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June 6, 2011

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Employees have more ways to communicate, but until the mishmash of tools gets integrated, productivity will suffer >> By Michael Healey

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CONTENTS
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY June 6, 2011 Issue 1,302 This all-digital issue of InformationWeek is part of our 10-year strategy to reduce the publications carbon footprint

20 Buyers Guide: Enterprise Social Networking

Get the social networking features you need to support collaboration on business projects and boost your companys productivity

COVER STORY

12 Collaboration Breakdown
Employees have more tools than everbut until those devices are integrated, people wont be as productive as they could be

3 Research And Connect

Reports, events, video, and more

4 Practical Analysis
Wintels mobile compatibity mess

6 Global CIO QUICKTAKES 9 Online Attack Thwarted

Lockheed Martin attack could force EMC to reveal risks for SecurID customers

11 Finance-Friendly Cloud
NYSE launches platform for captial markets to overcome security, reliability, and regulatory concerns

How to develop a career path for technical leaders

8 CIO Profiles
Intuition isnt all that counts when assessing client projects

10 Cloud Standard
Citrixs Project Olympus combines XenServer and OpenStack to create an enterprise cloud foundation

10
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CONTACTS
25 Editorial Contacts 26 Business Contacts
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INFORMATIONWEEK ANALYTICS

Database Breaches State Of Storage 2011 Recently, theres been IT teams are packing more data on fewer a rash of major datadevices, delivering faster output. Find out base breaches. All of how smart CIOs can speed this trend. the companies had informationweek.com/analytics/2011storage solid resources at their disposal, so what went Understand Clouds Risks wrong? We profile five database Security concerns give many companies breachesand extract the lessons to be pause as they consider migrating to cloud- learned from each. based services. But you can stay safe. informationweek.com/analytics/datalessons informationweek.com/analytics/securecloud Data Dedupe Gains Ground Reduce Mobile Device Risks As the volume of corporate data grows, IT pros keep investing in new technoloInnovative IT shops demonstrate that mobile devices can be used securely. gies, including data deduplication. informationweek.com/analytics/mobilesecurity informationweek.com/analytics/datadedupe

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practicalAnalysis
Wintels Mobile Compatibility Mess
Two weeks ago saw a dust-up between Microsoft and Intel about claims for application compatibility on smartphones running Windows on ARM processors versus Windows on Intel Atom processors. The dispute demonstrates just how late Intel is to the smartphone and tablet markets, and the ripple effect on Microsofts already tenuous plans for smartphones and tablets. Just like most everyone else in the industry, both Intel and Microsoft got the tablet market wrong. They saw tablets as little PCs rather than big smartphones. If you need an example of just how wrong a design can go, I offer the Avaya Flare, which for $1,500 weighs more than 3 pounds and looks more like a clunky Walmart LCD picture frame than anything else. Even Apple didnt fully appreciate what the tablet market would become. Supposedly, it developed the iPad first and then shrunk it to create the iPhone. But the genius is that the two are much alike, sharing common design, operating system, and apps. Theyre intended mostly to retrieve information, with very little ability to input large amounts of complex data. The type of information retrieved, need for portability, and duration of viewing tend to dictate the size. It appears that both Intel and Microsoft followed their own desires rather than those of their customers. Corporate group-think can be an incredibly hard thing to overcome, even in the face of the success of the iPad and the myriad failures of Windows-based tablets. It took threats from large OEM partners to convince Microsofts top brass that Windows 7 wouldnt cut it as is on tablets. Intels failure to grab onto the smartphone and tablet markets is even harder to fathom. The enabling technology for smartphones is the system on chip, which attempts to combine as many aspects of a computer system as possible onto one piece of silicon. By combining cores, memory controllers, cache memory, graphics, and more, the chip allows for the vast majority of the devices work to be done in the chips lower-power-consumption confines. The stuff off-chip includes radios, display drivers, audio amplifiers, GPS everything you need to interface with the
ART WIT TMANN

outside world. This is familiar ground for Intel, which understands these systems well and should never have ceded the market to the Qualcomms and others that have made their fortunes in dumb cellphones. App Compatibility Conundrum This brings us back to the scuffle two weeks ago, which centered on Windows 8. Microsoft initially said Windows 8 would be only a 64-bit operating system, and then when it looked around for 64-bit chips that could be the basis for power-sipping phones and tablets, it found none and changed its mind, saying Win8 would support 32-bit ARM chips on those portable devices. At a recent Intel investor conference, a company exec apparently said more than he should have, or more than he knew, when he said app compatibility would be had only with Win8 64 bit running on Atom chips. He went on to say there would be no compatibility possible with ARM chips. The Intel execs statement is probably accurate, depending on which set of apps you
June 6, 2011 4

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practicalAnalysis
think should be able to run on a Win8 phone or tablet. Be that as it may, Microsoft said the statement is inaccurate. Its not hard to see why Microsoft is getting comfortable with ARM. The Wintel beer and pizza party is no fun if Intel is two years late bringing the beer. Windows Phone 7 got a major update recently, adding some 500 features. Its a clear signal that Microsoft intends to continue to develop WP7 at least for phones if not for tablets. But in doing so, Microsoft also is making clear theres a different code path for Windows 7 than for Windows Phone 7, and those differences will probably continue into the next versions. So when you talk about compatibility, you have to ask: Compatibility with what? On phones, I think its pretty clearsupposedly there are more than 10,000 WP7 apps now, and those will work on WP8 whenever it arrives. There are hundreds of thousands of Win7 (and previous) apps, and Win8 will probably run only 64-bit versions of those, making obsolete those apps that havent been recompiledincluding many apps IT shops developed themselves. On laptops and desktops, that means a long transition to Win8, just as it has been with any Microsoft operating system. The place where it all goes to hell is on tablets. As I stated earlier, recent history tells us that users want tablets to act more like big phones than little laptops. Sure, Microsoft can create a version of Win8 that has the right user should get enterprise IT architects thinking, too. I hope, as youve made your transition to Windows 7, youve taken the time to catalog the apps your IT team runs now and must run into the future. If you havent decided to either Webify apps or bring them back into the data center to be accessed through some sort of virtual desktop, nows the time to do it. No matter how you look at it, there will be no Windows XP-like monopoly in your future. Users will want to access apps from a variety of devices and operating systems. My mantra: Webify if you can, VDI if you must, and avoid platform-specific programming like the plague. As for Microsoft and Intel, that theyve given Google and Apple and ARM this big of an opening will be one of the biggest mistakes these two giants have ever made. Art Wittmann is director of InformationWeek Analytics, a portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. You can write to him at awittmann@techweb.com. More than 100 major reports will be released this year. You can sign up or upgrade your membership at analytics.informationweek.com/upgrade.
June 6, 2011 5

Why is Microsoft comfortable with ARM? The Wintel beer and pizza party is no fun if Intel is two years late bringing the beer.
interface on Atom chips, but the compatibility users want is with apps that understand how to use the six-way gyroscope, GPS, touch screen, and other features that make smartphones smart. Those apps run on a WP7-ARM combo. Running big fat Wintel applications on those devices, at least at this point, doesnt appear to be all that important. While theres no doubt it would serve Microsoft and its customers well if Redmond laid out a plan for all its client devices and corresponding app compatibility, the commotion

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globalCIO
Technical Leaders Are Special, So Treat Them That Way
No CIO can be successful without a competent technical staff. Even when system development and maintenance are outsourced, the CIO and senior IT staff need the input of their own technical team. If most senior executives fail to develop high-potential directors and VPs, they do even less to develop senior technical leaders. There are technical core competencies these leaders must have, which I address in another column. Even once a CIO has the needed skills, though, there are major organizational challenges to getting the right people into senior technical leadership positions. The most serious challenge is having a career track sufficient to motivate and incentivize technical talent. Without a technical track that parallels the management track in salary and perks, top technical talent will either go into management or leave the company for more money. Far more technical people are coin-operated than want to admit it. The management and technical career paths must be structured to not incentivize top technical talent to move into management simply for more money. Years ago when I was a director at American Airlines, I had a situation that still bothers me. There was an exceptionally talented IMS and DB2 engineer and resident expert on Sybase. He was clearly world class in database technology and extremely important to Americans daily operations. But he wanted more money and was at the top of his pay scale, and we worked for an airlineso there wasnt any money. I counseled him that he had a few things to work on before he should consider a management position, and that those were the same things required for the equivalent of a technical fellow position. Nevertheless, he talked his way through an interview and into a management position in application development. That group had a lot of problems for which he didnt have the management experience, he made a couple of political blunders, and within a year he left the company for another job. What a loss. I have changed some high-potential career plans by reminding the individuals that I had 150 managers and I didnt know all their names, but I had only 10 technical fellows and I knew each of them, what they were working on, their hobbies, and everything else I could
L ARRY TIEMAN

because they were each so important to me. The second major organizational challenge is in promoting top technical talent, which quickly gets into which characteristics are most important. Every company I have worked for that had a technical career path eventually politicized the technical fellow position or used it for something other than top technical leaders. Promoting For The Wrong Reasons Among the most common mistakes is using the position as an additional salary band. At American Airlines, where the salary scale was always under pressure, the hot technologists were occasionally hired at the technical fellow level even though they didnt have the leadership skills. At other companies, I have seen top business analysts promoted to technical fellow even though they had no technical skills whatsoever. Misuse of this position diminishes its leadership and technical aspects and can damage the performance of the company. The required leadership and technical characteristics are illustrated by the actions of one of
June 6, 2011 6

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globalCIO
the top technical leaders I worked with at FedEx. In 2008 we made a significant change to a major operational and customer system, adding considerable workload. Several days after the change, the system began to slow, to the point where a transaction that should have taken less than 10 milliseconds was taking more than Do workarounds to get the business back up, or identify and fix what was causing the system to crawl. Realizing the problem might be more complex than any one person or team could solve, he organized several teams in different technical areas and began collecting data. Unknown to the application team, there had also been a major disk drive upgrade and messaging software upgrade. Complicating matters, the disk drive upgrade was our first experience with solid state drives, and the engineers really didnt know how to tune the drives using the new tools. As the disk drive I/O rate deteriorated, the queues filled and the messaging software performance degraded. Once our technical leader and the teams had collected all the data, they determined that the new disk drives were the problem. The manufacturers engineers were called, the disk drives were tuned, and the situation was resolved. The problems you want your technical leaders to solve are too big for one person or one team. These leaders must see the big picture, be quick studies, organize teams, break up finger-pointing, use their broad and deep technical experience to guide investigations, and balance immediate pressure to get systems back up at any cost while discovering and fixing the problems. My role as senior VP over the application group was to provide political cover, managing up and making any decisions the technical team didnt think it could make. My rule is, people dont get promoted for what they know; they get promoted for the class of problem they can solve. Larry Tieman has been a senior VP at FedEx, a CIO, or a CTO for the past 20 years. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.

The problems you want your tech leaders to solve are too big for one person or one team. These leaders must see the big picture.
120 msa catastrophic system failure. While everyone was blaming the increased workload and pushing to back out the changesa very difficult and risky fallbackour most senior technical leader jumped in. He was faced with two competing challenges:

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CIO profiles
CAREER TRACK
How long at current company: I joined GXS, a business-to-business data integration and e-commerce company, in early 2010. Career accomplishment Im most proud of: At IBM in 1994-95, we deployed the software that ran online ticket sales for the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games. I led a team that developed and launched IBMs e-commerce software suite, WebSphere Commerce.

KARL SALNOSKE
Executive VP of Service Delivery & CIO, GXS

Leisure activities: I race my Porsche for fun sometimes and watch the Formula 1 circuit Business leader Id like to have lunch with: Virgins Richard Branson Tech vendor CEO I respect the most: Lou Gerstner, for managing the IBM turnaround If I werent a CIO, Id ... consider being a small-business ownermaybe woodworking (cabinets) or plumbing

right answer. The best I could come up with was, it was intuition from my years of previous experience with similar situations. He explained that without thoroughly understanding the clients business and analyzing the data around the various options, intuition could easily lead to the wrong answer.

chitecture to drive improvements in performance and availability.

VISION
The next big thing for my industry will be ... cloud-based integration across multiple business processes. For many customers, the meaning of integration is changing. Many want to integrate broader business processes and transaction types with their customers, suppliers, banks, and thirdparty logistics providers.

ON THE JOB

Ranked No. 75 in the 2010

Top initiatives: >> Data center move: Were moving to a dual/dual data center strategy, with two data centers in Most important career influencer: both North America and Europe to One thing Im looking to change: The people I worked with at McKin- support our disaster recovery Were continually looking to imgoals and customer service levels. prove our change management sey during 1990-94. They helped me transition from a techie to process, reducing the percentage >> Siebel deployment: Were being more well rounded. After of failed changes that get rolled rolling out some new internal one of my first meetings with a out. We process more than 50,000 capabilities. group of key client executives, a changes in our network each year. McKinsey partner asked me what I Even a 1% error rate means we >> Continuous availability: Were thought. I outlined what I thought could introduce 500 failures into the best technical solution was. He replatforming our core integration the network, which is unacceptservices onto a new hardware arasked how I knew that was the able. Our goal is zero defects.
June 6, 2011 8

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Quicktakes
RSA BREACH CLUES

QUICKFACT

133,000 Number of employees who had to reset passwords

Lockheed Martin Fends Off Attackers

Lockheed Martin has revealed that it successfully faced down a major online attack last month against its networks. In a statement, Lockheed Martin, the nations largest defense contractor, described the attack as significant and tenacious. Its information security team detected the attack almost immediately and took aggressive actions to protect all systems and data, the company said. As a result, it said, its systems remain secure; no customer, program, or employee personal data has been compromised. Hackers reportedly exploited Lockheeds VPN, which lets employees log in remotely by using RSA SecurID hardware tokens. The attackers apparently possessed the factory-encoded random keys used by at least some of Lockheeds SecurID hardware tokens, as well as serial numbers and the underlying algorithm used to secure the devices. Whoever attacked Lockheed Martin may have been behind the successful breach in March of EMCs RSA division, which makes SecurID. Since that attack, there have been malware and phishing campaigns seeking specific data that would let the attackers link RSA tokens to specific end users in order to access their systems, says Rick Moy, CEO of NSS Labs, in a blog post, leading his organization to conclude that the Lockheed Martin attack was carried out by the original RSA attackers. Its likely that whoever hacked the RSA network got the algorithm for the current tokens and then managed to get a keylogger installed on one or more computers used to access Lockheed Martins intranet, says security blogger Robert Cringely, aka Mark Stephens, who broke the news of this attack. From there, attackers reportedly gained access to the contractors internal network. Lockheed Martin, which posted revenue of $45.8 billion in 2010, makes everything from Trident missiles and F-22 fighter jets to a network of satellites for the Defense Department that are designed to support high-priority wartime communications. By all accounts, Lockheed Martins swift detection of the attack helped avert potential disaster. The good news here is that the contractor was able to detect an intrusion, then did the right things to deal with it, Cringely says. A breach like this is very subtle and not easy to spot. The same day Lockheed Martin detected the attack, it disabled all employees remote access and told telecommuters to work from company offices for at least a week, Cringely says. Then it told remote workers theyd receive new RSA SecurID tokens and all 133,000 employees to reset their network passwords. In a statement released on May 28, EMC said it was premature to speculate on the details of the attack. But if attackers did use information stolen from RSA to hack into Lockheed Martins SecurID system, then EMC could be forced to finally reveal, publicly, any risks that the use of its system might now pose to the 40 million users of SecurID hardware tokens and 250 million users of its SecurID software. Mathew J. Schwartz (iwletters@techweb.com)
June 6, 2011 9

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Quicktakes
AN EMERGING STANDARD?

QUICKFACT

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Citrix To Combine XenServer, OpenStack For Enterprise Clouds

Citrix Systems is developing a product that will let businesses use the OpenStack cloud software as a foundation for establishing their own infrastructure as a service. OpenStack is an open source project launched last July by Rackspace and NASA, with the backing of 60 vendors, including Cisco, Canonical, Dell, and Intel. IaaS vendors Amazon, Savvis, Terremark, and Verizon Business havent signed on, however, nor have IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle. Under an initiative called Project Olympus, Citrix will offer OpenStack with a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer, its hypervisor for hosting virtual machines, according to CEO Mark Templeton. That will let Citrix XenServers work as a pooled, self-service resource in the data center, capable of linking to other OpenStack environments. Early OpenStack code contributions from NASA and Rackspace were oriented toward cloud service providers; they allow the provisioning of servers and storage on a large scale. When OpenStacks basic functionality gets combined with Citrixs hypervisor, the software will be useful on a smaller scale as well, Templeton said in a speech late last month at the companys annual Synergy conference in San Francisco. Dell will provide a reference architecture implementation of OpenStack by October, and the first software to be produced from Project Olympus is due later this year. If OpenStack becomes a de facto standard for enterprise clouds, IT departments will be more likely to turn to Rackspace or other OpenStack-based cloud service providers for their external IaaS needs. Its easier to shift workloads between clouds when they recognize each others APIs. Citrix was an early supporter of OpenStack as a way of creating a standard that might counter VMwares lead in enterprise virtualization and cloud software. Rackspace, in addition to using OpenStack to offer cloud services, has gone out of its way to say it relies on Citrix XenServer for its operations. In addition to the Citrix hypervisor, Project Olympus will support VMwares vSphere VM

Templeton: Industry-class clouds for the enterprise

management software and Microsofts Hyper-V. Since vSphere manages VMwares ESX Server hypervisor, the announcement seems to indicate that Project Olympus will result in a crosshypervisor system, while using XenServer as its default hypervisor. Yet Citrix emphasizes the advantages of using open source to build private clouds in contrast to approaches that add proprietary management layers on top of existing data center virtualization stacks. You can take that as a thinly veiled jab at VMwares vCloud initiative. Charles Babcock (cbabcock@techweb.com)
June 6, 2011 10

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FINANCE FRIENDLY
Stanley Young. The platform is set up to host customer applications and services such as electronic trading, market data analysis, algorithm testing, and regulatory reporting. So far, it has two test customers: Pico Quantitative Trading, an agency-only broker that provides services to multiasset electronic trading clients, and Millennium Partners, an investment management firm with $10.6 billion in assets under management. Jarrod Yuster, cofounder and CEO of Pico, says his firm is using Radianz financial services cloud. Microsoft recently launched a range of cloud services aimed at healthcare organizations. But widespread adoption of industry-specific clouds isnt a given. Companies in heavily regulated and highly competitive environments tend to be very security conscious and may not warm to the notion of colocating data in the same facilities that host competitors information. And businesses in industries where regulations are more relaxed, such as retail, may opt for less expensive, generic cloud offerings from service providers like Google and Amazon. Picos Yuster said he isnt worried that his data could get exposed in the cloud. Were very comfortable that our information is protected and segregated, he says. NYSE Technologies Young is confident CMPC will see significant adoption, if for no other reason than trading firms are under major cost pressure. People cannot go back to the business model of three years ago, he says. Clients are asking for more services at less cost. Gregory MacSweeney of Wall Street &

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NYSE Launches Cloud For Capital Markets

Capital markets firms have been slow to adopt public cloud offerings because of concerns over reliability, data security, and potential regulatory headaches. NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology arm of NYSE Euronext, has launched an industry-specific cloud computing platform that might address some of these worries. Dubbed the Capital Markets Community Platform (CMPC), its designed to provide rapid provisioning of pay-for-use processing power, access to historical market data, and temporary compute capacity for real-time testing. The cloud services, created in partnership with EMC and VMware, are hosted at NYSE Euronext data centers in New Jersey and the U.K. NYSE Technologies plans satellite hubs through partners in Toronto, Sao Paolo, and Tokyo, with prices based on consumption of CPU cycles. The goal is an open platform to enable frictionless trading, says NYSE Technologies CEO

This could mark the start of specialized clouds for industries with tough regulatory, security, and transaction requirements.
the flexible capacity for back testing quantitative trading strategies. The platform will go live for other customers July 1. NYSEs cloud could mark the start of a host of specialized cloud offerings aimed at industries with demanding and unique regulatory, security, and transaction requirements. BT boasts more than 15,000 members on its BT

Technology and Paul McDougall

(pmcdougall@techweb.com)
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Collaboration Breakdown
Employees have more ways to communicate, but until the mishmash of tools gets integrated, productivity will suffer By Michael Healey

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lmost 90% of companies use some form of social networking, whether its an internal blog, an online forum, a wiki, or a hybrid

platform such as Microsoft Share- consider that effort a success. And Point, the InformationWeek Analytics we know one of the big reasons. Only 26% of our survey responSocial Networking in the Enterprise Survey shows. However, a paltry 10% dents have direct email integration
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COLLABORATION

[COVER STORY]

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with their social systems. In other words, companies expect employees to break away from their email, check the social system, col laborate, and then go back to their email. Fuggedaboutit. Collaboration technology presents the ultimate irony of the modern IT age. Hundreds of apps, platforms, and devices are designed to help us work together better. They all promise to make us more productive. Yet almost none of these tools plugs easily into the others. Vendors touting unified communications havent come close to solving this problem. All present their visions of how their platforms will revolutionize the workers life, but fail to mention what they dont provide. Microsoft Lync has no iPhone or Android option. Ciscos unified communications suite offers limited Exchange integration. Avayas new Flare doesnt support Microsoft Office. And none of them has sufficient plug-ins for the growing number of software-as-a-service collaboration options, such as Salesforce.coms Chatter. The cloud vendors are no better, preferring to push their own visions as the only way to go. Youre a big fan of Google enterprise email? Too bad, if youre a SharePoint or Notes shop. Google has integration tools for Outlook and Notes client software, but it doesnt in-

Whether youre e managing web w access, securing your our portal, port or extending identity to o the cloud, cl you need a way to safely saf share user information. Its essential sential for f your external applicationsand ationsand for f your compliance e and governance go initiatives, as well. ell. But how ho can you open your identity in a fragmented fr
infrastructure, where wher each application ation is an island unto unto itself? With a virtualized identity service, servic

you have identity integration, int correlation, elation, and synchronizationright synchr at your ngertips. So you y can manage your our identity as one logical l system, while e gathering data data and handling security at the source. sour
RadiantOne: Link your y identity to the entire world.

COPY R IGHT 2 0 1 1 , RADIANT LOGI C, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESER VED .

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COLLABORATION

[COVER STORY]

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clude Notes databases or SharePoint sites. Its time for a reset. IT organizations have 11 major choices today when it comes to technology-assisted communication and collaboration (see box, right). Some are old and boring, like the phone and fax, while otherslike telepresence roomsmake you feel like a Jetson. IT teams need to assess each based on whether they support six critical integration points, three interoperability benchmarks, and three user requirements (see box, p. 16). View this as a checklist for successor a harbinger of the troubles ahead if theyre ignored. And they all start with email. Get Your Email House In Order Email remains the dominant form of enterprise communications: 100% market acceptance, 100% user acceptance. Period. Modern email systems provide a manageable and centralized point for four of the six integration requirementscontacts, calendars, tasks, and actual messages. However, enterprise IT teams stink at exploiting emails potential beyond the in-box, and they pretend that personal folders and to-do lists, as well as lightly shared calendars, pass for a rich collaborative environment. Were missing a tremendous opportunity.

Sixty-one percent of companies dont integrate their email with their accounting, CRM, or ERP systems, finds our InformationWeek Analytics State of Enterprise Messaging Survey. Instead, people are left to cook up their own approaches for managing the

11 MAJOR OPTIONS
Collaboration Option
Email Instant messaging SMS texting Audio conference Web conference Video (point to point) Video (conference) Video (telepresence) Collaboration systems Fax Phone

User Acceptance
Universal Low but loyal Growing Universal Growing Unproven Tolerated Generally accepted Low and unproven Universal Universal

information around projects, meetings, customer interactions, and the like. Often, they end up just stuffing emails into folders. The result is that any communication string involving more than two peoplebe it with another colleague or a customer or vendorgets fragmented. That typically means

a meeting to piece together a story and take action. Heres an example of how integrating email and a project management system would be powerful. Chances are project managers are using some type of system to track their workwhether its a module inside the ERP or CRM system or a separate app, such as the cloud-based Basecamp. Email communication is crucial to any project, providing status updates, meeting notices, and follow-up notes. Project managers are well-organized data junkies wholl happily send their updates from within the project app, creating a record and resource. The rest of the project team? Forget it. Theyll just use email, often forgetting to cc: the project manager. Retrain the users? No way. Its much easier to integrate email with the project management system, so sending an email with an associated project code is automatically noted in the project software. Sound like a monster custom coding job? Not really. The best way to accomplish this integration is to leverage some rules-based logic at the server or gateway, similar to the conventional transaction logging used for compliance. Delivery into the application itself can be done via SMTP or whatever API
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COLLABORATION

[COVER STORY]

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the vendor provides. It does require your application staff to understand the message flow and development options and inject the logic to pull out email strings that contain a project identifier, match a customer name, or meet a certain rule set. So why dont companies do this? In part its because of the enthusiasm for new collaboration technology. Email works, so why would you spend developer time on that rather than on implementing a new collaboration tool, like telepresence? Yes, companies should think about such emerging options, but they also must consider how any new tools fit with the tried and true. Another reason is fearemployees dont like it when IT messes with their email. But IT teams need to remember that just because employees depend on an email front end doesnt mean a company is tied to the backend server software. People care about the

Outlook client, not Exchange on the servers. Users love (or hate) Notes, not Domino. One of the reasons Google has been able to jump-start its Gmail for the enterprise has been its Outlook integration client and backend API. Gmail has been able to do basic email via Outlook for years, and contact and calendar integration has come more recently. When Google added a feature to sync its calendar with Outlook 2010 last year, the company described that as its top feature request. The lesson is theres an opportunity to build features and improve integration around the email client you have. Adding On To Email So hopefully youre convinced that adding IM, video, texting, or full-blown collaboration systems that arent integrated within an existing email system is just plain silly. But dont assume

that vendors are going to make it easy on you. Google is a great example of a provider that really understands some of the integration needed to succeed over the long term. However, it also falls short of the level of integration needed to expand its capabilities beyond email. Google Talk instant messaging doesnt work with Outlook or Notes, for example. Thus, its hardly surprising that the bulk of Google enterprise app growth has been driven by email, and not by instant messaging or Docs, which have more limited integration options. At a minimum, your integration goal must include having all contact, calendar, task, and message information integrated back into centralized repositories. A bigger undertaking is to integrate messageswhether via chat, video, or emailinto a CRM, project management, customer support, or ERP system. Nice goal, but sadly, most enterprise applications

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dont even get contacts and calendars right. Heres an example. Web conferencing is fairly commonplace. Cisco WebEx, Citrix GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Live Meeting all have integration options, but their client support is lim-

CRITICAL ELEMENTS FOR SUCCESS

Integration Requirements
Message and conversation Contact records Calendar events To-do/task lists ERP/CRM systems Logging/auditing

Interoperability
With email client With mobile devices With external organizations

User Requirements
Works with email Unied search Formal training

ited, and they provide only plug-ins to send appointments and invitations. Thats OK if your Web conferencing usage is 100% driven from email invitations, but if someone gets the message forwarded, or
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signs up online, where does that contact record go? If the event is part of customer or vendor activities, is the fact that it took place noted in the CRM or ERP system? Lastly, most of these systems can record sessions, but are the sessions stored with your other logs? The point is, these integrations are difficult for vendors and, frankly, arent their top priority. So when youre going to add a new tool, make sure to consider how you will integrate it with other tools. Even when vendors make a solid effort, there can be complications. Case in point, Google Apps and Salesforce. If youve ditched your Exchange email service and internal CRM and headed for the cloud, you may be in for a nasty surprise. Both Google and Salesforce have nice options to sync with individual email clients, including Outlook. But weve seen them bomb for companies running both sync options at once on an Outlook client. Plus, neither Salesforce nor Google offers a way to integrate its respective talk and chat apps. Even a seemingly simple integration like capturing and logging messages for security purposes can slip by existing setups. BlackBerry Enterprise Server is the standard for most companies mobile connectivity. IT organizations usually end up enabling SMS

texting after the sales team or executives deems it critical. However, many dont realize that BlackBerrys SMS text logging is turned off by default and is probably not logging the messages their users have enabled. Three Levels Of Interoperability When planning to integrate collaboration applications, think in terms of three levels of interoperability. The first, as weve noted, is email. The push of late to create enterprise social networks is making this more critical, since these social networks create a whole new silo. And no, setting up an email alert of social networking activity isnt enough. In fact, it may even make matters worse to generate a generic message that says something like, Bill Jones commented on your product idea. Click here. Thats not integration, its noise. If the details of Bills message were there, and you could reply to and comment on those messages right from your in-box, that would be integration. If you could check if Bill were online and maybe chat with him right then, that would be even better. However, as we noted, only 26% of companies integrate their systems with email, and only 31% enable online presence indicators. The rest? They exJune 6, 2011 16

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pect people to hop back and forth between email and social collaboration apps. The second level of interoperability is with mobile devices. IT needs to identify the options for all devices, even those it doesnt currently support. If your company adds video capabilities, chances are employees will expect to be able to use that video from their iPhones or Android-based smartphones. Establish a clear standard for email connections and clients for every device option. Do you expect iPhone users to use iMap, SMTP POP, or the Outlook client? And we mean every deviceWindows, Mac, Linux, desktop, laptop, tablet, stone tablet, smoke signal, you name it. Lay out the options and configuration ranges for all of em. Why? Because if you dont, people will connect on their own, based on what they believe is the correct or just the easiest way. For example, iPhones have an Exchange connector that is amazingly simple to use. If you have basic remote Exchange access set up, chances are you have iPhones getting mail and you dont even know it. Help your employees, or theyll help themselves. The third level of interoperability is with other companiessuppliers, partners, customersand their different collaboration

software platforms. This requires a hard reality check on what will ever be a standard. We know we can send email or text, or make a phone call, to almost anyone, regardless of that persons hardware or devicethats universal interoperability. But some platform options wont be inter-

you cant guarantee that outsiders will be able or willing to get on board. With desktop-centric applications, Skype shows some similarities. For the most part, youve needed Skype software on your desktop to use it. The company has a few partners that offer gateway access to voice and PBX

How Are Internal Social Networking Systems Integrated Into Your Email App?
Direct plug-in that works with email client Mail-out option that lets us send email directly from application Mail-to option that lets us send email to the application No email integration

26% 23%

19% 39%

Data: InformationWeek Analytics Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey of 624 business technology professionals at companies using one or more internal social networking systems, August 2010

operable. Ever. A prime example: Hosted Web and video conferencing services like Cisco WebEx, Google Talk, ooVoo, Ojo, and others have no incentive to allow easy interoperability with their systems. The vendors logic: A user can just load and go, so its no big deal for the party youre looking to collaborate with to add that vendors software. If you go with one of these options, youd better have high enough usage rates among your employee base to make it worthwhile, because

systems, but Skype has never heavily promoted this optionand thats worked out OK. Skype provides a basic set of tools to integrate with almost every mail and Web client, and thanks to a clean interface, easy chat capabilities, and pretty decent video, the company claims 125 million active users. Seventy percent are in Europe or the Middle East, and using the service has meant huge cost savings for people doing international business. Now that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5
June 6, 2011 17

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billion, the question becomes, What kind of priority will there be on integration? Clearly, any interoperability efforts will focus on Microsoft products first. Will Skype support competing systems from Avaya, Cisco, Google, and others? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went to great pains when announcing the deal to say that Microsoft would keep Skype accessible from other platforms. But Microsofts interoperability track record is mediocre. The company has struggled for years with its messaging and video platforms, offering poor consumer products, and a series of attempts at creating a UC platform for Exchange. The Lync rebranding effort promises new UC capabilities, but theres no native support for Apple or Android devices. That omission explains why people worry about the long-term future of Skype for the iPhone, despite Ballmers assurance Skype will support Apple products: 45% of respondents to a recent InformationWeek survey agree with the statement that Microsoft will deprioritize Skypes multiplatform support, while 21% disagree. ITs best hope for better interoperability lies with the bridge and gateway options noted earlier. That way, your future is at least somewhat in your own hands. But lets be clear: This

strategy does require development chops, including understanding the APIs and standards used for each platform. Any talk of universally accepted standards must be prefaced by the same warning that comes with every spec, from virtualization to IP numbers to cloud computing. Creating standards is a painfully slow process, and the market keeps moving faster and faster. For systems that have limited interoperability, assume that situation will continue, and then figure out if youll get enough use by

But two other needs are high on the list. One is enabling universal search of the information generated in these collaborative apps. The other is formal training in how best to use collaborative apps. Neither area tends to get IT leaders fired up. Enterprise search has languished as a potential business productivity breakthrough for years. There are 50+ vendors that offer software that can crawl and index an entire range of applications, including email, IM, documents, and even group collaboration systems

Enterprise search has languished. Most companies leave it underused, focusing it on just one or two applications and forfeiting the benefit of giving their employees an enterprise search vision that starts with their email stores as only one of several primary sources.
employeesand key customers or suppliersto make it worth your while. We Built It, So Where Are They? It should be easy to figure out what users want most from collaboration, but unfortunately, IT doesnt always make the effort. Weve made our case that connecting collaboration tools, with email at the center, is vital. like wikis. Granted, letting people search colleagues in-boxes is a leap of transparency few will ever make, but the software should at least offer functions like tying results from an in-box search to documents stored on the network. Most companies leave it underused, focusing search on just one or two apps and forfeiting the benefit of giving their employees a search vision that starts with their email
June 6, 2011 18

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stores as only one of several primary sources. Enterprise search fits neatly with this discussionif youve forced integration and interoperability, pulling it all together with a centralized search is technically easy and provides big results. It can quickly help an employee sort out communication details, contact updates, and problem histories. Without enterprise search? Try remembering who OKd that proposal last year, and whether the discussion was in email, IM, or a WebEx meeting, or via Salesforce. Bringing all these communication tools together, and adding search to them, does create one very big obligation for IT: A focus on training. Yes, real training that IT customizes based on the toolset it has built and the companys culture. Were not talking about walking through the tech features and demonstrating the various pull-down menus. Were talking about best practices training. What type of communication is best for quick updates? Whats the proper format for a Web conference? Heck, whats the right way to change a subject line when you respond to an email? This level of education simply isnt done. Less than 18% of all those responding to our most recent State of Enterprise Messaging Survey say their companies provide an overall training

program on how to use communication tools. The reason? IT assumes people already know the fine points, and that using the right tool well is just common sense. Wrong. Email itself has been a mainstream communication platform for only 15 or so years, and it still isnt part of the writing curriculum taught in most U.S. schools.

IT needs to do real training thats customized to the toolset it has built, and to the companys culture. Were talking about teaching best practices, not tech features.
Video, SMS, and IM education? Doesnt happen. Part of this training should be providing guidance on which medium a person should use and when. Left alone, people will default to the option that fits their personal behavior, not necessarily the right choice for businesslevel communications. IM and texting are good examples of where quick status checkins work in a personal settingrunning late Mom, pick me up at 5, can I go to Jennys but become annoying and downright intrusive when done wrong by a co-worker. IT relies on the power of a competitive and

open technology market, constantly bringing new products and ideas to the fore. Collaboration vendors are delivering those new ideas, and IT should explore whats available. However, most companies have reached a breaking point with communications and put their IT teams in a predicamentwhat chess players call zugzwang: They have to make a move, but any move might make things worse. As we add more options and more devices, we actually make our other systems less efficient and ultimately more confused and confusing. However, we dont necessarily have the choice to say no. As people accept new communication methods, businesses must adapt to stay competitive. Attempting to standardize on a single platform means making the fatal assumption that one vendor can provide and connect all needed channels, or that its even possible to connect all relevant platforms. By focusing on email as a core starting point, companies can build on emails success to help create a cohesive plan for rolling in the rest of the communications suite. Michael Healey is president of Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and research firm focused on maximizing technology investments. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.
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Buyers Guide:
Enterprise Social Networking

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Become an InformationWeek Analytics subscriber and get our full report, Enterprise Social Network Buyers Guide. This report includes 14 pages of action-oriented analysis. What youll find: > Features and pricing for 11 products > Guidance on vendor selection > Criteria for successful adoption

These tools can improve collaboration and productivitybut only if your employees actually use them. Heres how to find the right fit. By Jim Rapoza

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ompanies are increasingly turning to enterprise social networking tools for collaboration, project tracking, and knowledge management, according to our InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise 2.0 Applications Vendor Evaluation Survey. But dont think these systems are just knockoffs of Facebook or Twitter. Yes, they offer user profiles and microblogs, but todays enterprise social networking products are built for business, with powerful tools like wikis, doc-

ument sharing, and community knowledge spaces. Employees can collaborate on projects, find experts within their companies, and partner easily with colleagues on the daily tasks that constitute business operations. Still, choosing the best system for your company can be a challenge. The market is flush with enterprise-focused social networking startups, such as Socialtext, Jive, and Yammer, looking to win customers with leading-edge features and functions. Meanwhile, the largest

technology companies in the world, including Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco Systems, are also playing in this space. But size doesn't always matter: Socialtext and Jive trumped Microsoft and other big rivals in overall performance in our Vendor Evaluation Survey of 619 business technology professionals using or testing enterprise 2.0 products. Before investing in a social networking product, answer two key questions: What features do you need, and how will you deliver
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the capabilities? Status updates and profile pages are available on just about every platform, but your company may be more interested in document sharing or wikis. And some products are traditional on-premises software, others live in the cloud, and a few offer both options. Moreover, decide whether you want a product thats closely linked with your other applications, such as SharePoints tight integration with the Office suite, or if a standalone platform is the best bet. To help answer those questions, we examined the state of enterprise social networking, cataloged capabilities top products bring to bear, and analyzed criteria IT should use to determine the best fit for their firms. The Business Side Of Social Networking Companies are looking to enterprise social networking for a full slate of business value. IT professionals ranked the ability of a social networking product to meet business needs as the No. 1 feature in our InformationWeek Analytics surveyalong with data security and authentication. In other words, these products arent being rolled out just because microblogs are fun, or because its the in thing to do. Companies want to see a return. The catch is, to see value from enterprise

Are You Using Any Enterprise 2.0 Applications?

Were testing one or more applications

19% 9% 68%
Weve adopted one or more applications

Were in the process of rolling out one or more applications

13%

Data: InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise 2.0 Vendor Evaluation Survey of 619 business technology professionals, November 2010

social networking, employees have to use the tools. And that can be a problem: User adoption is the greatest management challenge IT faces when it comes to social networking, according to our InformationWeek Analytics Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey of 624 business technology professionals at companies using these systems. Thus, one common aspect of nearly all the enterprise social networking tools is a striking similarity to the interfaces of Facebook and Twitter. In this case, familiarity breeds adoption. Another way to get employees to collaborate

within an enterprise social networking system is to integrate it with tools they already depend on. For example, if your employees use Salesforce.com, then Salesforces Chatter application is a logical pick to add social networking. Similarly, companies that are heavily invested in Microsoft should evaluate the improved social networking capabilities of SharePoint 2010, which includes news feeds and the ability for users to rate content. And nearly every enterprise social networking system provides some form of API and integration method to tie into other enterprise applications. In addition to feature requirements, know
June 6, 2011 21

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how the social networking platform can be protected and managed. Differentiators to look for include single sign-on and deep analytics that show how employees are collaborating and which features they use most. Same, But Different Twitter-style updates and Facebook-like profile pages are at the core of nearly all these products, but there are variations. For instance, in some systems, users can attach documents and other files to an update. Other systems let users embed content, such as documents, images, and videos, so its viewable directly from the activity stream, which may increase engagement and make it more likely that others will view this content. Also look for filtering and privacy options within status updates. In a business environment, users wont always want to broadcast their updates to the entire companyand the entire company probably wont want to receive them. Some products can direct status updates only to select communities, groups, or individuals. Thus, a development team working on a new application can keep its members updated on progress without cluttering the message feeds of other groups. Profile pages, in which employees can post

How Important Are These Enterprise 2.0 Application Features?

1 Not important
Ability to address business needs Security of data or quality of authentication Integration with existing internal enterprise software (such as email and directory systems) Intuitive user interface Very important 5

4.5 4.5 4.4 4.4

Data: InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise 2.0 Vendor Evaluation Survey of 619 business technology professionals, November 2010

content such as contact details, professional interests, and appropriate personal information, also can vary widely in functionality. In some systems these are simply static listings of basic contact data. However, in the best systems, they are highly dynamic pages that show everything a user is doing, from status updates, to content, to areas of expertise. Socialtext and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 do a very good job with profile pages; both platforms let users provide lots of details on their activities and the content theyre creating and sharing. Social Networking Everywhere As with other business applications, enterprise social networking products are in-

creasingly available as mobile apps. This makes good sense because these tools can make it much easier for employees to stay connected to projects and tasks while on the road. Mobile readiness is one area where theres still a lot of differentiation among the products. Some have native mobile apps for access to core features, such as the activity feed. For example, Yammer and Salesforce Chatter both have apps for iPhones and BlackBerrys that let users view status updates from colleagues and adjust their statuses while on the go. However, other products have no native mobile apps. Instead, they rely on a standard browser interface, which often isnt optimized for small screens. Use of HTML 5 to imJune 6, 2011 22

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prove mobile access is on the radar of many vendors, but is still limited in use. Social Communication Enterprise social networking applications are maneuvering to become complete communications portals for users, in part to make these platforms indispensable to companies. This has led to the inclusion of multiple forms of direct communication, including email and integrated chat. An emerging feature in social networking systems is video and voice integration, often via Skype. Given Microsofts recent acquisition of the application, vendors and customers may be less enthusiastic about relying on Skype to provide live voice and video. At present, however, Skype will remain the most common option for live communications in social networking products. Some vendors are also building in integration with full Web conferencing systems, which can be valuable for initiating and managing meetings, presentations, and training. Cisco Quad, which is being revamped through a collaboration with EMCs Documentum, comes integrated with Ciscos WebEx Web conferencing service to make it simple to engage in conferencing.

Managing The Social Network Administrative features are another area where capabilities in enterprise social networks can vary, from very basic user management features to systems that provide deep analytics and the ability to sync with corporate directories. Analytics can extend the value of a social networking platform. Some products offer very deep analytics geared toward monitoring and gleaning insight from social activities. An early leader in this type of deep social analysis is Socialcast, which can provide data to help administrators see which users are highly valued by other employees, what types of content are being shared or linked to the most, and how important company events are received (or even

predicted) by employees. While its possible to misinterpret this kind of informationlots of status updates doesnt necessarily translate to productivity, for instanceanalytics can help detect and replicate effective work processes, find employee expertise, and improve information dissemination. For many companies, integration with company directories and security systems will fall under the essentials category because administrators must be able to enforce authentication and access policies. However, while access control is clearly important, it shouldnt get in the way of enhancing productivity. Thus its unfortunate that many social networking products make it difficult to extend access to third parties, given that collaboration and

Enterprise Social Network Feature Comparison

An expanded version of this table with 11 vendors and more details, including pricing, is available online Jive Analytics Blogs Delivery model Mobile version Shared workspaces or wikis Single sign-on User profiles or directory
G G

Microsoft SharePoint
G G

Salesforce Chatter Via Salesforce.com SaaS

G

Socialtext
G G

SaaS and software

G G G G

Software
G G G G

SaaS and software

G G G

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communication with partners, consultants, and other external personnel are crucial in todays business environments. How hard is it to collaborate with outsiders? In some cases, only users with the same email domain as the company can be invited to use the social network. Some systems also completely block Gmail and other Web-based email users. We recommend grilling providers on your short list about their ability to extend product capabilities to users both inside and outside the company. Another important management consideration for social networking is content management. IT must ensure that content created or stored on the social networking platform can be archived according to compliance and regulatory requirements. Content also should be retrievable by e-discovery systems, because social networking platforms are fair game in litigation. Pricing is also a concern. In general, softwareas-a-service products have a low up-front cost; many vendors charge about $5 per user per month. For an on-premises product such as Jive, prices start around $50,000 and go up based on the number of users and desired features. Many vendors offer free versions that let IT test basic functions, such as activity feeds and

The User Hurdle

What is the greatest challenge in managing your companys internal social networking systems?

Other Dont know Cost control

1% 6%

6%

User adoption

35%

Increasing employee usage

15%

16%
Time required to manage applications

21%
Explaining the role of social networking as it applies to business

Data: InformationWeek Analytics Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey of 624 business technology professionals at companies using one or more internal social networking systems, August 2010

user profiles, but lack deeper administration and integration capabilities. However, these lightweight versions may be good enough for small businesses or even departments within larger companies. IT organizations can also use a free version to pilot the product. Getting Social In our public lives, social networking has become commonplace. For many people, its almost impossible to remember how they

stayed connected with friends before Facebook. In the business world, social networking has the same potential to become indispensablebut only if your employees find it a useful business tool. Fortunately, we have a wide field of vendors from which to choose a product that meets our needs. Jim Rapoza is an editor at Network Computing. Get more details on 11 top contenders in our full buyers guide. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.
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MARKETING
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UBM TECHWEB
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For article reprints, e-prints, and permissions, please contact: Wrights Media, (877) 652-5295, ubmreprints@wrightsmedia.com Back Issues Phone: (888) 664-3332 (U.S.); (847) 763-9588 (outside U.S.) Email: customerservice@informationweek.com

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