In The Next Version

Earlier this week I attended MicroStrategy World in Miami, Florida. If you're not familiar with MicroStrategy, they are one of the largest vendors of Business Intelligence (BI) software, competing with products such as SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos for reporting and analysis of data. MicroStrategy was founded in 1989 by CEO Michael Saylor and COO Sanju Bansal. I did not get to meet Michael, but did have the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Bansal and found him to be an excellent presenter and spokesperson for his company.

While BI is not my area of focus, the reason MicroStrategy was interested in speaking with me is that they are increasing their focus on "social". This makes sense, since analyzing Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites is a hot area right now. However, MicroStrategy made it clear that they are taking a different approach than others in this space. They are not doing things like "sentiment analysis" where you can monitor social networks for mentions of your brand. Instead, they looking to create the largest and most powerful application for analyzing the data "Liked" by people in Facebook. Throughout the various keynotes and sessions they referred to Facebook as the largest CRM database ever created and stroked our imagination at what information could be gleamed from it.

In addition to "social", MicroStrategy has put a HUGE focus on mobile applications. They don't see mobile as an afterthought or an "alternative access method", they see mobile (especially iPads) as a fundamental driver in the adoption of Business Intelligence. After a few days of playing with their various iPad apps, I can tell you they have hit a home run. Just look at these screenshots. The iPad's UI and interactions (touching, zooming, scrolling) brings data to life in a fun and interactive way that you just don't get on a regular computer screen. Several customers at the event talked about how the MicroStrategy iPad app is enabling their company to create and share information in ways they never have before.

So let's look at how they have combined the two areas of "social" and "mobile" and do a quick review of their Wisdom iPad application.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Facebook But Were Afraid To Ask (or share!)

Wisdom is a free iPad application that makes it simple to drill down into information shared by millions of Facebook fans. Currently the application has data from about 5 million people and MicroStrategy says that is growing by about 100,000 people a day. The app has two main functions, the first allows you to analyze and compare the information from almost half a billion Facebook Page Likes. The second provides you detailed statistics about your personal Facebook network.

A Marketing Managers Dream

Have you ever wanted to know about the differences in Coke vs. Pepsi fans? IBM vs. Microsoft? Yankees vs. Red Sox? With Wisdom you can. Here are a few examples that I had fun creating:

Harry Potter fans vs. Twilight


Justin Bieber fans vs. Sting


Wisdom has a powerful set of filters that enable you to drill down into the data from many angles. For example, below I investigated the differences in TV shows Liked specifically by Canadian men and women ages 22-45. Interesting that The Big Bang Theory is the first show to both lists.





Overall I'm extremely impressed with the Wisdom application. The iPad UI is easy to use and provides some really powerful features. I do wish you could select multiple pages when doing comparisons. For example, I wanted to look at The Simpsons vs. Family Guy, but each had several choices listed. The same thing happened for Playstation vs. Xbox. To get a more accurate picture I think they need to enable you to compare multiple Facebook Fan pages into a single query.

So while the free iPad application is a lot of fun (and useful) the real power for brands comes in the form of MicroStrategy Wisdom Enterprise Edition. This version allows brands to create more advanced dashboards, engage their fans with personalized deals and even synchronize data with CRM systems. Of course the first thing that probably pops into your mind is concerns around security and privacy. Rather that get into those details here, I'll direct you to the MicroStrategy Wisdom FAQ.


Getting Personal With Your Network

Switching gears from analyzing Facebook Fan Pags, Wisdom also allows you to drill into details about your personal network of Facebook friends. For example, you can discover the most popular posts, interests, activities and places your friends visit. Filters allow you to slice and dice this data in a variety of ways.

The default page named Feed, shows you the Most Popular posts made by your friends in the last 7 days. (I'm not displaying a screenshot to honour my friends' privacy) Popular is defined by the total combined number of comments and likes. You can filter this view by geography, age, gender and relationship status. Of course the first thing I did was look at what the single females 30-40 in Toronto were posting about! As another proof point of how good this iPad application is, you can click on a person's name to go to their Facebook profile or click on the text of the post to open the specific conversation. There are two enhancements I'd like to see: 1) The ability to exclude specific people 2) Click to sort the various columns.

The second page named Friends, allows you to look at things like who's the most active, which people you interact with the most, the people who comment/Like your posts and the people who's posts you most frequently Like or comment on. I found this to be very interesting data, but again wish I could sort the various columns.

The Interests, Places and Events tabs provide a look into a lot of the details of your network. For example, the most checked into location amongst my network was SFO airport. Again (broken record) I wish you could sort the columns. It would also be nice to be able to dive deeper into specific stats, for example I can see the number of people that checked into SFO but now who they are.

The final page "About Me" is perhaps the most fun to play around with. You can look at the demographics of your network: (gees, most of my friends are younger than me and married, surprise surprise)



You can see the people you interact with the most frequently: (posts, comments and likes, but not message)



and you can see your overall activity. Notice that if you touch anywhere on the chart, details pop up.




I've really enjoyed playing with the Wisdom application. I use the word playing on purpose, because for me this was fun, not business. However, that's smart on MicroStrategy's part as this shows the power of what their platform can do and will entice marketing people to contact them to find out about Wisdom Enterprise Edition. Wisdom is one of the most impressive iPad applications I've seen. I hope I have the opportunity to work with MicroStrategy on ways this technology can be applied to internal enterprise collaboration platforms.


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You can't attend a conference or webinar these days without hearing how social, location, mobile, gamification, cloud and big data are currently the most influential trends in enterprise software. Of these, location is currently getting the least amount of attention, but that may be changing soon. Take for example Tibco, who have just announced some location features to their Tibbr product.

So what role should location play in enterprise software? I think the best way to answer that is to start by saying what I don't want it to be... "FourSquare for the Enterprise." I can't see companies wanting employees to compete over being Leader of the Lunchroom or Ruler of the Water Cooler. However, I do think a great deal of value could be derived from adding location as a layer of metadata stored with objects that are part of a business processes. Those objects could be things like people, customer records, inventory, steps in a workflow, status updates, etc.

If location was stored with objects, that data could then be used to filter information, just like how facets such as time and author are used today. This could lead to location-specific activity streams, similar to how Google+ provides a "Nearby" stream in their mobile apps. Location is not just reserved for people though. Say a new customer prospect was entered into your CRM system and that record was broadcast into your activity stream along with the customer's location. If an employee was subscribed to updates based on that location, they may be able to help close the deal.

In other words, location is an important data point that could be used to reduce the rapidly increasing amount of information that is being pushed into activity streams.

Another way location could help is to assist employees as they travel. Imagine visiting a customer location or remote office and having your social software automatically provide you information about the facility such as where to park, maps to the visitor center, places to eat and a list of local colleagues you're connected with (or others like you that are visiting) all based on knowing your location. Take it a step further and imagine if the system automatically informed your people working there that you were visiting and they could reach out to you to try and meetup.

There are many ways in which location can play a pivotal role in helping navigate the sea of information we're all drowning in. Based on conversations I've had with several vendors I know we're going to see a lot of advancements in this area. If you're a software vendor and you're not working on this already, you better start as you're already way behind.





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You may have noticed that I'm really excited about the plethora of new team project management solutions that are popping up such as Do, Strides, Asana, Wunderkit, Podio, Trello and many others. The reason I like them is that they enable colleagues to do more than just share status updates and links and instead help teams actually focus on getting work done. Today Producteev announced updates to all their clients, integration with TaskRabbit, printable task lists and more.



Producteev uses the term workspaces as the top level way of organizing a project. Each workspace has members and contains tasks. Tasks have all the expected features such as prioritization, due dates, assignments, etc. Tasks can have sub-tasks, but they are just simple checklists and don't have all the features that main tasks have. Producteev provides a nice activity stream that displays all the events taking place in the workspace and allows conversations to take place around each event.

Producteev is available on the web, via clients for Windows or Mac, and as applications on iOS and Android devices. Pricing is per workspace, not per user. Workspaces for only 1 or 2 people are free, while paid workspaces start at $20/month and discounts apply as the number of workspaces increases.


My POV

• While the "pay for what you use" pricing model sounds attractive, I think business buyers may prefer a single time charge and not have to worry about how many projects they are setting up. Of course per user pricing can get confusing when you mix both internal employees and external people like customers or partners. To solve this some SaaS vendors are charging per employee but allowing unlimited external users.
• Differentiation in this space is going to be difficult, as most vendors are offering similar features and user experiences.
• Producteev's integration with TaskRabbit sounds interesting, but I'd like to hear stories about how customers are actually using it before I'm convinced this will be useful, especially in business use-cases.
• I know one of the fundamental design points for these tools is simplicity, but I believe that integration with business systems such as CRM, ECM, HR, etc. is going to be critical in making them truly useful. After all, if you're going to manage a project don't you want to link back to the resources (people, pages, files, customer records, inventory, etc.) involved in the project?

What do you think?  Are you using a team-based project management tool to help you and your colleagues get work done?

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It's 8:00am Monday morning and I'm surrounded by thousands of friends in a ballroom at the Dolphin hotel in Orlando. The lights dim and BAM we're acoustically assaulted by the blaring sounds of OK Go performing Here It Goes Again as they kick off Lotusphere 2012. From that opening salvo to the final remarks some two hours later we were treated to one of the best overall Lotusphere opening sessions.

Below are some highlights of the event followed by my observations and feedback.

First up was Alistair Rennie, General Manager IBM Collaboration Solutions. Alistair established the pace of this year's event (short segments) by spending just a few minutes on opening highlights, including announcing that 750 university students were in attendance representing 20 different educational institutes. He then introduced this year's special guest speaker, Michael J. Fox. Michael's presentation focused on living in the moment and how this enables you to do things you never could accomplish if you over-think it. He tied his talk into the Lotusphere theme by explaining how important the online community was to him when we was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and how he established The Michael J. Fox Foundation to be an service where people could share their stories, learn from each other and know that they are not alone.

Over the next 90 minutes a parade of executive speeches, product demonstrations and customer stories combined to paint a very compelling picture of IBM's vision of Social Business. Some of the morning's product announcements included:

• IBM Connections Embedded Experiences - Via industry standards including OpenSocial and activitystrea.ms, IBM has taken activity streams to the next level by going beyond mere status updates and link sharing to offer integration with core business systems. For example, an order in SAP could be displayed as a post in the stream, then filled out and approved right inline, eliminating the need to switch back and forth between multiple applications. I'll be covering this in more detail in a separate blog post.
• IBM Connections Mail - In the next version of Connections people will be able to access their Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange based email and calendar right within Connections. This is not a new email system nor a native messaging application such as the one found in Facebook.
  
  

• Two announcements were made around Lotus Notes. The first is that next version of Lotus Notes, named Social Edition (bleh!) will include a new Home Page featuring the same activity stream that is available to Connections users on the web. This new feature will require an IBM Connection server, but the pricing and licensing for that has not yet been announced. Second, a new web browser plugin will allow people to access Domino applications via the web instead of requiring a full Notes client. The initial beta will be for IE and FF on Windows. When I get more details on the plugin's features, limitations and requirements I'll post about it.
• LotusLive is being rebranded IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business and will become a more integrated part of the larger IBM initiative around Smart Cloud.
• IBM Docs - Provides online document editing similar to Google Docs, where people can work together in real time to co-author content. Authors can even assign specific sections for colleagues to work on.

• IBM Customer Experience - this impressive package is used by companies to infuse their brand's web presence with social features, drag and drop content, videos and more.
• Mobile applications of all shapes and sizes where shown, including a prototype of the next Connections mobile app for iPad that has a Flipboard like experience.

The closing story was presented by Dr. Jeffery Burns of Children's Hospital Boston. It was a heart warming tale of how they are using IBM Connections to redefine the way doctors are educated, share information, work together and ultimately save children's lives. I'd love to see this as a TEDTalk.

My Point Of View

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the big software vendors are catching up to and even passing the startups when it comes to social software. I'm sticking with that statement and this week IBM did a lot to support my case.

• The keynote was informative, engaging and even inspirational. The pace was excellent and I was quite surprised how quickly 2 hours went by. I do feel the demos repeated too much from last year though. Embedded experiences, online editors, customer experience web sites... we saw this all last year. The difference is this year more of the code is "real". So while I am being critical of that, I will say the demos were excellent. Hopefully next year they will show different things, perhaps focused on a few specific (vertical) business use-cases.
• While IBM may not be the first to market, the least expensive nor the easiest to install/configure/manage, one thing they certainly do well is articulate the business value of social business. Every marketing message, product demo and customer case study is focused on why and how organizations need to transform themselves into a social business to remain competitive. My mantra for a while now has been to stop talking about "being social" and to instead focus on "getting work done" and IBM appears to be on that path.
• IBM is reducing the friction caused by their own internal politics. The IBM social software platform involves technology and people from all across the company, not just a single brand. It's been interesting to meet IBMer's this week who work in every corner of the company. Lotusphere is no longer just Lotus employees. This is a really good thing for customers as they are now truly buying from IBM, not just one small division.
• I like the rebranding of LotusLive. While IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business does not exactly roll off the tonge, it does provide a great proof point of my previous comment.
• Mobile access is a first class player, not an after thought. Almost all the IBM collaboration tools are available on a wide variety of mobile devices.
• IBM is doing a great job of thinking about how analytics can transform business processes. While they are talking about cliché use-cases such as brand sentiment in social media, they are also looking at quite innovative uses of analytics in areas like improving employee retention.
• IBM is improving the commitment and recognition of business partners. During the keynote partner products were included in demos, awards were presented in several categories, the OpenNTF community was mentioned and the IBM Champion program was highlighted including having a partner come onto the main stage to kick off the demos. I understand that on Business Development day the partners were educated on several new incentive models designed to put more money in their pockets, with less red-tape and instant payments. (ex: revenue model for selling cloud offerings)
• The overall collaboration portfolio is still rather confusing. For example, when should a customer go with a hosted version of Connections vs. LotusLive? (I mean IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business) With Microsoft the message is simple, there is SharePoint, available on-premises or hosted. With IBM you have Connections, Quickr, Portal, Customer Experience Suite, LotusLive, etc., etc. Many of the partners, customers and even IBMers I've spoken with would like to see a simplification of the portfolio.
• I'm curious to know who IBM considers their largest competitor. Microsoft? Google? Best of breed combinations?
• Finally, the customer reference stories are excellent. Toronto Dominion Bank (TD), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Children's Hospital Boston... these and many more are wonderful case studies on companies who have dramatically improved their organizations by becoming a social business.

Overall I'm quite impressed by both the technology and the messages IBM is sending. It's great to see the entire company working together to create platforms that can help transform organizations.

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Podio (pronounced like podium) is one of those companies that just keeps impressing me. The problem is, they are hard to categorize because they are more of a platform for creating applications than a specific application themselves. You can use Podio for CRM, Project Management, Sales Tracking, or hundreds of other use-cases. Visit the Podio App Store for examples.

Today Podio announced several improvements to their task capabilities, including repeats and reminders.



Podio is one of the vendors on my "Getting Work Done" list.





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The following lists are sorted alphabetically, not by my ranking. Several could be placed in more than one column. Not all are publically available yet.

Update Jan 9: I'm getting flooded with comments/questions on these lists so I thought I should provide a little more context. I am interested in more than just a company's product. To be successful vendors need an experienced senior leadership team, a capable support infrastructure, a knowledgeable sales team, a list of large customer references, a strong marketing presence at events/online, a growing partner ecosystem and they should be showing up in customer requests for vendors evaluations. Not all the companies below meet all these criteria and may be removed, some may be moved between columns and I am sure there are more that need adding.

Enterprise Social Software Platforms	SharePoint Add-Ons	Activity Stream Providers	Getting Work Done
Adweb Intranet Dashboard Atlassian Confluence Awareness Blogtronix BlueKiwi Box BroadVision/Clearvale Central Desktop Cisco (Quad) eXo FMYI Google Huddle IBM Connections / LotusLive Igloo Incentive INgage Networks Interact Intranet Jive MangoSpring / MangoApps Lithium (external) Lumoflow Microsoft SharePoint / 365 MindTouch Moxie Software Novell Vibe Oracle (Social Network, Rightnow) PBWorks Podio Rule.fm Saba SelectMinds Socialtext Telligent + Leverage (external) ThoughtFarmer Traction	Attini Beezy Blue Rooster NewsGator Nexocial SnapworkSocial	Convofy Eureka Streams Flowr Neudesic Pulse Presently Salesforce (Chatter) SAP (StreamWork) SocialCast (VMware) Tibco (Tibbr) Yammer	AgileZen Any.Do Asana Basecamp Bettermeans Cubevibe Do (SalesForce) Fellowstream Google Schemer IBM Activities MangoProjects MindGrow MindJet cohuman Neudesic Pulse Tasks Podio Producteev Rypple (SalesForce) SAP Streamworks Socialcast Strides (VMware) Socialtext (SocialTasks) TeamWork Live Trello Wunderkit WorkSimple Yodiz ZoHo

Who's missing?

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A few weeks ago I attended a 2-day event SAP hosted for analysts to learn more about what the company is doing. It was a great opportunity for me, as I'll admit SAP has not been a company I have followed very closely in the past. They are clearly putting a lot of effort into modernizing both their image and their products, but I would not exactly start calling SAP "cool" quite yet. In my opinion there were far too many executives in dark suits and even the venue (Boston Park Plaza) contributed to the stogy old vibe. Why not hold the event at a place like the Liberty Hotel which was just minutes away? Every presentation included the word cloud at least a dozen times and talked about "people-centric computing", both of which are good messages but a little 2009/10-ish. Still, better late than never. I will say almost every SAPer had an iPad, so bonus points for that. It may seem like I'm being picky, but these things all add up and the result was an event with a very different feeling that those hosted by IBM, SalesForce, Jive and others that I've attended recently. But enough of that, on to the technology review...

Most of the post-event blog posts I've read were about SAP's in-memory computing technology HANA. While this is certainly an important aspect of what the company is doing, it is not a space I cover. So instead I'm going to discuss with you (over a few different blog posts) 3 areas of SAP's business that do interest me:

• Social tools
• Cloud based solutions
• Mobile applications

A Stream For Getting Work Done

The social software market has no shortage of "Twitter clones" to pick from. While each vendor has a few features that differentiates them from the others, for the most part all the products are essentially the same. Each provides a stream where people can post status updates and share links, pictures and videos. Some products also have special types of posts such as questions, polls, ideas, events, etc. SAP has taken a different approach with their collaboration tool SAP StreamWork (formerly named 12Sprints).

Instead of focusing generically on sharing, StreamWork is designed to help teams work together to make decisions. For example, say a marketing team needs to do an analysis of the sales pipeline and make recommendations on changes to improve lead flow. Instead of using email to go back and forth discussing spreadsheets, the team can create an "activity" in StreamWork.  An activity is made up of members who can then collaborate together via a series of posts and responses. The posts in StreamWork go far beyond the standard status updates and link sharing though, and instead offer a huge variety of business tools such as agenda builders, ranking/priority lists, pro/con tables, SWOT matrix, cost/benefit analysis, mind maps, processing modeling workflows and more. They are also starting to build a good partner ecosystem providing integration with companies like Google, Evernote, Box and others.

StreamWork also has a very nice feature that graphically displays how people are connected, offering the typical hierarchical organization chart as well as options such as showing who a person most often collaborates with or even what customer accounts they are assigned to. You can also see "connection paths" which display how people are connected, which can help you get introduced to people similar to the way you do on LinkedIn.

Take a few minutes and watch the video below and you'll see how StreamWork is much more than just another Twitter clone. The ability to insert business tools like SWOT matrix and pro/con tables right into the stream appears to be a very affective way to work.



StreamWork is available either hosted or as an Enterprise version that comes as a virtual appliance that includes the operating system (SuSE Linux), database and application layer.

I have not used SAP StreamWork myself, but it does appear to fit in very nicely with the Getting Work Done theme that I have been speaking a lot about lately. I believe when a "social tool" can provide a way for people to collaborate around a real business process, there is potential for much greater value than just generic "sharing of information."

In my next post about SAP I'll talk about the mobile applications, followed by a post about their new SaaS based On Demand solutions.





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