Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

• There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
  
• For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.
  

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

• Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
  
• ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
  
• IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
  
• Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
  
• The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
  
• ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.
  

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.

LiquidPlanner Integrates Micro-blogging and Time Sheets with Statistically-based Project Management

In a blog post last week, I cited LiquidPlanner as a SaaS company that was tackling an important business problem—project management— in a new way (applying statistics to change guesses into estimates, thereby dramatically increasing the accuracy of project plans).

Today, the company announced its 2.0 release. I'd like to call attention to a couple of new features in the release.

Integrated Microblogging

LiquidPlanner has integrated micro-blogging in its project management interface. This makes a lot of sense.

Thanks to Twitter, a growing number of people recognize the power and convenience of micro-blogging (posting short messages, perhaps containing links, that can be read by large numbers of people who opt in). Twitter, of course, is mostly a public forum, the exception being any hypothetical network of users who all password-protect their updates.

Internal business communications call for a separate, parallel channel to Twitter. Hence the launch of Yammer, a company that replicates basic Twitter functionality for closed communities, such as companies.

But Yammer's tweets or blog-posts aren't integrated with any other business software. It's unlikely that Yammer users are going to abandon Twitter, so it's entirely possible that someone might end up using:

• Twitter for the public commmunications
  
• Yammer for internal communications
  
• 37 Signals or Microsoft for internal project management
  

with no integration between Yammer and the project management program.

LiquidPlanner offers the advantages of Yammer—secure internal microblogging—with the added advantage of context and linking: I see find all the micro-blog posts related to a specific project, for example. Or put another way: now micro-blogged posts become another convenient information source for tracking the development of projects.

LiquidPlanner calls this feature "workplace chatter." It looks like this:



Users can see everything, including "chatter" and design documents, related to a project.



Time Sheets

Another new feature is time sheets. LiquidPlanner 2.0 offers built-in time-tracking, obviating the need for separate software to track the hours that people are putting into a project. Time-tracking data can be exported in standard formats for use in HR and billing applications.

Putting It All Together

These new integrated features make a lot of sense. In addition to posting documents and status, why not blog about a project and track hours, all in the same program? LiquidPlanner creates a workspace where customers can manage and record everything having to do with a project.

I expect we'll see more integrations like this in the SaaS market.

Disclaimer: LiquidPlanner is not a client.

Postscript to disclaimer: For information on becoming a client, contact me.

Two SaaS Companies that Solve Business Problems for Customers

In a couple of recent blog posts (here and here), I raised the question of what type of cloud computing start-up would be likely to succeed in today's business environment, in which companies of all sizes are interested in cutting costs and minimizing risks. I suggested that business customers would feel comfortable with new programming paradigms (e.g., Salesforce.com's Apex) offered by large, stable companies, but shy away from similar offerings from smaller vendors. It's not that the smaller vendors won't get any customers; they just might have a hard time getting enough to stay in business.

Cloud Computing Opportunities for Start-ups and Other Small Companies

But, aside from infrastructure offerings, there are lots of great business opportunities for small cloud computing vendors. I believe that most of these opportunities share these traits:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Being small and new won't be problems (i.e., risk factors in the eyes of customers) for small vendors who demonstrate that:

• they thoroughly understand business process problems that are important to the customer, and they are dedicated to solving these problems
  
• they have a solution that directly addresses these problems in an immediately effective way
  

Getting Down to Business

Here are two software start-ups that offer examples of what I mean.

Compli is a SaaS company based in Portland, OR, that offers a software platform that enables car dealers to measure and manage their compliance with industry regulations. Through the Compli SaaS platform, car dealers can deliver compliance training to employees and employee test scores on compliance tests. As regulations evolve, and new state-specific regulations appear, dealers can distribute new compliance content to the appropriate employees and demonstrate "good faith" efforts at compliance.

Compliance is an important issue for car-dealers, an operational head-ache of sorts, and Compli's SaaS solution gives them an easy way to stay on top of the issue in a cost-effective way.

If you visit the Compli Web site, you'll have to hunt hard to find any references to SaaS and cloud computing. The words "SaaS" and "cloud" don't appear on the home page at all, and in the video featured on the home page, President and CFO Lon Leneve mentions SaaS only after discussing the scope and importance of compliance for car dealers. The company is focused on solving a business problem, and they're leveraging SaaS technology to do it. How's Compli doing? Last year was a record year.

I've written about Liquid Planner before, and I'll be writing more about them next week. LiquidPlanner offers a hosted project management solution that brings probabilistic analysis to project planning. In another words, while other programs like Microsoft Project force project planners to give a fixed estimate for how long a task will take, Liquid Planner lets planner input ranges and probabilities, so they identify risks up front. The result is planning software that's more detailed, more accurate, and more informative.

The solution includes other collaboration features, as well, but I'd like to point out that once again we have a SaaS company focused on solving an important business problem—project management—in a new and compelling way. Factoring probability into project planning makes so much sense, I think LiquidPlanner would be an attractive offering even in a traditional, in-house deployment; delivering LiquidPlanner as SaaS, so it can reach all members of a distributed project team while lowering hardware and software costs, only makes it more compelling.

And how's LiquidPlanner doing? Quite well. Business is growing. The company itself is a small, lean-and-mean team of ten people whose founders have extensive experience in data center management from Expedia. Steve McConnell, who has written authoritatively on rapid software development and software estimation, is an advisor to the company.

These two companies, Compli and LiquidPlanner, demonstrate the business opportunities available for SaaS start-ups. Both companies are focused on solving important business problems (regulatory compliance and project management) in new ways. The problems they're addressing will remain important to customers even in an economic downturn. The companies are leveraging SaaS to deliver their solutions broadly and cost-effectively. Both companies share share these characteristics:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Disclaimer: Neither Compli nor LiquidPlanner is a client.