It’s Wednesday afternoon at Enterprise 2.0. In spite of a few frustrating failures in infrastructure, it’s been a really great two days here at E2 for Trampoline.  

Right now I’m sitting in the EMC booth stealing their hardline because WiFi is down (again) and our hardline is down (again). Evidently Enterprise 2.0 still doesn’t mean reliable internet connections or badge readers which, like, read badges.

Ironically even the toasters on the breakfast bar this morning were teh fail and I had to steal one and jack it into a power strip inside one of the breakout rooms to toast my bagel. (Which, by the way, was artfully sliced to look like the victim of a drunken accident with a chainsaw. Not that I am in the least bit picky about my toasting. Oh no, not me.)

The deepest irony about the toasters was that during the “Evening in the Cloud” event several speakers likened cloud computing to needing to be as predictable, reliable and standards-driven as our electricity supply, clearly tempting fate and cursing the event and my breakfast toasting.

New England is in the middle of one of the weirdest early June weather fronts in history with temperatures in the high 90’s and huge thunder-storms and even tornado warnings, and really, there’s only one company on the planet to blame all of this on…

I blame google, of course.

I hereby declare that cloud computing evangelists are no longer to be taken seriously if they liken their services to electricity. In fact you should probably immediately take proactive de-cursing actions lest you find yourself suddenly in a region-wide freak weather phenom, total blackout or starring in a real-life version of I Am Legend.

Adrian, Steve Ardire and I worked the booth yesterday (with occasional support from Rebecca and Jules, who had lots to do on the party and so were constantly jetting about the hotel alternatively solving herculean problems and looking wistfully out the window at the sailboats).

The booth experience was very, very interesting. As always Adrian was the companies greatest low-key evangelist and gave great demo while Steve managed little micro-demos on his mac off on the side. (The people Steve talked to all left with a very pleased but somewhat dazed look in their eyes.) We were 2 or 3 rows deep for most of the day, even when all we had was Rebecca’s awesome slide deck because our hardline to the internet was dead (as were most booths) Tuesday morning.

The people who have visited us at the booth have been uniformly smart and enthusiastic and ask really great questions. While some folks are clearly still just looking and thinking (which is fine) the interest level at this show in real solutions to current enterprise problems is very high. So ++ on SONAR Server, Dashboard and Flightdeck.

When I joined Trampoline we were still supporting a product called “Collaboration Engine” which dated back to the earliest days of the company. It did what our customers wanted it to and it was also decent revenue, however when I looked at the product, talked with the team about it and then looked around at the marketplace and compared it to where other folks seemed to be headed, I recommended that we should cut it completely.

Why? Because I thought then that everybody would be doing “collaboration software” and it would become increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate our collaboration offering from others in this space. Collaboration in an enterprise means getting many many things right and it means potentially competing with experienced and/or entrenched competitors. There are clearly vendors here who are doing this well (IBM Connections is looking very slick, while Jive is here as well) and others who are highly entrenched (MS is here with SharePoint).

Most of the people I’ve spoken with told me “wow. Everyone else showing here is doing the same thing as eachother except for you. Your stuff is cool!” This was a really important bit of feedback and was very rewarding to hear. It’s nice to be told that you don’t look exactly the same as everybody else and to be appreciate for what you think you are doing well. People seem to really appreciate that we don’t build wiki, group, IM, email, workspace and blogging software but that we do make it much easier to build profiles to find people, skills and interests across large groups of people, and to visualize networks in interesting and engaging ways.

Wikis are clearly hot and there are lots of wiki companies here doing some neat stuff and again, glad they are doing it and doing it well, also very glad to not be “another wiki company”.

I don’t think that anyone one else at this show is eating email and automagically producing and maintaining user profiles of themes and connections, and lots of potential customers are noticing that this is what we do and they like it. It’s really refreshing.

Many of the vendors here at the show have come by and asked us about our upcoming API as they see what we are doing as very complimentary to their offerings. We can make collaboration tools like email and wikis work better. All cool.

The party last night was very good. Massive props to Rebecca; she kept her cool and created a really nice event. It was probably the nicest conference drinking event I’ve ever been to (and really, I’ve been to LOTS. Like, way more than 100), and that’s in spite of having to “work it” in the sense that we paid for it and so it was clearly soft marketing for us. It was really chill and fun and intimate and the music was good and people really seemed to be having a good time. Charles did a neat presentation on St. Agnes that was as interesting and low-key as the rest of the party.

As near as I can tell folks had lots of fun, and when Boston’s finest came they didn’t see the burned furniture or the donkey, so it was all good. (Okay, just kidding about some of that.)

Note to conference party planners – more money and more drinking and famous bands don’t always make for a better party. Try for intimate and fun and get fun smart people to show up. Think of the best non-work parties you’ve ever been to – they probably were way less over the top than the next conference party you are planning.  

So – despite the hiccups it’s been a great event. I’m really glad we are here.

We’ve all been on our feet all day again, but for the booth at least we are in the home stretch – just one more session on the demo floor for of boothy goodness! W007!

Trampoline will be in Boston in force in a week’s time (starting Monday 8 June) for Enterprise 2.0.

There are some great sessions, but the very best one will be the one where we buy you drinks - that’s Tuesday night. It says “smart dress is appreciated” but what we’d really like is if you show up wearing a cool hat. We love hats.

We have been pondering the almost obligatory references to the Boston Tea Party. If you have any suggestions for ways we can mine that particular cultural reference, please let us know.

The last post I made I referenced Spain and Spanish, and that produced an instantaneous onslaught of localized Spanish spam in our comments (all of which Wordpress very precisely blocked). As blatant spam-bait, I am now going to attempt to reproduce this effect, except only with Boston English, hoping that the spam-bots are so good they will give me not only Boston-themed spam, but also spam written in Bostonian:

“Come across the rivah and inta town fuh the wicked pissa kegga we aw havin’ Toozday night! We ah down by the hawbah, therall be potty plattas, sgunna be killa!”

Gartner is showing their top 10 disruptive technologies for 2008 right now here in Barcelona, and there’s some great stuff in here for us. I’m going to stick with the top 5 as we have plenty to think about there, and frankly the bottom 5 are a bit less clear so there’s not as much in there which says “do something now!!!!”. (List is ranked in importance by Gartner.)

Link to pic.

1. Multi-core - we’ve already factored SONAR for multi-threading, so we are in good shape to take advantage of multi-core solutions, provided of course we are on top of any OS that supports multi-core well. I think for Debian 64 we are pretty solid at least up to the number of cores we’re likely to see in the near future.
2. Virtualization - as you’ve seen in some of our other posts, we view virtualization as a great way to manage a complete SONAR install. It’s not the only way, of course - eg a VM is vastly larger (and often somewhat slower) than a native solution, however virtualization lets us build a complete working OS, JVM and SONAR solution here in the Trampery without having to worry about the underlying OS or Enterprise environment. VMWare FTW! (Hypervisors, as it turns out, are really important. Who knew?)
3. Social Networks and Social Software - w007! SONAR FTW!!! Nice to see Gartner putting this as number 3!
4. Cloud Computing and Cloud/Web Platforms - Gartner is basically saying that IT needs to just get over the whole “my stuff can’t run on a computer with their stuff” thing. Gartner note that Enterprises should know they can survive this because any enterprise which doesn’t actively BLOCK Google is sharing significant computing with, well, everyone else using google, and yet still everyone uses google and nothing bad seems to happen. We would love to run a hosted environment for customers on a third party like Amazon, however so far we’ve found that the security and overall risk-management concerns have prevented this. I look forward to trying this out - it could really free us up in some ways that could be quite handy for both us and for our customers.
5. Web Mashups - this is something we are, quite recently, seeing a lot more interest in, primarily from other Enterprise-serving vendors who see SONAR as providing them with some great capabilities they would have to work really hard to build themselves. We’ve started work on a meta-data framework and API which we think will radically improve what we can do in a mash-up environment, so stay tuned for more information on that.

 All in all, it’s pretty cool to be either directly providing or directly supporting so much here.

I will be in Spain next week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, representin’ Trampoline. There are some cool sounding sessions, and evidently there is also a concurrent Gartner event (why oh why do people run two events at once in the same place? it’s hard enough with 5+ tracks in one event!) for us plucky new-comers to the enterprise scene. I will be at both. My interest is in where Gartner sees Enterprise computing heading over the coming months/years, connecting with technology providers, checking out our competition, and meeting with customers.

It should be interesting as I don’t speak Spanish. Much as I delight in saying “Berthaylona”.

I begged my 12 year old son to ’splain to me how I might go about ordering food, or even just bottled water, when my vocabulary consists of cerveza, a few Mexican food names, and por favor. (I speak Simplified American Taco-Truck quite well, thank you very much). He said he’d try to send me a few sentences in email, which means that evidently some 12 year-olds know of this old-fashioned thing called “email”. Not very many. Like maybe 2. That’s a trend right there! I’m sure Gartner is all over it.

And yes, I do know about the interweb and it’s language-ness, and translation books. It’s just been a few years since I was last in-country where I don’t speak the language AND I’m travelling on my own. I’ve become wussier in my old age. In China, Germany, France, Japan and even the UK, where they speak something called “English”, I have or had the benefit of translators…

Anyway, if you are at either show, please let me know. We can drink some, er, agua and eat some, er, frittata? : ) If you speak Spanish and will be there then hey, you are my new BFF!  Peter (at) trampolinesystems (dot) com

I’ve seen a few comments on blogs about the intersection of social networking and business which questions the idea that an enterprise is a social network at all. Some have simply made the assertion that social networks and businesses are totally different - eg on the SONAR tech-crunch posting, Phil Dewey commented: “Does “enterprise social network” = social networking for a******s? Seems like “enterprise” and “social” are mutually exclusive…”

Companies are for-profit communities, and as such share many, if not all, of the characteristics we associate with any other type of community. Enterprises are most certainly social.

It’s super important that we think about how Trampoline should act in a flat or recessionary economy.

From this http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/recession_tech/ posting:

“Third and finally, as business slows down workers often have more slack in their weeks. When this is the case it’s easier for them to find time and energy to participate in Enterprise 2.0. So lean economic times might be the right times to launch an effort to build an emergent social software platform.”

Recessions are most likely to bring MORE work for fewer IT people, not less. So let’s think about how a recession could affect us.

It departments have been under the efficiency grinder for quite awhile now. The days of bored IT people sitting around doing nothing are well over. After the inevitable fat is trimmed, usually some meat gets lost as well, and so some departments, unhappy that they now have to wait around for 3 days to get email turned back on by IT, will staff up with a few folks who manage mundane things like printers not working, etc. In some cases these people have so much work that they grow to resemble small IT organizations unto themselves. These people may be contractors or full timers.

Whereas in the past, IT might resent this intrusion into their domain, they may well actually like these guys now because it means that someone other than IT sucks up first-line issues that the It department essentially gets credit for. In other words, the “efficiencies” that exec management forced onto IT after the dot-com bubble burst seem to be working because the accounting system doesn’t count people in departments as “IT”. So like magic, fewer people seem to be doing more work.

Now comes a recession and real downsizing. There are a few ways of cutting staff - I’ll focus on 3: Peanut buttering, early retirement, and targeted re-structuring.

Peanut-buttering is the most common, unfortunately. In this model, every group is given a target - say an 8% reduction. Every department gets to do this however they want. A bell curve of competence means that at least half the company will do this poorly, unfortunately, so it can appear to be completely random. Even when done right, it’s not perfect because it’s hard to say how this supports overall strategic imperatives. Hopefully the first people to get cut here by will be “overhead”, meaning contractors (easy to lose) and people who aren’t part of a core business, like the co-located, non-IT, IT people above. (In the good old 90s you could get away with cutting FTE and then immediately replace them with contractors, often paying more for the same people you just downsized, because accounting tricks let you do this. I don’t think that this happens much anymore.)

So first off, there’s an issue of downsizing of departmental (co-located) IT staff, which reduces the overall capacity of the entire company to manage IT. This immediately means MORE work for IT, not less. IT won’t be given more staff, of course, because the rest of the company is belt-tightening, there’s no way that IT can get more people. So with departments now completely beholden to IT again, there’s more work heading into IT.

Then comes staff reductions through early retirement or cutting off low performers. In both cases those people are encouraged to quit through a variety of means. For IT, off-boarding requires IT work more, just like on-boarding does. Accounts must be deleted, physical assets tracked, documents archived, etc. So, more work for IT. Oh, and in these cases it’s rare that the actual HIRING slows down significantly because no company wants to be in a position where, when the recession is over, the best and brightest all work somewhere else. So again, more work for IT.

In targeted re-structuring (IMUNVHO the best way of managing this) the exec staff make a decision about what the most important bets are for the c
ompany, and then they a) move the very best 5-10% of people in any group not working on these things to the important bets (meaning that, even in a recession, the big bets get an increase in funding!), and then cut the living crap out of other groups. Hopefully in some cases this means getting out of businesses altogether.

All this means, you guessed it, more work for IT.

What does this mean for us?

Easier technology is certainly better. Going with a VM-based solution is a good plan and gets better here, provided of course that we can get the perf we need. We will do our own SONAR installs on VMs from now on to prove to ourselves that they work and so we are dogfooding.

Why full VMs and not just the JVM? While much bigger, fatter and somewhat slower than systems with less abstraction, full VM’s are also the most portable solution, so if things change departmentally underneath us, then a VM is our best bet for picking a server up and moving it somewhere else. They also mean that we don’t have to care about things like the underlying OS or hardware as much. Every enterprise kinda sorta looks the same at least for this part of the stack. We can dogfood our solutions essentially the same as our customers much more easily.

Clearly we have some selling opptys that “old school” SW may not have. We should focus on empowering besieged employees to do more with less and to enjoy their jobs more. Another selling oppty will be linking into CRM and the sales pipeline - the best time to steal customers from your competitors is when they are facing downsizing, so talking about how we make that work, and how we make defending existing customers work, is very good.

IT will have to start cutting into some projects. I think that big, “re-do the entire enterprise so it sucks less” things will get postponed. After all the company has found a way to do what they do with the existing suckage, so they can assume they can afford to wait. Low-risk new projects are going to be higher pri than high-risk, as no one wants to be called up for breaking something critical in a down economy. Not fun. So our “stay out of the way of critical infrastructure” architecture is important.

Our heterogeneity is critical, as companies with more than one architecture will wait out homogenizing things. We hear that people are planning on deploying things like SharePoint and Exchange, but any wholesale move to just MSFT or any one company should be years out, at best. And our ability to easily integrate new data sources means that we can just say “bring it on” whenever a customer comes up with a new plan for a wiki, blogs, IM or something else.

Also we don’t require massive work to get up and running, in spite of the bumps and bruises we are involved in right now with pilots. We aren’t spreading the work out around the entire enterprise and we don’t require massive training. Frankly we’re pretty painless compared to something like a CRM system which involves lots of hand-wringing and holding and which inserts something into a business process, making its failure far more risky.

Lastly, we have a lot of flexibility in how and when we monetize, which is very good, and we aren’t reliant on the overall health of third parties (eg advertisers) to make money. It would suck to be totally beholden on both our enterprise customers and also an entirely separate segment of the economy.

All in all, I think our pluckiness and positioning should serve us well, even when things are a bit hairier as budgets disappear and people don’t return calls because they are busy dealing with the latest crisis.

It’s not every day you get to announce an entirely new technology category, but judging by reactions from the analysts I’ve spoken to today I suspect that’s what we’ve just done. Up until now the bulk of discussion around social computing has focused on how it empowers end users: providing people with direct routes to information, services and relationships that would previously have required an intermediary layer of some kind. Indeed the initial functionality in our SONAR platform was directed to empowering individual employees in just this way, making it easy for them to reach across the corporate ecosystem and link with people who have expertise, connections or interests relevant to what they’re working on.

But in the course of talking with customers during the second half of 2007 it became apparent that there was a second set of equally pressing needs which nobody had recognised, let alone set about addressing. In a word: management. In a large enterprise decisions are constantly being made based on assumptions about how different teams and units are linked together and which people are essential to the success of any particular process or initiative. These are sometimes million-dollar decisions but they’re being made on the basis of anecdotal evidence which is at best incomplete and at worst plain wrong. Who hasn’t come across a situation where the loud-mouth executive who appears to be crucial to a particular department moves on without causing a ripple, but when the unassuming person a couple of rungs below them goes on vacation things immediately collapse into chaos?

The problem is that managers have never had any fact-based tool to give them insight into how well teams are working together, how effectively their unit is sharing information with the rest of the organisation, which customer relationships need a tighter focus and who are the unrecognised people that help keep everything working smoothly. This is absolutely the realm of social computing, it’s all about taking analytic approaches from the social sciences and turning them into algorithms. So towards the end of 2007 we decided this was a field where Trampoline should lead the way and commenced the work the led to today’s launch of SONAR Flightdeck.

Initially I suspect a lot of the interest will come from fields like Change Management and Mergers & Acquisitions which have particularly acute needs for real-time insights into organisational structures and performance factors. But tools like Flightdeck (I’m sure others will follow where we have led) will rapidly establish themselves as a normal part of the enterprise management toolset. The Business Intelligence wave of the 1990s probably is a good analogue. Enterprises were swimming in financial information but managers had no way to get a real-time snapshot of the status of a particular account or transaction. BI applications emerged to fill this need and now they’re taken for granted. Flightdeck heralds a similar phenomenon, just dealing with human factors instead of financial ones.

One of the challenges of creating a new product category is the difficulty of predicting exactly what features will be most important to users and how people will prefer to interact with the tool. We’re already working with a couple of beta partners but we’d love to talk with more businesses that have issues that Flightdeck could help with. If you’re interested please get in touch with Adrian Jones (adrian [at] trampolinesystems [dot] com) or phone him on +44 (0)20 7253 6959. Thanks!

Trampoline’s CEO, Charles Armstrong, and User Experience Manager, Mike Stenhouse, are presenting at ETech 2007, San Diego, next week. Entitled Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy and the Illusion of Control, their session will offer an ethnographer’s perspective on how humans interact with complex systems and what this means for a new generation of social or “sociomimetic” technologies.

If you’re at the conference you can find them in Douglas B at 3:05pm on Tuesday 27th March, please pop in and say ‘Hi’!