Happy Holidays from Enterprise3

We will be taking some much needed time off for the holidays. We'd like to thank you for your readership and we encourage you to check back with us next year for more innovative thought, perspective and news surrounding the world of Enterprise.

We wish you a joyous holiday season!

Google's Native Client

Google's Native Client (a new open-source technology designed to complement JavaScript, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR and Flash) is geared to address the security issues inherent in leveraging native computer code in application development, helping Google bridge the performance gap between Web and desktop applications.

We see that the future will be about computers that are "clients" - pretty basic computers with small or non-existant local storage, plugging into web apps--

Netbooks are seen as a first step to that... everyone will be using apps online, etc. etc.

Now that Google has Google docs and shareware, this is the next step--but will it work?

Check out eWeek's coverage here.

Understanding CLOUD Computing

CLOUD computing can be seen as:

Common
Location-independent
Online
Utility provisioned on-
Demand.

We've covered this in the past, but I think its important to bring up and companies are searching for new ways to cut costs with enterprise computing. What do you think? A way that completely carries applicatons outside of the computer hardware--will this catch on? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Angsuman Chakraborty's Enterprise Blog covered this as well, and the article can be seen in Ajax World Magazine.

Social Media Today: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking

A few great tips for starting an enterprise social networking system, thanks to headshift at Social Media Today.


Social reading and writing.

Social search and expertise location.

Social networking for collaboration.

Social networking for key client relationships.

Unified messaging.

Harnessing attention metadata.


For the rest of this article, please click here.

Barclaycard hails success of adverts across MSN portals

More than 4.6m unique users visited a Barclaycard website as part of a major push via Microsoft Advertising's first 'two-screen' takeover campaign.Barclaycard ran a major campaign to promote its contactless payment service for two weeks in November, using Microsoft Advertising's MSN Live fixed and mobile portals.The campaign was the first home page takeover across both portals and generated strong results for the brand. The site attracted 4.6m unique users and 102,000 played the related...

For the rest of this article, please click here.

Dell in Leaders Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Storage

From Welt Online:

Research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. positioned Dell in the "Leaders Quadrant” of its Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 20081 report, Dell announced today.

Do you think that Dell is a leader? We'd like to hear your thoughts.

Read more here.

Sybase Wins Big at MobileVillage Awards

From MarketWatch:

Sybase, Inc. the largest enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information, today announced that four of its innovative solutions received three Gold and one Silver Mobile Star Awards(TM) from MobileVillage(R), a leader in advancing mobile and wireless technology for enterprises and professionals.

This year's Mobile Star Awards winners can be found online at http://www.mobilevillage.com/awards.htm.

For more information or to read the MarketWatch article, please click here.

Internetnews.com: SSD's Next Home Could Be Enterprise Storage

Ran across this nifty article today in InternetNews.com.

The mobile market was an ideal launch point for the advent of solid state drive (SSD) technology because every one of SSD's strengths hit a point of need in mobility: they run cooler and faster than HDDs, they're smaller and draw far less power.

Because prices are coming down, people are now looking to replacement drives to store their data--hm.

What do you think? How will people store data in a cost effective way?

To view the rest of the article please go here.

GMail becomes enterprise friendly

A recent article at eWeek looks at how GMail has taken a turn to become an enterprise tool. Some relatively new items that are featured in GMail are:

-Google calendar
-Docs gadgets
-Alerts from calendars
-G Chat available on cell phones

Read the article here.

Tripwire Chosen for Oregon County Schools

Marketwatch

Tripwire, a leader in configuration assessment and change auditing for physical and virtual environments, today announced that Gwinnett County Public Schools has selected Tripwire Enterprise to help it ensure control of IT configurations across its systems. Gwinnett's IT team selected Tripwire Enterprise to ensure system availability and compliance to its change control processes.

"Gwinnett County citizens highly value the important role education plays in building a thriving, diverse community and strongly support the school system's pursuit of excellence," said Scott Futrell, CIO at Gwinnett County Public Schools. "For this reason, we chose Tripwire as our de facto standard for ensuring our IT systems attain and retain a known state. Tripwire has helped Gwinnett improve our change control processes, effectively supporting administrators, teachers and students in their pursuit of excellence in education through optimal system availability and reliability."

Tripwire Enterprise provides Gwinnett Public Schools with the ability to detect unauthorized changes to its systems, helping its IT staff to proactively avoid unplanned downtime. Gwinnett County IT staff was particularly interested in Tripwire's support for Active Directory and the ability to monitor it for changes. Undesired changes to directory services can cause serious problems including logon failure and account lockout, security and compliance-policy breaches, application failures, and service outages.

Read the rest of this post here.

Top 10 Green Gadgets for Your Office

Check out this great post over at Silcone.com, that details the must-have green gadgets for your office. Not only are these smart inventions earth friendly but they may save your company on yearly energy costs--and costs savings are where its at these days!

Our personal fave, is this nifty mobile charging unit that uses solar energy to recharge your gadgets.

Hard news from inside the company

In these hard economic times, many companies are forced to cut back. However, many of them are looking to break the news in a more personal way by blogging them. The New York Times ran a story today. Many companies are taking their time to write their story down, as many employees take time to use Twitter and blogs to share their thoughts.

One example is Cake Financial:

Steven A. Carpenter, chief executive of a two-year-old investing advice site, Cake Financial, had blogged about the company’s new weekly video show and its move to new quarters in San Francisco. On Oct. 19, the night before he laid off 30 percent of his employees, he wrote a post about the cutbacks.

The next morning, he met with the six employees he was letting go. Afterward, he clicked the button to publish his post about the “extremely sad day for all of us who have to say goodbye to a group of great people.”

“Our whole company is built on the idea of transparency in investing, so that was a reason why it was important for us to do it,” Mr. Carpenter said in an interview. He also wanted employees and outsiders to know they were each getting the same version of the story. “It let them know what we were up to in real time, so they didn’t get nervous about what was going on,” he said.

Enterprise 2.0 Tool Success

In a continuation of yesterdays post, this article from ZDNet provided an informative graph from the Forrester research report regarding the future of Enterprise 2.0. The graph depicts the success level of various forms of Enterprise 2.0, as well as how long each form will take to have an impact. As the graph shows Social Networks, and Wikis have the highest success level, especially between between the survival and growth phase. For more analysis check out the post at ZDNet.

Enterprise 2.0 Industry Reports

The Enterprise 2.0 market is expected to reach $4.6 billion by 2013. Other predictions as mentioned in ReadWriteWeb,

-predicts that social networking tools and internal wikis "will have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration"
- expects enterprise microblogs to "become a feature, not a standalone product category"
- enterprise 2.0 apps will fall dramatically in price
- "cultural resistance" to social networks will "eventually break, allowing workers to connect with like-minded colleagues and enabling a collaboration channel that previously didn't exist in the enterprise."

To see all of the expected changes in the enterprise 2.0 market check out the report here.

Enterprise Software Purchasing

This new post from ZDNet proves enlightening on the subject of enterprise software purchase. The author of the post, Michael Krigsman, quotes Barry Wilderman, VP of Business Strategy at Lawson Software, regarding points to cover with software vendors. Krigsman summary of these points, that you may also find useful, are:

1. Software license fees: A negotiated fee often involves a certain cost/named user. It is important to understand the relative usage by named user (e.g., the heads-down transaction user, the decision maker/reporting user, the self-service user) and the value that each user will deliver to the company deploying the system. An understanding of value, when the value will be delivered, and a comparison to total cost of ownership are all critical to making the right decision about software fees.
2. Implementation fees: Expect to pay one to four times the cost of the software in implementation fees. And, even if you buy third-party professional services, a best practice is to have the ERP vendor as a subcontractor (at least 20 percent).
3. Maintenance fees: This represents a significant charge – often about 20 percent of your original software charges. Make sure you are getting the kind of support you need.
4. Upgrades: How often do these upgrades occur? (A good rule of thumb is every three to four years.) What has been the history of upgrades over the past five to 10 years? Relative to the cost of going live with the software, how expensive were the upgrades to implement?
5. New modules: If the software vendor invents something, is it part of your maintenance agreement, or is it a new product for sale? Ask the vendor to show you all the new modules implemented in the past five years.
6. Post go-live sales, services and care: What are your expectations after you go-live? Do you want the vendor to have a keen understanding of your original pains and goals? Will they know enough about you to really help?

Shaking Things up With Alfresco Enterprise 3.0

Paula Rooney writes in this post on ZDNet that Alfresco will be releasing a major upgrade to its current enterprise content management system, Alfresco Enterprise 3.0, which will have many new collaboration features and services.

It is due to be released on Halloween, and it will feature Share which is a collaborative content solution that makes capturing, sharing, and accessing information across virtual teams much simpler. It will also offer support for CMIS specification as well as the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Protocol. It will be interesting to see how the enterprise will respond to Alfresco’s latest offering

LinkedIn Launches “Enterprise” Applications

Larry Dignan posted today on ZDNet that LinkedIn has recently unveiled its application platform where it allows developers to offer business-oriented software. But unlike Facebook that provides many time-wasting apps and games, LinkedIn will provide a bigger focus on business essentials.

LinkedIn will be handpicking the applications that will be available on the platform. For now, some of the developers include Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit and WordPress. Although a lot of these applications are not completely focused on the enterprise, it’s off to a better start. I’m interested to see what the next couple of months will hold in store for apps on LinkedIn.

Small Business Owners and Social Media

This afternoon I came across this post on ZDNet which discusses the findings of a recent survey conducted by online payroll service SurePayroll. According to this survey, 55 percent of 120 small businesses surveyed believe that online social networking like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are extremely beneficial to their business. One of out 5 businesses surveyed even mentioned that they have gained at least one new customer because of social media. Interesting stats…

Even smaller companies are beginning to discover that social media is not just only for personal use; it is a must for business success. The survey provides information on small businesses reaching a customer base through online communities, but where are the stats for benefits for small businesses on using social media internally? Does anyone have any input on the usage of enterprise 2.0 in small companies?

SOA Predictions for the New Year

Every year David Linthicum at InfoWorld makes his SOA predictions for the upcoming year (which he claims to be 90% right in the past few years). As detailed in this post on InfoWorld, here are his predictions in SOA for 2009. Do you agree?

1. The interest in cloud computing will drive many enterprises toward SOA.
2. The explosion in PaaS (platform-as-a-service) will leave many enterprise architects and CIOs scratching their heads.
3. The economy will recover, but most enterprises out there will focus on cost reduction.
4. There will be a larger focus on inter-domain SOA technology, or highly scalable and secure middleware technology that will provide scalable service and information access between the instances of SOAs within the enterprise, and
5. Jig will be up for poor SOA governance solutions out there.
6. Most failed SOA projects will be traced to unqualified SOA architects.
7. SOA the buzzword will become a bit less relevant and will begin to morph with concepts, such as enterprise architecture and cloud computing.

FriendFeed testing enterprise friendly function

At ZD Net, they talk about the new beta project FriendFeed started using this week. This new feature will allow new notes to be updated in real time.

The real-time feature is continually connected to FriendFeed’s servers, so that when a person posts an update in main stream or room it updates automatically in, well, real-time. It’s a bit like a chat room except it still aggregates some interesting content such as likes and comments, but it does omit the much-loved threaded conversations.

Read more here. Do you think you could use this in your quest to adapt Enterprise 2.0?