A new report from global public relations firm Weber Shandwick has found that when it comes to Fortune 100 companies, they just don't get Twitter...not yet anyway.
According to the study (PDF), which looked at how the world's 100 top companies used Twitter between late August and early September, the companies have a grand total of 540 Twitter accounts owned by just 73 companies; 27 firms don't participate in the microblogging tool/social network. Some 76 percent of those 540 accounts weren't "updated often" and 52 percent were not actively engaged, as measured by the accounts' use of hash tags, links, references, and retweets.
Weber Shandwick contends that in order for a company to be successful on Twitter, it needs to engage users through five basic activities: listening to followers, participating in conversations, updating accounts frequently, replying to questions, and retweeting useful messages. The PR firm says that if companies perform those activities, they will have a large number of followers. But its research found that 50 percent of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts had fewer than 500 followers.
And companies that had active Twitter accounts weren't making their tweets appealing to followers, the firm found. Fifty-three percent of the accounts did not "display personality, tone, or voice" in their messages. Only one-third of all the researched accounts featured personality "in addition to names and/or photos of those who posted tweets." Seventy-six percent of accounts surveyed posted 500 or fewer tweets on the account. As Weber Shandwick points out, the more tweets of value, the more likely the brand will engage customers.
Big companies aren't doing enough on Twitter.
(Credit: Weber Shandwick)In the end, Weber Shandwick was concerned about company use (or lack of use) of the Twitter. The organization wrote that "for the majority of Fortune 100 companies, Twitter remains a missed opportunity." The firm said "many of their Twitter accounts, examined by Weber Shandwick, did not appear to listen to or engage with their readers, instead offering a one-way broadcast of press releases, company blog posts, and event information."
Weber Shandwick also offered a word of caution. The firm said that "the number of active Twitter users in the United states already exceeds 20 million and can be expected to continue to grow. This is a massive human database to tap; companies that understand the value of Twitter can benefit from its potential as a viable engagement platform."
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
ORLANDO, Fla.--Watch out, business technology managers, because Google has its eyes on your domain.
If Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gets his way, the line that separates the computing services used by businesses from those used by consumers will fade fast. And Google, through services such as Google Apps and the new Google Wave, hopes to accelerate the change.
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The company has done well so far with services that appeal chiefly to consumers, but Schmidt said at the Gartner Symposium here that Google likes services that become part people's lives regardless of whether they are doing work. And because the company covers its costs by charging enterprise accounts $50 per person per year for those services at work, he said it's just a matter of attaining scale before the business becomes "very profitable" for Google.
I spoke to Schmidt after a Gartner Symposium talk in which he said the enterprise market is Google's next billion-dollar revenue opportunity. Here's an edited transcript of the interview.
... Read more
It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.
Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?
In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed to build a vibrant business, doing north of $90 million at the time of its acquisition by Sun Microsystems in February 2008.
Equally compelling, however, is the exceptional user and developer community that formed around the open-source database project, registering tens of millions of downloads and a massive developer community.
This community augmented MySQL's financial fortunes, of course, but it also protected MySQL database users from the whims of the company, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos wrote to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes:
Even if Oracle for whatever reason would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity - not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Unfortunately, the EC seems intent on punishing MySQL--both community and company--for its success. Already the MySQL database project has started to fracture into competing forks, while business rivals like EnterpriseDB and IBM collect confused customers.
More worryingly, the EC's actions may end up diminishing potential returns to investors in other open-source projects, particularly those that take the added time and cost to build global communities.
Technology mergers and acquisitions activity is at a 20-month high. Open-source companies, however, may miss out on this resurgence, particularly those, like Acquia and EnterpriseDB, that build on successful open-source communities (Drupal and Postgres, respectively).
Indeed, based on the EC's actions, perhaps the worst thing these companies could do is foster successful open-source communities. Maybe they should just take the cash and run?
Consider: the EC didn't challenge Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra, VMware's acquisition of SpringSource, Citrix's acquisition of XenSource, etc. What do they have in common? Rising revenue but, except in the case of SpringSource, much more limited communities than MySQL. (Even the Spring community pales in comparison to MySQL, impressive though it is.)
Granted, the major difference with Oracle/MySQL is that the two are ostensibly competitors, as CNET points out. In the letter referenced above, however, Mickos dismisses such competition. The reality is that MySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets.
Regardless, as well as MySQL was doing, $90-plus million is spare change in the global database market. The EC, in other words, isn't trying to protect MySQL's business. It's trying to protect MySQL's community.
Such mollycoddling of an open-source community is destructive to all future investments in similar endeavors. Why should commercial entities bother fostering community--the very community that makes them less susceptible to hostile takeover and anticompetitive forces--if doing so simply ends up ruining financial returns?
The EC means well, but it is not doing the right thing for MySQL, its community, or other open-source commercial efforts. Quite the opposite. Just as the commercial open-source community has been pondering a move back to community-controlled open source, the EC threatens to hobble the shift.
The EC may well end up with less competition, not more, by blocking Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun and its crown jewel, MySQL.
Hewlett-Packard announced Friday that it will acquire Ibrix, a maker of enterprise-scale file serving software.
Large companies running huge data-heavy applications often bump into bottlenecks with both storage and performance. HP says that Ibrix's software is designed to help such customers manage and store massive amounts of data, scaling to tens of petabytes. (A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.)
HP wants Ibrix to help strengthen its share of the burgeoning market for high-performance enterprise data storage, cloud storage, and file archiving. HP says this segment is growing 20 percent a year, faster than the markets for network-attached storage (NAS) and external storage.
"Customers need highly scalable storage solutions that efficiently and cost-effectively manage massive amounts of information," said Jeff Hausman, vice president of Unified Storage in HP's StorageWorks division. "This acquisition expands our portfolio to better support the needs of this market segment."
Started in 2000, Ibrix is a privately held company in Massachusetts with 53 employees and more than 175 enterprise customers.
"Joining forces with HP is a natural fit for our customers, resulting in an enhanced storage solution that scales to meet their data growth," said Milan Shetti, chief executive officer of Ibrix. "The unique combination of Ibrix's file-serving solutions with HP's portfolio of products and services enables customers to lower the cost of scale-out architectures while easing the process of storing, accessing and moving critical data."
HP expects the deal to be completed in the next 30 days, after which Ibrix will become part of the StorageWorks division in HP's Technology Solutions Group.
The cost of the deal was not disclosed.
As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.
Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs and add new features.
In a call with CNET News on Monday, Ross Mayfield who is Socialtext's chairman, president, and co-founder, said that the benefits of having a system like this locally can make a big difference when doing a fresh setup on a big company. "You turn it on, and in five minutes you can start posting right away."
Your company 'tweets' would go through this box.
(Credit: Socialtext)To speed things up, the appliance can be connected to local staff directories and pull in employee information to create user accounts that have profile information including phone numbers and e-mail address already filled out. Anytime local directory changes are made, this information gets updated in Socialtext too. Administrative control is also not limited to IT staff, since certain users can be graced with admin privileges of their own that let them moderate both user content and the users themselves.
Companies will still be able to use Socialtext's free 50-user version of the service that lives in the cloud, but this option gives larger companies a bigger user cap and more control over the data. Mayfield also pushed the fact that companies that wanted to tack on additional Socialtext services won't have to get any additional hardware since they'll already have it for this service.
Socialtext is undercutting competitors like Yammer in price, as well as offering an additional way to deliver its service. Yammer has its own Web based service for enterprise power users, however it's a little more pricey at $3-5 per user, per month (depending on what plan they go for). There is, however, no hardware to buy. On the flip side, Socialtext's solution can still be used even if access to the outside world is blocked, which can often be the best time to find out what your employees are up to.
This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Despite a bevy of questions--looming competition from Oracle, takeover rumors, and a weak economy--Red Hat appears to be humming along, according to Jeffries analyst Katherine Egbert. But in the long run, Red Hat will have to be subsumed into a large company--most likely IBM.
In a research note, Egbert touches on the short-term and long-term prognosis for Red Hat. In the short run, she notes that there's solid demand for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Jboss in a down economy. Meanwhile, sales to the government--Red Hat has just beefed up its sales force to sell to Washington D.C.--are expected to get a stimulus boost.
Egbert's take echoes research by Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy. Murphy surveyed 70 Red Hat customers and generally found that the company is gaining wallet share.
Here's the money slide from Murphy:
Simply put, Red Hat is looking strong. Wall Street is expecting the company to report earnings of 14 cents a share on revenue of $171.7 when its fiscal first quarter closes at the end of May. But there are a few moving parts. The biggest one is Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Will Oracle continue to support Red Hat products?
Egbert writes:
While Oracle's CEO has said publicly that he will continue the company's support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), there is a sense within Red Hat that an increased focus on Open Solaris over RHEL is inevitable, as Oracle seeks to protect the declining Solaris maintenance stream. We estimate that 1/3 of Red Hat's new business comes from Unix-to-Linux migrations, much of this from Solaris-to-Linux. The danger to Red Hat is that Oracle will offer customers attractive terms to stay on Solaris, potentially even paying them or offering discounts not to migrate.
If that scenario plays out Red Hat will increasingly be caught in the land of giants with Oracle on one end and Microsoft on the other.
That reality points to a Red Hat takeover at some point, argues Egbert. She adds:
We believe it's inevitable that Red Hat will be subsumed into a larger entity, probably IBM, given the strategic importance of RHEL with the data center. Here's our reasoning:To date, much of Red Hat's success has come because the software is relatively inexpensive, Unix applications port easily to Linux, and because Red Hat is not Microsoft i.e. they are not a large, integrated vendor that can lure customers in with low pricing but exploit their pricing power once the customer becomes dependent on the software. Most customers view Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a way to break free of large vendor lock in and the high economic toll it extracts.
However, with Oracle buying Sun Red Hat now has 2 giant competitors, both of whom have virtually unlimited pricing power. We believe it will be increasingly difficult for Red Hat to compete over a sustained period as a small, standalone, independent vendor against the upcoming entry of Oracle, who could offer cheap hardware/software bundles, steep discounts to stay on or migrate to Open Solaris, or even pay customers to not use RHEL as they seek to stabilize the Solaris maintenance stream. Therefore, with Red Hat's choice-based value proposition potentially pre-empted by a data center land grab among 2 giants, it seems to us that Red Hat needs a partner. A large partner. Someone with pricing power, C-level relationships, and a significant enough presence in the data center to combat the Oracle/Microsoft threat. IBM fits the bill.
Indeed, IBM could totally offset the threats to Red Hat from Microsoft and Oracle. A deal would make sense because:
• IBM could bundle RHEL;
• Jboss would complement Websphere;
• IBM could leverage Red hat developers;
• IBM would get and operating system and virtualization tools to play in all layers of infrastructure.
• The IT game is increasingly becoming a matter of dueling hardware and software stacks. Red Hat would provide IBM with more software ammo.
Research In Motion on Monday announced the availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0, the next generation of the company's push-based server software for BlackBerry business users.
Enterprise Server 5.0 beefs up integration between BlackBerry smartphones and corporate enterprise systems, enabling mobile workers to be more productive, RIM said in a statement.
Additionally, RIM announced a new interface that will let developers push real-time data to consumer BlackBerry users. Until now, push technology was available only in corporate environments. BlackBerry owners will be able to receive news, weather reports, music purchases, games, and other updates.
Enterprise Server lets users tap into corporate e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, wireless networks, and enterprise applications. Corporate BlackBerry users can access their network files and documents, view and send e-mail attachments, and manage their calendars. Version 5.0 helps IT administrators more easily manage the BlackBerry within a corporate environment, RIM said. Using push technology, the IT staff can send software updates and other content to their BlackBerry users.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 has already been tested in real-world environments over the past year and is currently in use by companies such as IBM, RIM said.
"We are proud to unveil the next generation of BlackBerry Enterprise Server software," Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO at RIM, said in a statement. "BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 significantly raises the bar for advanced IT manageability, high availability, system monitoring, and reporting. It has undergone testing in real-world environments for over a year and is available now for customers."
BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 is the first mobile platform to win the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification, RIM said.
A new version of BlackBerry Mobile Voice Server (MVS) has also hit the market. Optimized for use with Cisco Unified Communications Manager version 6.1 or later, MVS offers corporate BlackBerry users such benefits as a single, "read me anywhere" corporate phone number, and simultaneous or sequential ringing of up to four devices.
My co-host on the Overcast podcast, Geva Perry, has published a very compelling post arguing for the demise of the traditional enterprise sale--the deal brokered by the highly extroverted, commissioned sales rep with the help of a team of sales engineers, marketers, consultants, and so on over the course of 6 to 18 months.
Geva established his case by relating the observations of venture capitalist Charlie Federman:
I met today separately with two successful CEOs who, unprompted, told me they were de-emphasizing their marketing/sales efforts to enterprise accounts; one company is in the application arena, and the other is in the infrastructure space.
Each told a similar story:
They don't have the "patience or resources to go through the hoops" required in committee sales. Translation: they don't want to fund the direct sales force/field engineers for the traditional six-month sales cycle, where they have to commit the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront before a decision is made. Moreover, if the decision is positive, it's normal to wait a few more quarters for implementation to move forward.
Each stressed that the opportunity cost is simply too high when many alternative channels are present that are open to a "fast test/fast purchase" decision cycle. Today, their biggest issue is prioritizing their time/resources in an environment where they receive near-instant market feedback from traffic, trial, and conversion statistics. Direct enterprise sales (as opposed to business development) is being extracted from their company DNA.
Geva then goes on to break down the decline of the enterprise sales empire:
The history of the trend away from the enterprise sale is easily traceable. It starts with free-trial CDs; it really picks up steam with downloadable enterprise software (salute to the WebLogic folks). It becomes downright mainstream with open source: Linux/RedHat, Jboss, MySQL, and the rest. And now, we come to cloud computing: the final nail in the enterprise sale coffin.
There is some truth to this. I worked for six months at open-source enterprise content management vendor Alfresco, and their model was fascinating: with the exception of a single direct sales representative, the entire business was run over the phone, Adobe Connect, and Skype. Deals were small, but numerous. "Try then buy" was the norm, and it worked--at least at that scale.
Could an indirect-only model work at a much larger scale, though?
Jim Liddle doesn't seem to think so. The architect-turned-sales-representative made his rebuttal on his wonderfully titled "Liddle Thoughts" blog:
Most of the enterprises I am dealing with are looking at public cloud infrastructures as being an enabler for outsourcing suitable applications or services. What is key for them in doing this is using software that they can use in-house as well as being able to be used on the cloud. Same skill sets, in some cases the same code, so that the transition to the public cloud is seamless. To get companies to engage on public cloud infrastructures right now requires a direct sales model, certainly until some form of tipping point is reached, and even then I believe that for certain classes of public cloud software, direct sales will always be needed.
In many ways, cloud licensing is an evolution of licensing models that include single user/single license, multiple users/shared license, temporary or fixed period licenses, pay-per-use licensing, subscription licensing, perpetual licensing, etc.
On top of this we have the private cloud in which companies use software and infrastructures to provide public cloud-type features available in-house. Make no mistake that the majority of this will be enterprise software with some major enterprise players in this space such as VMWare with VCloud and Citrix with C3, as well as companies such as GigaSpaces, who in many cases will partner with such companies and provide additional innovation. There will of course be room for innovative open-source software, such as Eucalyptus.
Liddle concludes with his belief that "enterprise license models, for certain vendors, are changing; for others, existing models have a new buddy, but I see this as evolution rather than revolution."
I'm not sure where I stand in this debate, but I have to agree that enterprise sales is a huge, difficult, expensive pain right now, and that cloud computing has the potential to bypass much of this pain. Then again, I know most enterprise IT organizations want accountability and responsiveness from the vendors on which they build their business. Direct sales puts a name and a face to that in a way that indirect sales or "do-it-yourself" never will.
Another possibility, I suppose, is that enterprise sales shifts from software to services, just like everything else.
I put the question to you: Is enterprise sales dead? Has your organization stopped looking at the multimillion-dollar licensing or hardware deal? If you are a commissioned sales representative, are you nervous about your profession's future?
Editors' note: This is a guest post.
Every time that I see an article touting how great cloud computing is, I always chuckle and think to myself, "been there, done that."
Those who remember the emergence of the Internet era as a mainstream venue (circa 1995 to 2000) may also recall a company called Loudcloud, founded by Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen. It is my opinion that you can trace the road that led to the current cloud-computing era back to Loudcloud's founding.
It started in 1999, when four visionaries who met while at Netscape--Marc Andreessen, Ben Horwitz, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee--saw a pressing problem facing Web-based start-ups. If these emerging companies wanted to establish a presence on the Internet, they were forced to buy a lot of expensive hardware, diverting precious resources that they otherwise might have been able to invest in their core businesses.
Loudcloud thus started with the vision of various "clouds"--mail, database, network, application server clouds, etc.--so that any enterprise could fractionally rent out what it needed. Customers would pay based on what they rented and for how long.
The formula was an instant success in a valley full of impatient Internet start-ups waiting to show what they could do. And all that changed when the dot-com bubble burst, and the names of many of the companies that had been hosted by Loudcloud started appearing in the pages of F***edCompany.com.
Being an employee at Loudcloud at that time gave me a ringside view of the company, as we tried to aggressively reinvent ourselves toward selling the concept of managed infrastructure to the bigger enterprises when the Internet economy collapsed. However, the idea met quite a bit of resistance from companies questioning the effectiveness of security controls in a managed infrastructure environment.
This was not a valid reason then and is not the valid reason now. These enterprises resisted moving to a cloud environment out of fear that they would lose control over the data that was sacrosanct to them. Interestingly, many of these same customers were more interested in learning about the automation platform that ran our multiple data centers across Europe and North America.
In 2002, Loudcloud's founders decided that it was in the best interest of the shareholders and the company's longevity to jettison the managed-services business (fixed equipment costs played a huge part in this) and to move toward producing a data center automation software platform that would help enterprise customers run their own data centers efficiently. So they spun out a separate software company, Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard bought in 2007 for about $1.6 billion.
Other cloud-computing companies can learn a couple of valuable lessons from Loudcloud's example.
Convincing an enterprise customer to let you host its crown jewels (business data) is going to be the last thing you should attempt. Instead, focus on applications that are important to an enterprise but not in their "critical" path--as the first wave of cloud-computing adoption has shown us (such as with Salesforce.com and NetSuite).
Be prepared to adapt and adopt. Loudcloud survived--and then thrived--as Opsware because it was able to refine its message to enterprise customers when the bubble burst.
Finally, cloud-computing companies have one thing that is going for them that Loudcloud didn't have nine years ago: enterprises are now more "comfortable" with the concept of the Internet and the maturity of Web-enabled technologies, and that has made them more open and receptive to taking advantage of the flexibility, speed, and agility that cloud computing offers. So much so that the newly anointed federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has embarked on a cloud-computing strategy for the federal government.
Cloud computing is getting its due these days, but let's remember that Loudcloud first proved the viability of the concept.
NetSuite on Thursday unveiled its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, expanding its on-demand enterprise software service to include cloud computing.
The company, which hosts enterprise software on demand, is branching out to allow customers the ability to push their core operations into the clouds.
As part of its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, NetSuite is launching a developer program, SuiteCloud Developer Network, and an online cloud-computing application marketplace, SuiteApp.com.
The SuiteCloud platform will be built on core NetSuite enterprise resource management (ERP) software, as well as its customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce offerings.
NetSuite is delving into cloud computing at a time when this relatively new industry is coming to grips with its own definition and purpose.
