I put my main conclusions and perspective on the Office 2.0 Conference in my Part 2 report. However, I want to pick up on a number of threads related to adoption of this technology in the enterprise, and how the Office 2.0 companies need to position themselves as they present their wares.
Many of the sessions looked at Office 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, how it is being accepted and the barriers to adoption. The “Is Office 2.0 Enterprise Ready” panel mentioned the outages Salesforce.com had earlier in the year, and highlighted the problem this gives CIOs of larger companies who are worried about the level of service and security of their data. When Ivan Koon of YouSendIt insisted that IT “can’t make a deal, but they can break a deal” that triggered one of the few panel arguments of the session. Mat Quinn of TIBCO slapped him down, saying you can’t speak in absolutes like that. Ken Rudin of LucidEra related from his time at Salesforce.com, when they had made the mistake of trying to go round corporate IT, when actually you need to embrace them and find ways that will help bring them on board.
In the Open Business session moderated by Stowe Boyd, Paul Topping of Design Science highlighted that Leila Boujnane’s Idee company has a traditional sales force, whereas SugarCRM started without any sales force. Both are web 2.0 companies, and both models can happily exist. This session also discussed the acceptance of blogs, wikis and social media in businesses in general. Paul said that even in a high technology company like his, no-one was interested in using social media, but Stowe argued it was partly a generational thing, and the younger generations are more likely to adopt. He also hit a great point, which is that where the corporate management raise concerns over internal use of blogs and wikis, and the detrimental effect this might have with employees spending all their time online gossiping, these things are cyclical. Exactly the same issues were raised back in the 40s and 50s when companies started to put a phone on everyone’s desk. It was the same with e-mail, and now the concern gets raised again with social media.
One difference about the Office 2.0 phenomenon that this group discussed is that there is no single “killer app” like e-mail. Stowe suggested that the mashup mechanism of integrating applications was going to be the “killer glue”. They also discussed the orientation of the topic benefiting medium and VSB (Very Small Business) more. Whereas the CIO of the major company is interested in command and control of his/her systems, the smaller company just doesn’t care, and is more than happy to outsource the problem to get the job done.
Neil Robertson and Jason Wood hosted a great panel getting the VC and investor’s view on the whole topic, and the companies involved at the show. Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures suggested that a lot of the applications at the show don’t address a mission critical topic. He coined the phrase “vitamins not pain killers”. He said he is investing in only one company at the show, Teqlo run by my fellow Irregular Jeff Nolan. He thought most of the vendors here were a lot of variations on a theme, with many of the conversations being about how they are doing things and not what. Too much focus on the products themselves, not enough on what business problems they are going to solve. MR Rangaswami of Sandhill Group suggested that CIOs of larger corporates are disillusioned about the things being pitched to them. The Fortune 100 CIOs at Enterprise 2006 seemed to be through cost cutting cycle, and are now in an innovation phase. However, too often they are pitched technology looking for a problem. They want the vendors to learn their business and present the product to solve a specific problem. The Office 2.0 vendors need to express their domain knowledge, not just show their latest cool, new thing.
The VCs were asked what they were looking for from the start-ups they are investing in. Do they need to see a demo, do they need to hear about beta customers, or will they fund a concept presented on PowerPoints. One of them said the median company that they put money in to had 3 people, but the discussion kept coming back to the theme of business, not technology (hey that’s OUR motto!) and what business model the company in question is going to leverage?
The other key point was emphasising that SaaS is a delivery mechanism, like distributing software on CD, not a sexy thing in itself. It’s just the most sensible way to work at the moment, and the real focus should be on the “value add” of the service in question, combined with the collaboration potential. Jason did a great write of this session himself, assisted by notes from Dan Farber’s piece - you should go and read both of them.
Here is the motley crew of the Enterprise Irregulars, at our inaugural get together on the evening of day 1 of the conference, kindly hosted by Atlassian and Stormhoek - Hugh’s South African wine people.
So as I pack up to head away from San Francisco, I can say that I’ve met some great, smart people, learned about a lot of new products with potential, seen the start of an IT sector that will be increasingly important over the next 5 years, and helped crystallise some of my thoughts on Software as a Service and the way enterprise software is developing. It was a great show to have been at.
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