way, I can concentrate on blogging properly hopefully.
Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief of WPP, asking everyone to calm down.
I am currently writing this on the train from Zurich Airport to Davos journeying through amazing Swiss scenery. The flight from Heathrow was completely full and Davos was probably the reason. I saw a few faces that were vaguely familiar, probably because they won the Nobel prize. In the seat behind me was Emma Thompson, which was a thrill for me and looking at all the faces of the guys behind me queuing to get out of the airplane, probably a thrill for them too. Our investor from Accel, Kevin Comolli, was in the front of the plane.
I am cheating and using o picture from last year's trip.
Lakes as large as seas, snow covered mountains, rushing rivers and cows grazing on pastoral land have been rushing by me for nearly an hour. It's hard to believe it has been a year since the last time I saw this gorgeous scenery, but what an amazing year it has been. The insights that I gained from Davos last year helped me understand what was going on in the world and how it affected Alfresco. Davos was where I finally understood Web 2.0 and it is core to where we are taking the company.
This year's theme for Davos is the Power of Collaborative Innovation, a topic near and dear to my heart. Although, there is less tech content than last year, I will be particularly interested in how innovation and collaboration can be applied to some of the world's most difficult problems. I am also keenly interested to see where the economy is heading. If this group of people don't know, we're in a heap of trouble. As always, I will look forward to the workshop sessions and the one on one interaction that is unique to Davos.
I am going to try to keep up my blogging while I am here and try a Twitter or three, as well as keeping my Facebook page up to date.
In a software industry that had little innovation and created obstacles for the next class of rising companies, open source is turning enterprise software on its head. Xen Source, Zimbra and JBoss are now part of larger companies acquiring new technologies and new distribution models by leveraging the power of open source. Now we see that MySQL has been acquired by Sun for $1 billion. Sun has been embracing open source more and more under Jonathan Schwartz's watch as CEO and this can be seen as a logical next step in that strategy.
Marten Mickos, a happy man and a really nice guy.
When we started Alfresco, we came in with the assumption that one of the only things that is working in enterprise software is open source. The past year or so have proven this prediction right. Although it wasn't really my prediction. A meeting with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL in 2002, helped me understand that, yes, open source really could work. Up to that point, I was of the same opinion as Bill Gates, that open source is equivalent to communism. MySQL helped me understand the power of huge numbers of people using software and the value that support can provide to fund the development of professional software. The fact that the model works means that small open source companies can thrive in an environment of behemoths consolidating stacks and actually create an environment of innovation.
David Axmark and Monty Widenius, founders of MySQL
When a category has been around long enough that customers know what they want, then open source works really well. MySQL provided a simple, cost-effective database system that meant that you didn't have to install a big, hulking Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server and more importantly, you didn't even have to pay for it. You just pay for support. JBoss did the same thing for app servers, Xen Source for virtualization systems and Zimbra for email. Some people question whether MySQL was really innovating, after all the set of SQL is the same as Oracle had in the early 90's. In reality, there wouldn't be a Web 2.0 or possibly even a Web 1.0 without MySQL. MySQL pioneered the model of Scale Out rather than Scale Up to provide web properties like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. to scale to levels that were unthinkable in Oracle back in the 90s. JBoss, Xen and Zimbra were doing the same to their respective industries and bigger companies were willing to pay for that.
From our perspective at Alfresco, Sun is a great company to acquire MySQL. Sun has proven their alliance and cooperation with open source. And this doesn't change our plans to become a public company. We have created public companies in the past and we intend to in the future. Our sales of support and development of our community have exceeded our expectations and events like this make us even more determined that IPO can be successful for the development of the Alfresco system and the Alfresco community.
Congratulations to Marten and team and good luck in the future. We are looking forward to more successful collaborations and joint deployments of Alfresco and MySQL.
Matthew Aslett at the 451 Group blogged on a Fortune article on IPOs in 2008 noting that 3 of the top 5 are open source including MySQL, Ingres and SugarCRM, all of which are partners of Alfresco and good friends. The 4th is an open source project sponsor, Parallels. The Fortune noted that even if a recession is coming that doesn't mean that business still don't need to innovate or cut costs.
On MySQL, the company most likely to go first, Matt says:
"MySQL has been talking up its IPO credentials for some time, and a 2008 offering was always more likely than 2007. The plan has not changed as far as The 451 Group is aware. What has changed is that the company has stopped being so open about its financial performance, which is typical of a company preparing to go public. Previously the company publicly claimed revenue of $50m in 2006 and $34m in 2005. Expect an IPO sooner rather than later."
The disruptive nature of open source and its low cost development and distribution model will ultimately thrive in a recessionary environment. The result could be very similar to previous recessions that created much bigger markets for mini-computers, relational databases, PCS, client/server and web-based technologies that ultimately cut costs of using older technology and made people more productive. The same will be true for the current generation of open source tools, applications and technologies. Companies just won't be able to afford using the old technology just because it is there.
I have been using Windows now for nearly 20 years and PCs for over 25. This October my Dell refused to come out of standby mode, which forces me to reboot every single time I leave the building with my laptop. After all those years of blue screens, hanging on large PowerPoint presentations, hanging on network connections, waiting for the laptop to come up when I press the On button, I finally gave up. I ordered a Mac.
I would say half of Alfresco now have Macs. Matt Asay must own Apple shares as he has been the key sales person for all those Macs. The sales organization in the US all have Macs and a lot of the developers are now transitioning to Macs. A lot of our customers are also using Macs. When you look at the pain of transitioning to Vista versus just leaving Microsoft behind, it becomes a much easier decision.
I must say the transition hasn't been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn't look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster. Upgrading to Firefox 3 beta at the same time has made web browsing much faster than before. I am using ChronoSync for synchronizing backups and Vienna for RSS reader. I haven't decided yet between MS Office for Mac, Apple’s iWork or NeoOffice (Open Office). This is my first blog using my new Mac.
During the last 25 odd years, I used Macs and Unix systems in addition to my PCs and laptops. I have been using Unix for over 30 years now and still can use Vi and write amazing shell scripts. When we started Documentum, my desktop machine was a Mac for writing and formatting the business plan and I owned a Mac SE for home use. I have also used Unix systems, mainly Suns and HP, side by side with my PCs and Macs for a very long time. Before that, we all multitasked on Vaxes and even PDP-11s while I was at Berkeley. I still find that I can do more with c-shell, sed, grep and awk for managing and finding information than I ever could with a drag / drop interface. It's nice to get some of that back.
I actually heard the CIO of a major US government agency say they were considering moving to Macs or Linux. The lock-in of new file formats and features in Office Vista were a concern for them. Between that and the user interface and file format issues of the new Microsoft systems, won’t a lot of people be looking back at the last couple of decades and saying "Why?"
I was a little surprised by the announcement today that Microsoft offered to buy FAST, the search engine maker. Surprised because Microsoft claims that have the whole search thing sorted in SharePoint after hiring a lot information retrieval talent. And surprised that OEMs dependent on FAST and who compete against Microsoft let it happen. Most notable is EMC with Documentum and Oracle with Stellent.
The press release implies that the purpose of the acquisition is to bolster enterprise sales. In their overview of SharePoint enterprise search, Microsoft states that MOSS enterprise search capabilities provides “enterprise-grade scalability, extensibility, and manageability meet the needs of even the largest organizations.” Jeff Raikes implies that FAST is there to provide the high-end solution contrary to previous claims. SharePoint could definitely use the performance boost.
Is Microsoft just trying to target the general search industry? Are they trying to block any in-roads that Google is making with Google Appliance? Although Google Appliance is only a side show for Google, it is still one of the largest enterprise search vendors, but have a limit of 30 million documents on their high end system. FAST originally made their name in internet search, so is Microsoft trying to bolster its Microsoft Live Search which few seem to like or use out of choice? Are they trying to undermine the ECM industry and their reliance on vendors like FAST for full-text search? My guess is that they are just trying to bridge one of the weak links in their product functionality. This technical note from Microsoft indicates that they have some real issues scaling and an upper bound of 50 million documents for its index server and require complex configurations to go beyond that.
So what do the OEM vendors and customers who are competitors of Microsoft do? Ironically, it puts Oracle in a similar to the position that it put MySQL in when they purchased Innodb. These vendors could do what we have done and use the Lucene open source search engine. We recently performed a benchmark with Unisys demonstrating linear scalability beyond 100 million documents with no inherent blocks to scaling to 1 billion and beyond. Lucene also has related projects such as Solr, Nutch and Hadoop that provide infrastructure for scaling, crawling and distribution. Being open source it is probably the full-text solution of choice for most people building systems from scratch.
The alternative is to go to Mike Lynch over at Autonomy who purchased Verity, the engine software vendors left to go to FAST, especially after EMC Documentum’s decision to OEM the search engine in 2005. Autonomy/Verity still powers the search of a number of other ECM systems. Some are looking at Endeca to provide alternative styles of search that are more aligned with taxonomic search.
Regardless, it would be prudent for FAST’s OEM customers to get off FAST fast. Microsoft is already in a position of locking in a number pieces of layers that users access in the office environment from the proprietary hooks in Office to SharePoint to bundled services in the operating system. For the sake of innovation in the future, we should have alternatives to Microsoft for search.
This is more or less Alfresco’s third birthday. More or less because we started Alfresco in earnest in the new year as people were coming back from the holidays. Early 2005 was an exciting time, since we knew we wanted to create an open source enterprise content management system, but we didn’t know exactly who was going to buy it or how the open source model would work. With 2007 just completed, we have learned a lot and the future looks to be just as exciting as our first year. Alfresco is in its third year of exponential growth thanks to all of you who not only downloaded the software but deployed it in the tens of thousands of live systems and your active participation in the community.
Every company needs to start with table football. L-R: Dave, Kev, Derek and Roy in early 2005
The year started by focusing on our community and nothing could have been more important than our decision to move to the GPL license from our previous modified MPL license. With this we made the entire system open source with an OSI approved license and decided not to withhold any features or bug fixes. We would encourage the community with full feature set and encourage enterprise customers with support and more testing and certification on different platforms, a model that most open source companies are adopting including MySQL and RedHat. CMO Ian Howells and his team are responsible for getting the world to know about Alfresco with a budget that is a tiny fraction of what anyone else in the ECM industry spends by building on an open source foundation and helping community development. Ian has hired Nancy Garrity as a community manager and we are in the process of revamping the whole community infrastructure. The result has been a dramatic growth in the community, over a hundred contributions, and our first user community meetings in New York and Paris.
Kevin Cochrane and Paul Holmes-Higgin presenting at the Paris User Conference
Our engineering group led by VP of Engineering Paul Holmes-Higgin and Chief Architect David Caruana, expanded functionality of our ECM capabilities while providing excellent support for customers and increasing robustness and scalability of the Alfresco system. During 2007, Kevin Cochrane, Britt Park and Jon Cox led the release of our web content management product, although almost all of engineering was involved in the WCM application, runtime or deployment services. WCM has already had a significant impact on the product, the community and our customer base. During 2007, Activision, EA Sports, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaplan Educational Services and Swisscom launched internet websites on Alfresco. Web Scripts, the brainchild of Chief Architect David Caruana, uses REST as a web-oriented architecture to make it easy to create both mashable user interface components and new data APIs. Web Scripts enabled us to quickly create Microsoft Office extensions and integrate Alfresco into all sorts of environments such as Facebook and iGoogle as well as standard portals. The simplicity of web scripts has also led to a lot more contributions of new functionality to the community such as the new calendaring functions provided by the London Boroughs of Islington and Camden.
Dave Caruana's Facebook enhanced with Alfresco content thanks to Web Scripts
Enterprise sales and support grew dramatically and allow us to make the Alfresco system available free and open source. Matt Asay finds time between blogs on CNet to sell and hire the rapidly expanding US team. Denis Dorval, previously from FileNet, was promoted to VP of European sales and expanding a strong partner network here in Europe. The speed with which companies are adopting the enterprise system has surprised even us. I normally find out about and am surprised what new companies have bought an enterprise license during our end of quarter review. This meant that we added hundreds of paying customers in 2007 and Helen Dann has been furiously hiring both here in the UK and in Austin, Texas to support them. In addition our OEM business has been growing very strongly with more companies, such as Ricoh and Quark, incorporating either our lightweight repository or our CIFS capability with the newly GPL’ed JLan engine developed by Gary Spencer.
The coming year is shaping up to take Alfresco into the realm of greater collaboration and social computing as a natural extension of our Enterprise Content Management business. In 2008, we will be developing enhanced collaboration features, integrate Web 2.0 and social networking services into our applications, and take Alfresco services to the outside world as “Content as a Service”. The idea behind this is that ECM is no longer about application suites, but accessing and contributing content wherever it is needed, inside or outside the enterprise. Briana Wherry and her growing team are developing new documentation and training to help you learn more about these new and existing capabilities. We will be expanding our footprint into Europe with more support, marketing and sales in more countries and increasing the depth and breadth of experience in the US.
On this third birthday, I would like to thank all the people of Alfresco for their efforts who are now becoming to numerous to name. We are now getting close to seven times the number of people we had at the start. I would like to also thank all the people who have been active in the community and spreading the word about Alfresco and actively contributing to its success, especially people like Russ Danner, Jeff Potts and Ray Gauss. I would especially like to thank the original team that came together in that small room in Maidenhead in January 2005 - John Powell, Andy Hind, Dave Caruana, Derek Hulley, Gavin Cornwell, Kevin Roast, Linton Baddeley, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Roy Weatherall, and Steve Rigby. Thanks for believing.
Investment in the infrastructure of the internet has dramatically increased bandwidth to everyone in the developing world and created home computers that are not only inexpensive, but very powerful. This change has expanded the usage of the internet exponentially and introduced new demographics and generations of users that had not used computing prior to the expansion of the internet. These users have themselves created the content and applications that feed the internet and have set expectations of the applications that we use in web browsers and new mobile devices. The increased bandwidth has made this experience much more interactive and visual experience encompassing video and visual elements. Web properties such as YouTube, Google, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have set the benchmark for expression, accessibility and social interaction of computing systems.
Dubbed Web 2.0, this revolution in computing has shifted the face of software from a logical, linear, and introverted science to an expressive, graphical and social art. New designers of web sites, unschooled in traditional software techniques, are nonetheless able to create software that scales to millions of users and billions of objects of information and still meld those users into an artistically aware community. The next generation of enterprise employees who started using the internet in their early teens have only known this evolving culture of free and creative development of the internet and now demand better of the enterprise software that they meet. Older employees also know that that the software that they use on a day to day basis can be better. Enterprise 2.0 seeks to emulate the success of Web 2.0 in the creation of new software for the enterprise.
Social Computing
The shift of computing power from business logic and calculation to socialization and people-orientation has been dubbed by some as Social Computing. The term Social Computing has been used interchangeably with Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Applications, however, IBM and Microsoft have created Social Computing research centers and Forrester has started to use the term in describing next generation enterprise collaboration. Social Computing is the use of technology to support sharing of information and enabling collaboration through social networks and to tap into the value of the “Wisdom of Crowds”, a concept made famous by James Surowiecki in 2004 to explain how many people are smarter than individual experts. Social Computing exploits software oriented toward people and Social Networks, the extended relationships of individuals, to connect to more people and access the Wisdom of Crowds.
To tap into the wisdom and awareness of social networks and empower people to collaborate at any time or place, Social Computing platforms need the following capabilities:
People - Support information about people, their preferred communications, their relationships and affiliations, since social networking is all about people rather than just systems, data and objects. The more information available about other users, the more likely they can be found as a source of knowledge.
Context of Networks - Social networks organized around projects, teams and departments provide the context of work and relevance of information as it spreads from creation to the people that need that information. Social networks, especially networks extended beyond the enterprise, provide the greatest differentiation of social computing from previous generations of collaboration.
Social Collaboration - Provide an environment where people can share ideas, contribute knowledge and solve problems in creative, unstructured socialization as opposed to rigorous workflows that are required for control of information. Next generation tools use techniques developed by Web 2.0, particularly those tools that empower social knowledge, such as social tagging, integration of communication and awareness of changes in social networks.
Content as a Service - Content is the container of knowledge and information and is core to the socialization of information. Content needs to be accessible everywhere, not just in large, monolithic applications. Content capabilities need to be accessible as reusable service components. Social computing can happen inside the enterprise or outside and a channel can be a web site, web application, mobile device or even external web platforms such as Facebook or Google applications. Mashups can occur inside the enterprise or outside and the channel will require content as a service that can securely be accessed wherever it is needed or wherever it is contributed.
People-centric Tools - As Web 2.0 has spread new paradigms of user interaction, the consumerization of software has created expectations that enterprise software becomes easier and empowers user to contribute, correct and classify content and information within the context of social networks. AJAX and next generation rich internet application interfaces such as Adobe Flex will provide users with a much richer, more intuitive user experience and the ability to scan much more social knowledge to find ideas and solutions. These tools should themselves be componentized and accessible as a service so that they may be mashed up with other sources of social knowledge.
This does not mean that the need for traditional enterprise content technologies such as document and records management goes away. They are still repositories of the truth and verifiable information and thus play an important role in sharing knowledge within social networks. However, these traditional technologies lack the usability, empowerment, and breadth of reach that Web 2.0 sites provide. They lack the collaborative nature that invites in people without barriers and restrictions to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and information. Web content management for creating a richer Web 2.0-style user interface becomes even more important to this collaboration to provide a compelling face to the interaction and to simplify the access and navigation of shared information. Enterprise Content Management cannot become one of the principle platforms of Social Computing unless it addresses the requirements of Social Applications.
Use of Social Computing
The balance is shifting from contained and controlled companies to engaged and empowered collaborative enterprises driven by Web 2.0-inspired social computing. At the center of the shift from old models of computing in the enterprise to new social models are companies that are inspired to innovate or to engage more with their customers. This includes companies not just using their internet or intranet web sites, but engaging in social networking channels such as Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Those using social computing are interested in engaging people, such as customers, employees or partners. They are using new people-centric tools and facilitate creating or extending existing social networks.
Major ECM vendors are all planning their Social Computing efforts and to a large extent are being dragged in this direction by their more forward-looking customers. Enterprises that have discovered the value of Social Computing are:
Consumer-oriented companies that particularly address a younger demographic must engage their customers as part of both the marketing process as well as the development of new products. For example, games and film companies that engage their viewers in plot and scene development do much better than those that keep everything under wraps until the game or film is ready.
Enterprises hiring a new generation of knowledge workers who grew up on the internet must provide tools as empowering as those available from Web 2.0. Turning these tools off forces these workers to seek employment elsewhere and forcing them to use tools that do not meet their expectations of usability and engagement.
Financial Services firms are leading the shift in usage of these technologies. Financial Services have always been innovators in developing new technologies and investing in providing better service for their clients. Speed in innovation in these services becomes a major competitive advantage where churn of clients can be very high in turbulent times. Internally, competition for talent is intense and providing better support is important for attracting and retaining employees. In particular, young and ambitious brokers and managers are more likely to be sociable themselves and seek out Social Computing inside and outside the enterprise.
Government and Non-Profit organizations that provide services and citizen feedback online find increasing their IT budgets much easier than those that merely arbitrated by a front-line service. It is now inconceivable for an American politician to run for office without an extended internet presence such as Facebook or YouTube.
Enterprises that have faster cycles of product innovation, especially high tech, are looking to their customers and partners to participate in the development of new products and services. In previous generations, the field acted as a filtering mechanism of new customer requirements and ideas. However, today technology can provide a frictionless way of getting the entire enterprise to exchange ideas and improvements with the customer communities.
Integrating Social Computing
Because Social Computing is unlikely to come from a single source, especially because of the diversity of sources of knowledge and social networks available on Web 2.0, it is extremely important for the enterprise infrastructure for Social Computing to be integrated with those sources. This means bring these sources into the enterprise and bring the enterprise sources out to Web 2.0. No matter where the people collaborating are, the tools they want should be available. To facilitate this, the Social Computing should be:
Open Source - Through being developed through social computing paradigms and sharing best of breed components with the open source community, open source systems have evolved rapidly and encompass social computing capabilities developed by the open source community. Social tools such as MediaWiki, the wiki that powers Wikipedia, and WordPress, the most popular blogging software were developed using open source.
Integrating the Inside Out - By providing content as a service and enabling light-weight, Web-Oriented scripting development, the Social Computing platform should quickly integrate content services into external channels and web sites, such as Facebook and iGoogle, to allow enterprises to engage customers, partners and home workers.
Integrating the Outside In - If the Social Computing platform is modular and supports a Web 2.0-style mashup-oriented architecture, it enables users and teams to integrate external open source tools and social networking web services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or other Open Social-enabled properties, to tap into the wisdom of crowds available on the internet and to make customers and partners part of team collaboration.
REST-style Architecture - A Web 2.0-style or REST-style of architecture using easy, light-weight scripting languages and integrated through internet standards-based APIs can easily mash-up content services into any web-oriented application or web site. These architectures should be scalable, fault-tolerant and high performance to meet any enterprise or internet requirement.
Choice - The Social Computing platform should be based upon open interfaces developed by the open source community to provide choice of operating system, database, application server, content authoring tools or APIs.
Over the past year and continuing into the coming year, Alfresco is dedicated to expanding its architecture and applications to enable this vision of Social Computing. We will work with partners and open source community to provide best of breed open source tools for enabling this architecture. We will integrate with external Social Computing properties such as Facebook and the Open Social alliance to expand the breadth of social networks and the ability to collaborate through those networks. We will be expanding the Alfresco system’s understanding of users as people and facilitate sharing of information and content through their networks. We will be open in the process and seek and encourage your feedback and participation.
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