How Successful Could You Be if You Planned to Fail?

Many technology companies are notorious for being too cautious when introducing new products or bringing to market new technology developed by their skunk works. A new offering will often be underdesigned or feature-limited because product managers fear the new will cannibalize sales of the old. The IBM PCjr is a great case in point – a low-price point PC (for the time) with lots of potential, but one that lacked key features that could have driven it into the SMB and education markets quite nicely. The result is a new product that fails to meet expectations when it isn’t necessary.

But what if a company organized itself in such a way that it fought itself – that it actually planned to fail? Take Apple for instance. What if the company organized itself so that the iPad folks sought to put the MacBook Air folks out of business? And vica versa. Of course, they would rely on the same basic operating system – which would be an operation unto itself with two competing customers – but in every other way the two divisions would slug it out and try to move customers away from one platform and toward the other. No intentional design limitations, no giving one product the faster processor, etc.

Conventional wisdom says that such a strategy is pretty stupid. And it could be if not managed properly. But it might actually elevate competing offerings within the same company to levels that it could not otherwise achieve.

Why?

First, there’s an old rule that always applies: if someone is going to cannibalize your market share, make sure you're that someone. For example, if hosted archiving is going to do away with your on-premise archiving solution, make sure it’s your hosted archiving solution that will do it. If your customers are moving to SaaS-based email and away from your on-premise software or appliances, they had better be moving to your SaaS-based email offering. Trying to preserve margins or market share or tradition without being the destination for those leaving you is futile.

Second, competition almost always improves your offerings, regardless of from where that competition arises. If you’re the MacBook Air folks and the iPad folks are gaining market share at your expense, chances are you’ll be motivated enough to at least try to do it better than them. Nations do the same thing by offering lower tax rates or cheaper labor or easier export rules (Ireland is a good case in point.)

Third, acting stupid by announcing to the world that you’re competing with yourself might get good press – and any press is almost always good press. Telling the world that you’re trying to do away with the old and move to the new – while still supporting and improving the old – might just net more market share than you otherwise would have if you hung on too tightly to the old paradigm.

Atlas for Lotus Connections

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a very interesting day-and-a-half IBM meeting in San Francisco on Advanced Case Management, which will be the subject of an upcoming blog post in the near future.

However, this newsletter is focused on Atlas for Lotus Connections, an older IBM application that sits on top of Lotus Connections, the company’s social networking tool. I was given a demo of Atlas while at the meeting and was quite impressed with its capabilities, among which are two important capabilities:

• The ability to create a visual map of social connections within an enterprise or another group. For example, type in a keyword or phrase on a topic, client, etc. and a map of individuals and their relevance to that search term will be displayed. This is quite useful when trying to find an expert to help on a project or to find someone who has experience with a particular client.
• The ability to find the shortest path to an individual with whom you’d like to connect. Atlas will analyze the various types of individual communications in an organization and map out the best path of individuals that can help you find an expert on a topic. Again, very useful if need to find expertise outside of your direct circle of social contacts.

I'm impressed by Atlas’ ability to create what IBM calls “social value” across an organization. This is very useful in large and/or geographically distributed organizations in which personal interactions would be nearly impossible or would happen only by chance. This concept is not new, of course, but has been developed by a number of companies over the years.

The ability to create social value will become more important in the future for two important reasons. First, organizations are becoming more distributed as decision makers find they can reduce costs by allowing employees to work from home. This complicates and slows the decision making process because of the geographic separation of co-workers, in no small part because the person you need to talk to isn’t just a quick walk down the hall. Second, younger workers that are used to employing Web 2.0 applications, text messaging and other non-traditional tools are becoming a larger proportion of the workforce. While IT departments can force these workers to use traditional tools with their limited capabilities, smart ones will deploy social networking tools and build value-added capabilities on top of them.

You can get more information on Lotus Atlas at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/services/atlasasset.html

Should You Avoid Hosted Archiving?

The decision of whether or not to archive email and other electronic content is (or at least should be) fairly simple: if you keep a copy of your personal tax return for at least a few years, then you’ve already acknowledged the importance of archiving critical information. Just apply the same logic to your business records.

More problematic for some decision makers, however, is the notion of using a hosted or SaaS-based archiving solution. For some decision makers, letting a third party manage the crown jewels – the critical business records that they will need for many years – is not as desirable as on-premise solutions because they fear the loss of those records, an inability to retrieve them on demand, poor performance when conducting searches, and so forth. While this perception is real, the evidence to support it simply is not there. Consider:

• Global Relay, which focuses heavily on the financial services industry – the most rigorous industry for archiving given SEC and FINRA requirements for long-term data retention with very high integrity – has been in the hosted archiving business for 11 years and in that time has never experienced even one incident in which it lost a customer’s email. The company’s infrastructure is highly scalable and is based on a very high performance search database technology that permits rapid searching across even enormous stores of archived data, with a typical search conducted in under three seconds (we recently published a white paper with survey results that were somewhat contrary to this, but the white paper presented the results of a survey, not a bakeoff). Global Relay’s customer data is encrypted using a highly secure encryption algorithm.
• Smarsh is another hosted provider that has been in the archiving business for many years and also focuses on the financial services industry. Yes, Smarsh had an outage of its Web site and VoIP-based phone system back in February (prompting one blogger to question the integrity of the company’s archived data), but absolutely no customer data was lost, nor was the archiving of customer data interrupted in any way.
• LiveOffice is another leading vendor of hosted archiving that has been in business since 1998 with a heavy emphasis on the financial services industry. The company serves a large and growing client base, offers 99.99% uptime (less than 4.5 minutes per month) and a 97% client retention rate, all while offering very good performance and tremendous security.
• Proofpoint, which acquired hosted archiving vendor Fortiva in 2008, uses its DoubleBlind Encryption technology to encrypt clients’ data both in transit and while being stored at Proofpoint’s data centers. Proofpoint’s archiving offering is focused on Exchange-enabled organizations and offers another highly secure and safe choice for archiving data.

There are many other good hosted archiving vendors that are worth a close look if you need to archive your data – and you should. Hosted archiving is safe and your data will be secure – ‘nuff said.

However, another important consideration for the use of hosted archiving solutions is the ability to store and retrieve data over the long term. For example, when I worked at SRI International, one operation in the company was going through an audit in which it needed to retrieve data from tapes that were about a decade old. The company was having difficulty reading this data because the equipment that had recorded it was no longer in use – retrieving the data was going to cost a bundle. That’s a problem that could occur for companies that manage their own data for long periods assuming that they migrate their older data to tape instead of keeping it on magnetic storage, which many do for cost reasons. Because tapes deteriorate over time, many companies find that they simply cannot retrieve very old data – assuming they still have the equipment that can read those tapes.

Even for data that is stored for much shorter periods, on-premise archival can be compromised by natural disasters, power outages, fires, floods and other problems. This won’t happen to most companies, but it will happen to enough of them to warrant taking precautions against these eventualities.

These arguments don’t mean that organizations should not use on-premise archiving – there are many very good on-premise solutions available and organizations of all sizes can be well served with an on-premise solution. But the bottom line is this: hosted archiving is safe and, with the right vendor, your data will be secure.

Some Thoughts on the iPad and the Cloud

I played with an iPad over the weekend and was very impressed. Reflecting Apple’s robust engineering and design in just about every product it offers, the iPad is an elegant, fun and very solid device. I haven’t purchased one because I don’t believe it will offer me much that I can’t get from my iPod Touch or MacBook, but that’s beside the point. Plus, I like to joke that if the next version of the iPad offers a hinged aluminum cover – and a physical keyboard built into that cover – it really will be a killer device!

All kidding aside, though, I believe the iPad reflects what has looked for a long time like an inferiority complex on the part of Apple. The company offers hardware and software design that is second to none (albeit with a few minor exceptions) and their marketing prowess is extraordinary. Apple stores are packed seemingly just about all the time and the experience of buying, unpacking and using any Apple product is without peer. However, Apple almost seems to intentionally underdesign its offerings for reasons that are often difficult to explain. Consider:

• The iPad is clearly designed for a cloud environment and would be ideally suited to videoconferencing for mobile workers – if it had a built-in camera like all iMacs have. This is a serious flaw for those that really would like to participate in a videoconference on their patio or in an airport.
• The iPad does not support Adobe Flash, a nearly universal – and the de facto – video standard on the Web today. While there are some good technical and marketing reasons not to use Flash from Apple’s perspective, this limits the appeal of the iPad for a wide variety of applications, including some messaging tools.
• That the iPad comes with varying amounts of internal memory, coupled with the fact that it still requires a physical connection to download music and photos, indicates that Apple intends for the iPad to be semi-cloud enabled, not a fully cloud-enabled device.
• The iPad does not permit multitasking, a major drawback in my opinion. This is particularly true for people who won’t necessarily use their iPad for doing lots of work per se, but who would like to use it for simultaneous use of Twitter, email and maybe instant messaging. I suspect the iPad will permit multitasking in a future iteration – it should now.

I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on the iPad, particularly if you just bought one.

IMAuditor becomes Vantage

Real-time communications is a double-edged sword: it can make people more productive and enable people to work more effectively from remote locations, but it also creates a number of new ingress points for malware, new compliance issues with which IT and LOB managers must contend, and new policy challenges that add complexity to what IT is already doing with email and more traditional parts of the IT infrastructure.

FaceTime announced today the release of Vantage, the product formerly known as IMAuditor. Vantage is designed to address the security, compliance and management requirements for a wide variety of real time communications applications, and offers a range of capabilities, including:

• Support for a number of enterprise-grade and consumer-focused real time communications tools, including Microsoft OCS 2007, Lotus Sametime, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Skype, among others.
• The ability to set granular corporate policies for things as diverse as controlling how instant messaging is used on BlackBerry devices, managing ethical wall enforcement policies for Microsoft LiveMeeting and Lotus Sametime sessions, and controlling file management on a wide variety of real time communications platforms.
• Managing anti-malware and anti-SpIM capabilities when users are connected to consumer instant messaging networks, as well as zero-day worm blocking.
• The ability to monitor content across a variety of platforms.
• The ability to archive real time conservations and integrate with various email archiving and WORM storage systems.
• Management of potential data leaks through a variety of avenues, including content scanning for Microsoft Office documents sent via real time communications tools, blocking messages that contain keywords and expressions, re-rerouting consumer instant messaging conversations over internal networks, and managing the specific types of files that can be sent.

Of particular interest is Vantage’s ability to manage Skype conversations, including scanning the content of instant messaging conversations, preventing file transfers using Skype, and logging of Skype conversations. While Skype is not yet approved for use by most IT departments, according to an Osterman Research survey to be published this week it does find use in 29% of SMBs and 7% of enterprises, and so represents a potential security hole if not managed properly.

I’m really not trying to make this newsletter sound like a FaceTime press release! But I am quite impressed by the thoroughness of the Vantage approach both in terms of the number of different platforms it can monitor and manage, and in terms of the large number of features and functions that it provides. If your organization uses real time communications of any kind, I would definitely recommend giving Vantage a close look.

Free Speech vs. Your Business

We're familiar with the growing threat of data leaks - sensitive and confidential information like credit card numbers, passwords, financial information, etc. that exits companies unencrypted or unmonitored through email, Web 2.0 applications or instant messaging tools.

But what about the stuff that doesn't rise to the level of a data leak, but that can still prove very damaging to your company?

What I'm referring to is content that your employees might send out using social networking or other tools that could come back to bite your company. For example, someone at a company that I follow on Twitter (not a client of Osterman Research) yesterday tweeted a link to a very derogatory blog post about the CEO of a major software company, and tweeted this under the name of their employer. The blog post discussed the eternal fate of this CEO, implied he probably had multiple mistresses, and expressed the view that he looks like the "child of Karl Rove and Stewie from Family Guy". Not very complimentary stuff no matter how tongue-in-cheek might have been the intent of the author.

Now, imagine you're a salesperson or CMO or CEO of the company that employs the Twitter poster and you're trying to work a deal with the company whose CEO was denigrated in the blog post. At best, it might be embarrassing and at worst it might kill a potential deal. In any case, it's not the kind of thing that most people would like added to the mix in the negotiation process.

This raises the question of the balance that companies need to achieve between the free speech rights of their employees, the value that they derive from letting employees use tools like Twitter and Facebook, and the potentially negative consequences from unfettered discussion in public forums.

Your thoughts?

Some thoughts on Novell BrainShare

I spent Monday at BrainShare, Novell’s annual conference held in Salt Lake City each year, although the show took a hiatus in 2009 for reasons that were primarily economic – both for Novell and for its customers.

Although the show was fairly well attended, including a mostly packed keynote on Monday morning, the show was clearly much smaller than in past years. For example, the large dining hall that served breakfast and lunch each day was replaced by multiple food stations on the show floor itself. While there were a decent number of exhibitors on floor, there were fewer than in past years. Other than Novell itself, GWAVA and IBM were two of the larger exhibitors.

On a positive note, the keynote on Monday morning presented some very interesting content (although I got there late and missed the opening portion), including a good demonstration of Novell Pulse – Novell’s real-time collaboration tool – soon to be released to attendees of BrainShare for use with up to five of their friends. Also shown was a very nifty demo of ZENworks used to demonstrate the migration of a user from Windows XP to Windows 7 – along with their data – in a matter of just a few minutes. I also attended a quite interesting session on the use of virtualization for disaster recovery using VMware ESX.

BrainShare, as always, is an interesting and informative show. This year, however, it was made all the more interesting by the undercurrent of Novell’s potential acquisition. In early March, Elliott Associates, a hedge fund operator, made a roughly $2 billion bid for the company that the company turned down on March 21. It’s likely that Elliott Associates will up its bid or Novell will be acquired by another company – one person in the know with whom I spoke on Monday afternoon is surprised that Citrix has not made a public bid for Novell given the synergy and existing partnership between the companies. Another alternative is the parceling out of the more valuable bits of Novell to various suitors. GroupWise, for example, is still making money (albeit not acquiring customers in huge numbers) and might be acquired by a company that already focuses heavily on the GroupWise space (a couple of them come to mind). Whatever, Novell does, it will likely be sooner rather than later given the company’s last year-and-a-half of declining revenue.

Personally, I am impressed by a lot of Novell’s technology and hope to see its continued development. GroupWise, for example, still has many loyal users and is a very solid messaging and collaboration platform; Novell Pulse is an interesting technology for real-time collaboration, and so forth. It will be interesting to see what happens with the company over the next few months.