Enterprise 2.0 Tools Will See Price Drop

Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young, in a new study, has indicated that the cost for business web 2.0 tools will decrease over the next five years. Price drops will be seen across the board for "blogs, wikis, social networking tools, and enterprise RSS." The sole exception is mashups, which Young predicts the cost will double. As quoted from the study, and reported in this article, the reason for the trend is that:

"Traditional software vendors have moved aggressively in the direction of web 2.0 software; however, few are offering standalone products. Instead, most, like Microsoft and SAP, are rolling web 2.0 features into existing software packages; in many cases, they are providing the technology at no extra cost...many will make use of them and offset another purchase in the process."

GE Understands Enterprise 2.0

Support Central is the heart of GE’s global business. It is available in 20 languages, has 25 million hits a day, supports over 50,000 communities and over 100,000 experts are on the site daily to manage information and answer questions. Oliver Marks takes an in depth look at their system and how it works in a recent post on Collaboration 2.0.

Using the new tools for Enterprise 2.0, GE has created a way to digitize their documents and internal processes. The complete system is protected by a firewall, but there is 30,000 external users who can log on to the site and access the Support Central system. GE hosts its own internal cloud to support this impressive enterprise system. In addition to all of the processes available to GE throughout the world, they also offer a way to make mashups at the click of a button and a professional networking system that provides a way to instantly find the experts. Also in the works is a program to collaborate on online shared documents.

Serena Software releases ARM

On July 7, Serena Software announced their latest release, the Serena ARM, or Application Release Manager. EWeek talks about it here. This tool takes mashups to the mainframe for businesses.

This new tool will provide:

an automated way for application developers, IT operations and business users to communicate and collaborate with each other during the release process so that applications can be released on schedule

Rene Bonvaine, Senior Vice President of worldwide marketing, partner programs and services, had this to say about the new release:

This [ARM] relates a lot more to our roots, but it combines very nicely with a lot of things we’ve been talking about with mashups. This is part of the continued mainframe drive toward Web 2.0, and we see a lot of application development happening for the mainframe. We have quite a number of mainframe customers, and we continue to add them to our stable.

Mashups will create huge market

According to this article at Read Write Web, mashups will be a $700 million business by 2013.

According to Forrester, this is the definition of a mashup: "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique."

One of the reasons that mashups will become a vital part of the future is that simple platforms such as Yahoo Pipes and other programs have allowed mashups to be created by consumers who have little or no knowledge when it comes to programming them.

Forrester also makes the assumption that mashups will hit their high point between the years of 2009-2010, and eventually fold in to IT departments by 2013. At this point, the major software manufacturers (examples: IBM and Microsoft) should have assumed most of their productions elements.

Organizations must increase their Web 2.0 awareness and capabilities now to prepare for the storm of innovation to come."

Enterprise 2.0 a growing business

In an study released at Forrester this week, they say the Web 2.0 business is growing so rapidly, it’ll be worth $4.6 billion by 2013. Details of the report can be found here at Read Write Web.

What’s included in this growing industry? Some of the key parts are social networks, mashups and RSS feeds. They also point out the blogs are not a part of enterprise 2.0. Neither is Facebook, Netvibes or Twitter. Why? These are ad supported. So, this growing is going to come from the money companies spend on web 2.0 tools such as Net Vibes, Microsoft and IBM. Also included in this Enterprise 2.0 category is tools that allow companies to collaborate on certain projects.

Mash Ups in the Enterprise: Serena Software making them happen

As we all know, Serena Software is one of the leaders when it comes to pushing out Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into the world.

Serena Software’s latest venture, according to EWeek, is that they are now releasing software with Creative Commons. This nonprofit organization’s aim is to push software out into the work place and having it open source so everyone can modify it to the different needs of the company. Their standpoint is that as long as the software is reworked, the original still has value and is worth the same amount of money. All of this between the two companies free of cost. They hope to set up an online community that encourages people to share their solutions to the problems in their business.

Serena Software wants to see innovation throughout a company, and this is why their mashups are free and open to anyone who wants to use or modify them. This cuts out time on the IT side, and users can modify the software to do exactly what they need. This way, productivity can be increased as well since the models can be adapted by the users and there is no middle man creating the product. Serena software looks to release 20 mashups with in the next two months. And after innovation happens from users modifying the software, who knows how many mashups those will turn into.

Many companies have already seen success with mashups. In this Business Week article, Société Générale shares that the use of mashups in their business has helped the time gap between California and France.

So, in mid-October, he brought in software company ActiveGrid, which added a host of tools, from Yahoo! (YHOO) news feeds to Google (GOOG) Maps to AltaVista's Babel Fish for on-the-fly English-French translation. Best of all, the upgrade took all of three days, compared with the three months it took to build the application at the outset. "It's all the applications I need, but simplified," Hababou says.

Société Générale as well as other organizations (E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Realogy) have taken advantage of these mashups are quickly built and inexpensive.

Are you willing to share the mashups that are developed in your company? Or have you had a mashup that’s had great influence on your company? If so, what were they?

The Forgotten Tool: Enterprise Mashups

Many times in this blog, we cover blogs and wikis as an important tool in order to create an Enterprise 2.0 environment in your workplace. In Ross Dawson’s recent post he points out not to forget one of the most important: the enterprise mashup. We must remember it’s definition in order to see the power it can hold as a tool in the enterprise:

Enterprise Mashup – A combination of different types of content or data, usually from different sources to create something new

When introduced to employees, they fully take the power. The employees can begin combining different tools such as sales, market research, transactions or other important data and keep it on the enterprise intranet. There is no need to have the IT department involved with many tools out there for the employee such as Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft’s Popfly and IBM’s QEDwiki or Lotus Mashups.

I think mashups will get your employees more involved in the adapting of the Enterprise 2.0 tools. It’s not like the wiki where they dump off a huge file for everyone to collaborate on. One employee may need to see the locations of the country that generate the most revenue for statistical purposes. So they create a mashup. Later, the sales team sees the hot areas and begins to research more in depth why these areas are hot spots. This could ultimately lead to seeing more opportunities for your company. It can also foster two key elements of the Enterprise 2.0 process: the tool (the Mashup) and collaboration. More collaboration means more productivity.

Mashups in the Air!

Finally, an application that will allow employees to populate a webpage with services that they feel are useful to the context to their jobs has arrived! The latest article on InformationWeek highlights the release of IBM’s Lotus Mashup Builder, which allows users to build their own mashups on a webpage and share it with the rest of the organization.

IBM has always been an innovator in introducing Web 2.0 tools in the Enterprise, but I think this application takes home the trophy. Employees can embed useful applications like a Google search bar, a Wikipedia page, or any other useful tool. The next step in this process is getting IT folks to understand the business value of mashups in order to include these webpages within a corporate profile. But that is another conversation in itself…

What else is great about this Mashup Builder is that it can track vital information such as who is building/sharing the mashups, the services that are being used, and a lot more. This will definitely show tech laggards that Web 2.0 is here to stay.

IBM seems to be the leader in the mashup biz for now, but I’m sure other giants will soon follow. I have a good feeling about this one…