The Enterprise Social Network, Auto-Generated And Visually Mapped

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1. Jeroen
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

   Wow, so I can find another way for my psychotic boss to hunt me down? “Jeroen is currently working hard.”

   Bring it to the States, tho, along with Pret a Manger and snooker.

2. Patrick
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

   What’s the target market? SalesForce handles this for many SMBs, except for the engineering dept which is usually tied to a wiki/trac/svn or some such combo. Large companies will prefer Oracle/BEA (Question: Why is oracle making a product to compete with itself?)

3. Sramana Mitra
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

   Patrick, Salesforce does NOT handle this function. You should also take a look at Tacit, which has 13 patents and 11 pending on this automated expertise location category. Sramana

4. nobosh.com
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

   it is heating up!

5. John
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

   Why do you put privately funded instead of raised 6mm from tudor? You can’t see crunchbase info in google reader so you have to open the link to find out. sucks.

6. Phil Dewey
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

   Wasn’t Cisco supposed to just crush this market? Looks like the got sidetracked by the Social OS instead.

7. LawyerKM
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

   @Patrick - One target market for this type of system is legal. Law firms in particular. And for that matter, any professional services firm. In law firms, people are always asking “does anybody know about [area of law X, or person Y at company Z].” And they ask these questions by email (we call them “PTI” or “pardon the interruption” emails - we also call it “internal spam” because these emails are ususally blasted out to the “All Lawyers” email list).

   Systems that mine email traffic (but not content) and other activities to passively determine relationships can be used to answer the “who knows X” question. You can read about some of these systems, including Contact Networks, Visible Path, and BranchIT, in my blog at http://tinyurl.com/53payk

   Social networking in the law firm is also important. Lawyers consume a lot of media, mainly in the form of practice area journals and news. Social networking can allow lawyers to “follow” each other. For example, if I see that a senior partner in my group is subscribed to (and maybe has even commented on) a particular resource, chances are it’s important. And if it is important to the senior partner, then the junior associates should be interested in it also. You can read about some of this in my blog, too. Here: http://tinyurl.com/3k3qm6
   -LawyerKM

8. Ajay Gandhi
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

   BEA’s social computing platform, called AquaLogic User Interaction also automatically tracks users’ workplace activities from tagging documents, to completing tasks and connecting with colleagues — but importantly the BEA solution is also built for true enterprise requirements such as sophisticated security and pre-built integration with existing systems.

   The Global 1000 market for Enterprise 2.0 is still highly segmented between companies just exploring and companies ready to take the plunge, check out this just released assessment tool that provides companies with best practices, tips and case studies around their Enterprise 2.0 needs: http://getsocial.bea.com.

   While Trampoline seems to have some neat visualization technology, a lot their “big brother” packet sniffing seems to be another version of Visual Path which did not succeed in the enterprise.

9. Phil Dewey
   

   April 24th, 2008 at 11:42 pm

   Does “enterprise social network” = social networking for assholes? Seems like “enterprise” and “social” are mutually exclusive…

10. Charles Armstrong
    

    April 25th, 2008 at 1:10 am

    @ajay

    “BEA’s social computing platform … also automatically tracks users’ workplace activities from tagging documents, to completing tasks and connecting with colleagues”

    BEA’s “automatic tracking” only covers manually asserted data such as tags and task status. This is in no way equivalent to the sophisticated analysis of email, documents, wikis and blogs that SONAR does. SONAR is the *only* enterprise social network that automatically picks up what people are working on and which contacts they’re collaborating with.

    “the BEA solution is also built for true enterprise requirements such as sophisticated security and pre-built integration with existing systems.”

    You imply that SONAR is not built for true enterprise requirements. On the contrary, it was rigorously designed to meet enterprise security and inter-operability requirements from the outset. SONAR works with a full range of mainstream enterprise systems, unlike certain competitors which are tied to a single vendor’s stack. A sign of how seriously Trampoline takes security is that our VP Development is none other than Peter Biddle, the former Microsoft executive responsible for BitLocker (the single most important security innovation in Windows Vista).

    “While Trampoline seems to have some neat visualization technology, a lot their “big brother” packet sniffing seems to be another version of Visual Path”

    Of course there’s no packet sniffing in SONAR. It’s depressing to see (much larger) competitors stoop to scare tactics of this kind. Meanwhile on the privacy front SONAR has a straightforward opt-in privacy model so every user is completely in control of what’s shared and what is kept private. Not exactly “big brother”.

    Is BEA by any chance feeling rattled because a London start-up has come up with a product that makes AquaLogic seem somewhat stale by comparison? We’re flattered!

11. Moe Glitz
    

    April 25th, 2008 at 2:16 am

    The Enterprise has never been and never will be a Social Network. But with the power of digital data, The Enterprise should be able to exploit this new wave of Linked Data.

    I still believe that we have not even scratched the surface as to what can be achieved in using the full potential of The Enterprise Cloud.
    I only wish I could find some like-minded developers or Companies based in London, with whom I could share my vision.

12. Dinesh Tantri
    

    April 25th, 2008 at 7:41 am

    IBM Atlas would be a serious contender sometime soon.

    http://tinyurl.com/237pqg

    The challenge for enterprises remains the same - do they go in for niche vendors or the incumbent ones. I don’t think features alone determine the leader - Trampoline holds great promise though!!

13. Peter Jones
    

    May 6th, 2008 at 1:25 am

    Time to get off your high horse Charles and play nice, stop being such a WASP