Taking Web Services To The Office
Most of the innovation in web services over the past three to four years (what is popularly known as web 2.0) has been focused on the end user as the customer. We call them consumer facing web services in our firm and they include the services from Yahoo! and Google, blogging tools like Wordpress, Six Apart, Live Journal, Blogger, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Tribe, LinkedIn, tagging services like Delicious and Furl, photo and video sharing services like Flickr and YouTube, attention aggregators like Digg and Memeorandum, wikis like Wikipedia and Wikicities, and countless other web native services.
These services are changing the way that we use the web to collect information, organize it, republish it, and extend it. I suppose you could say its a revolution in consumer knowledge management.
Which leads to me to the office or the "enterprise".
Esther Dyson observed in a Release 1.0 issue in 2004 (well before web 2.0 was upon us) that it used to be that technology would start with the goverment (military or space), then move to the enterprise, and end up in the consumer's hands. But, she said, these days technology starts with the consumer and moves up to the enterprise.
So we think its time for the developers of web services to start thinking about the enterprise. And we are not alone. Nicholas Carr wrote a post yesterday wondering if Web 2.0 is "enterprise ready". In that post, Nicholas links to an article in MIT/Sloan's Management Review by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, called Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.
In that article Professor McAfeee argues that web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, and group messaging services are perfect for "spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration".
We agree and we have made one investment to date around this theme, in a company called Instant Information that has built a web service featuring many of the most used web 2.0 technologies and techniques, such as RSS, tagging, blogging, wikis, social networking, and information sharing. The service is called TouchPoint and is focused on the needs of the wall street investment professional.
We hope to make a number of additional investments in enterprise focused web services. We can learn from what has worked to date with consumers and incorporate those lessons into the design of useful services for enterprises.
You might ask why won't the services that work for consumers today just end up in the enterprise. We think they will. Certainly we have adopted blogging on the Union Square Ventures website. We use delicious to share links, we use a jotspot wiki to keep track of all of our deal flow and our investments. We use social networks like LinkedIn to find candidates for our portfolio companies. In short, we run our business on web services and we are certain that many other enterprises are doing the same.
But there are times when a service that is ideal for a consumer doesn't work perfectly for an enterprise or a particular industry. In the case of Instant Information, they have added concepts like permissioning and entitlements to TouchPoint so that the wall street investment professional can participate in the sharing of research and other information while maintaining their business model and industry practices.
And then there is the issue of the business model for the web service. Most web services use the Freemium business model in one way or another.
Many enteprises will be more comfortable with a monthly payment than an advertising supported service. We still think a free component of the business model is critical to get widespread adoption among enterprises. We think many of these services will be brought into the enterprise by one employee or a small group and then spread virally. So freemium is still a good way to go when approaching the enterprise with a web service.
If you are building a company that is building or marketing a web service focused on enterprises, we'd certainly like to hear from you.
April 13, 2006 02:49 PM, By Fred Wilson
Tags: enterprise instantinformation webservices
Comments (12)
Hey Fred,
I agree that information sharing and collaboration services will become more widely adopted by SMBs and enterprises in the near term. It's important to note McAfee's focus on knowledge management systems (btw, I think the report is great). People, including professionals, are able to create an immense amount of content. Today, it's no longer a hassle to create content because of all of the tools and services that are available. The Internet is now becoming focused on the distribution, accessibility, and organization of that content (e.g. RSS). So while SMBs and enterprises are getting ready to use Web 2.0 collaboration tools, they operate very differently than an individual consumer. Their use of new collaboration tools will require better methods/systems/applications of knowledge management.
I think the way adoption progresses will be similar to how RSS became popular. We saw content from blogs and news sites easily accessible with RSS and, like many others, I had to start using a RSS reader to manage all of the feeds coming in. This is how I see business content moving, where everything gets created and accumulated and businesses will then need businesses to get better applications to access and view the content. One trend that helps validate this is online calendar sharing (iCal, Calendar rss, etc). We're seeing multiple sources and now multiple readers such as Google Calendar, Kiko, Planzo, Trumba, Yahoo Calendar, etc.
In summary, Web 2.0 concepts are being adopted by businesses, but we have yet to see tools to better manage all of the information. It's all about productivity for the organization.
I am starting a business that revolves around what I've said. My company is trying to revise the Intranet as it is a fundamental productivity tool for organizations, project teams, and groups. We believe there is an underserved market of organizations that need our service, and we're focusing on them for our pilot/launch strategy.
Posted by JonPaul Checa , April 13, 2006 11:28 PM
Hey Fred,
We have been trying to apply these services to enterprises for the last two years. Our most recent client is in the process of deploying services for up to 200,000 employes. Another customer is deploying the services internally as well as externally for its one million small biz customer's.
Posted by jim wilde , April 14, 2006 10:37 AM
Just curious what impact SOX will have on adoption? How will companies balance this free flow of information and still be compliant.
Posted by Barrett , April 14, 2006 11:25 AM
I'm surprised by this post. We've been integrating "web 2.0" web services for the past 2 years (like corporate blogging with workflow, both for internal and external blogging and for CMS), and there are a bunch of companies with corporate offerings. Microsoft and others with substantial corporate presence also have enabled rapid development of solutions bases on the approaches.
Payment models are a different subject altogether.
Posted by Charlie Crystle , April 14, 2006 01:02 PM
I would just add that a lot of technology that winds up in the enterprise gets started on Wall Street or stops off on Wall Street after starting in the military.
Posted by Steve Goldstein , April 14, 2006 01:15 PM
i agree web 2.0 apps are coming to the office - formally or informally. interesting that the public markets dont beleive that - all the folks who cover msf think the web 2.0 revolution ends attheconsumer, is taken up by salesforce andnetsuite in thesmb market and never touches the enterprise. i think they're wrong.
microsoft says office already has all the functionality its users want, they just cant find it. exactly the point - the great thing about these consumer web 2.0 apps is that they are not heavy tech solutions, they are driven by consumer ease of use.
we've been loking for a way to implement web 2.0 in our office environment (an asset mgmt firm). weve tried jotspot, delicious, feeds etc on and off but nothing really has taken yet as a complete office wide solution. sounds like we need to talk to the guys at insant information - great plug, as i just requested a demo! let us know what else you find out there...
Posted by jasonascott , April 15, 2006 04:19 AM
Saw Nick Carr's recent post on Web2.0 at the enterprise level (although a little different than the small business level) that discusses Andrew McAfee's article in MIT Sloan Management Review. I'm not if this article spurned Fred to post but thought it might be interesting to others.
Sorry, but can't post the URLs-- I thought Fred said links were the currency of the web. Just kidding, I realize you've got to fight comment spam. Thanks.
Posted by Chris Herbert , April 16, 2006 07:38 PM
Foldera Simplifies Your Digital Life
These days, like many of you, my life is filled with electronic communications, whether that’s email, chat, collaborative project management, mobile messages, or other data sources. I’ve written about this in the past.
On any given day, I spend hours on communications and between my work as Ideacodes, eHub, and personal communications, I pretty much live between a web browser, email client, and IM. Navigating these various spaces takes time, effort, and manual labor. Even with wikis, Basecamp’s efficiency in project management, iMail’s smart folders or Gmail’s labeling, I still find myself sorting and searching through multiple applications, browser windows, saving documents to project folders on my hard drive and then backed up to external drives.
Foldera plans to change that.
Max and I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Richard Lusk, Foldera’s CEO and founder, and Oliver Starr, Chief Mobility Officer, Director Business Development, and Corporate Blogger a couple of weeks ago. Since then, we’ve decided to work together and our company, Ideacodes, will be providing strategic design consulting on Foldera’s application and creating their corporate blog.
imageRichard and Oliver came by our office Friday morning to talk about the project and to show us a private demo of the web application, which is still in stealth mode but will be debuting at next week’s O’Reilly’s ETech Conference.
Foldera has truly created an innovative new web-based productivity suite which “inverts the sorting and filing paradigm,” allowing users to centralize communications based on context. The web application has a full feature set, including:
Activity Folders
- Instantly Organize your applications, teams, projects, and information
Email
- Email is automatically presorted and filed on a project by project basis
Document Manager
- File sharing with secure storage, version control and locking
Task Manager
- Task management, with assignment and tracking
Calendar
- Schedule events and share your Calendar with others
Contact Manager
- Organize personal and company contact directories
Comments
- Exchange ideas, make suggestions, and share information
Instant Messenger
- Conduct instant conversations
Administration
- Customizable to suit your workflow
Sharing Manager
- Share anything, everything or nothing at all
One of the core concepts is that your communications can be organized by activity, so whether you’re a large company or an individual, Foldera can be customized to suit the way you naturally communicate and work.
You create a dedicated Activity Folder for each distinct project or activity. Email, instant messaging, and all your other applications are now accessed from within this folder instead of their original disconnected and unstructured state. This organizational structure also keeps everything in context; for example, all your email conversations and instant message dialogs stay right inside that specific Activity Folder, so everything related to that project stays grouped together.
Richard showed us how easy it was to send and receive email while inside an activity folder, as well as direct commenting on projects, and simple customization of permissions and preferences. You can see screenshots of each feature at the Foldera site, but here are a few key screens of the current application:
image
For the skeptics out there, I would reserve judgement until you’ve tried it! Foldera is a solid product, fully functional on both PC and Mac browsers, and extremely fast. In addition to the application itself, I’ve been impressed with Richard’s rapid and open discourse about Foldera on various blogs and in comment threads. Both Richard and Oliver are doing a great job approaching bloggers to promote and get feedback on the application and their enthusiasm and expertise shine through. Clearly, they’ve also impressed their investors, having raised $13 million since its launch and another $8.5 million after a reverse merger into an existing public company.
See Max’s post, Foldera - Next Generation Communications.
To read what others have said about Foldera:
Two passionate companies (that are seeing huge adoption) by Robert Scoble
Foldera: Never organize your inbox again by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch
Foldera: 1 Million SignUps in 12 Days (later corrected to 400,000 signups) by Shel Israel
Foldera, 400,000 downloads in 12 days? by Robert Sc
Posted by Foldera Simplifies Your Digital Life , April 17, 2006 03:31 AM
Aspects of web 2.0 are relevant for the enterprise, but not as you know web 2.0 today.
The notion of translating much of what we find in the web 2.0 world (beyond the revolution in communication tools and post-sharing, etc) into enterprise applications is a bit absurd. Nearly everything that IS web 2.0 is *not* enterprise: Open Betas in full production environments, advertising-based revenue models, short gaps between development and production, fashionably sketchy QA, ad hoc support (if any at all), unannounced modifications, software for the greater good (yeah... whatever), no release structures, etc. What makes somthing uiniquely web 2.0 also makes it precisely non-enterprise.
My opinion is that many Internet entrepreneurs are getting caught up in the hype of web 2.0. To me, it is important to keep in mind a few principles and acid tests of product and business development for the enterprise market:
-Does your solution clearly alter a bottom line or generate new revenue for the enterprise?
-Do you have the staying power to support an enterprise over the long haul? When your app fails - and it will at one point or another, just ask sf.com - do you understand what it takes to keep your enterprise client on its rails?
-Can your enterprise client stake any or all of its operating profit on the strength of your system or application?
-Do you have an entry strategy into the cut-throat world of corporate selling (or, like most web 2.0'ers, are you just going to build it and watch the traffic volumes climb until Google buys your IP?)?
-Are you a mile wide and an inch deep or can you really position what you have to offer and embed it deep within a target vertical?
If you haven't thought of these things, in my mind, you haven't really thought about Web 2.0 and the enterprise market. What makes companies like Salesforce.com successful is that they are *not* web 2.0 - they merely borrow certain web 2.0 concepts and advancements to offer up an enterprise solution.
Herein lies the low hanging fruit for innovators: What of the web 2.0 world can you integrate into your solution or your design for a solution in order to give you a disruptive edge over the competition and a product that an enterprise vertical can truly benefit from?
My partners and I are currently working on one unique response to this question. If you are interested in chatting, email or msn jdc@ibl.bm.
Posted by John Cowan , April 24, 2006 01:59 PM
Fred,
My company is building a suite of enterprise tools for SMB using web services and lots of the "web2.0" tools you talk about. I'd love to discuss the topic with you some more. breslin[at]infinimedia.com
Posted by Brian Breslin , April 24, 2006 03:43 PM
There is a difference between what developers mean by "web services" and the definition of your "web service"... nothing major, just an observation.
Posted by alex , July 20, 2006 08:04 AM
> If you are building a company that is building or marketing a web
> service focused on enterprises, we'd certainly like to hear from you.
Hi, Fred! I'm building a company that is building web services focused on the enterprise. In fact, Spanning Salesforce v3.0 passed its presubmission review for publication in the AppExchange late this afternoon. More to come. Much more.
Cheers,
Charlie
Posted by Charlie Wood , April 13, 2006 09:39 PM