TechMeme is reporting that Microsoft, Google, Verisign, and IBM have all joined the OpenID board. Yahoo and Google are involved or getting involved with OpenID.

But that’s not enough. As Michael Arlington at Techcrunch points out:

But it’s not clear that any of them are in a hurry to become a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites). OpenID looks like it’s going to be a winner, so big companies making their user accounts OpenID compatible is a good hedge. Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to “own” the user. Less attractive is allowing users from other sites to log into your services, so don’t expect that functionality to come for some time.

What’s more we need the enterprise vendors to get involved as well. Cisco, Avaya and others should be tying back to OpenID as well. This way users would be able to use one login across corporate sites and services. There’s no reason why I should have a seperate identity for my communication systems than I might for any other database or corporate system. This is especially true when I’m looking to tie my identity back to a common presence infrastructure.

I met with Cisco’s distinguished engineer Cullen Jennings for unified communications last week, where he showed me a new concept demo that lays out where Cisco is going with mobility and Unified Communications (UC). Think Google’s Android

Read the rest of this entry »

CustomerVision just announced a bunch of improvements to its enterprise-grade Wiki, BizWiki 4.1. The improvements include:

• Enhanced file sharing capabilities
• Additional administrative options to support very large numbers of categories or topic areas
• New Advanced Search options
• Improved ability to customize online discussion areas
• More granular user-access controls
• Ability to fully customize all Page Tool options
• Enhanced My Place features with private pages

Check it out at www.customervision.com

In case you missed it, Steve Ballmer mailed Yahoo’s board of directors on Friday a love letter proposing an acquisition to the tune of $44.6 billion or $31 per share. You can read it here.

Larry Dignan thinks that Yahoo should take the deal noting that

Sure, there would be some overlap between the companies, but Microsoft would get Yahoo’s managers like Sue Decker and research teams. Microsoft touted R&D critical mass and innovation as two big selling points. In addition, the two combined Web giants could cut a lot of costs. Microsoft is estimating about $1 billion in savings from the combined entity.

And what are the implications for collaboration? Long-time UC analyst Jim Burton sees this as as a Microsoft play for a mobile UC strategy:

Microsoft has not presented a broad UC strategy for the mobile market. I am sure they are working on one and a Yahoo acquisition would be a great help in jump-starting the move from strategy to implementation. Yahoo does a great job of organizing information and services into portals. They are typically broad horizontal offerings – the type of market position Microsoft likes.

Eric Krapf wonders about the implications that this will have for Google and suggests that Google-Cisco merger may be in the wings:

More significant could be the effect such a deal could have on Google. With Microsoft striking so close to the heart of Google’s core business, presumably Google will have to respond by being even more aggressive in trying to shift the model to ‘cloud computing’

So if we enter a new era of blockbuster consolidation, how about a Google-Cisco merger of equals? It fits neither’s modus operandi when it comes to M&As, but would a Microsoft-Yahoo combination change the playing field?

The Google-Cisco deal might seem some what bizarre given Cisco’s traditional hardware focus, but having visited last week with Cisco’s Cullen Jennings it’s pretty clear that the company is serious about Web 2.0 technologies with search being one of them. More on that score later….

Nobody has mentioned the tie-in Sharepoint and enterprise search. As you’ll recall, Microsoft announced its intention to acquire enterprise search leader FAST in January. Aside from integrating search results into a common appliance, Microsoft-Yahoo deal has some interesting implications for the whole enterprise social network space Yahoo’s got great community features. Tie that in with FAST and Sharepoint and you could end up with an IT community, something along the lines of a SpiceWorks.

One of the hot topics here at the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo was whether computing resources will remain in the enterprise or migrate into the network. So called “Cloud Computing” has garnered much interest with some folk arguing that Web 2.0 somehow changes the paradigm and erases the importance of IT. (I just got finished chatting with Susan Kuchinskas on the subject and you can check out here story here.)

To my mind, organizations will always require an IT department of some sort, but the responsibilities of that organization will evolve depending on industry sector, company size and the success of “cloud computing” initiatives. Organizations within heavily regulated industries, financial services or medical for example, will tend to keep information local to the organization and as such will require traditional IT staffing.

Less regulated industries though will have more flexibility and be able to evolve their IT organizations. Leveraging service providers for hosting and storage or additional applications becomes a real possibility because often service provides can deliver these services at a fraction of the cost of what an enterprise would be required to spend. Service providers can amortize the costs of a data center with 24×7 surveillance, a VESDA system for early stage smoke monitoring, gas suppression systems, and double interlock sprinkler systems across clients. Enterprises don’t have that luxury. The same thinking holds true for deployments of wikis, blogs, and bookmarking services.

But all of this depends on service providers meeting their service level commitments. At the Web 2.0 conference, Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource argued that we’re dealing with a new generation of users who are used to finding things online. They’ll invariably demand cloud-based initiatives.

Hogwash. Users can care less where an application resides as long as that application is available and responsive. And “Cloud Computing” will only be successful if the service delivery can match the user’s expected experience of application performance within the organization or at the desktop. While some service providers, such as SaleForce.com, have been able to deliver on that proposition that’s hardly been the universal case. Carriers in particular have been notorious fo their customer support after the contract’s been signed.

Even when organizations do utilize outside providers, they will ultimately need a team to assume responsibility for a technology deployment and be held accountable for ongoing administration of that deployment. Departmental-scale deployment of blogs, wikis, and the like may well succeed, but enterprise scale will require a professional body to look out for the organization’s best interests. They’ll need IT.

So does Web 2.0 need IT? It will if it’s going to grow beyond the dabbling interest of a few workgroups.

At Lotusphere I had the opportunity to chat with a number of the researchers about the work they have going on in the area. Here are a few of the projects cooking and worth thinking about:
• Wormhole bridges the virtual and Web worlds. Woody Huang showed how you can take information in one world and then render it the other. So a list of my personal contacts, for example, may be rendered as avatars standing around me in a circle. It’s sort of like a screen-scraper for the virtual world, but one that’s constantly updated as necessary.
• Bluegrass is a SecondLife for business. This is tough one to describe here and I hope to post some links to the technology shortly, but basically Bluegrass provides a sort cartoon-ish world that employees can use to explore and collaborate. Individuals move through a lush, landscape and interact with other avatars. Avatars give off “bubble” of information that provide an excuse for incidental interactions, says researcher Li-Te Cheng.
• Team building games can be fun and form an important connection between coworkers. Normally, that’s done at costly off-site meetings. Jason Ellis and crew are hoping to enable employees to do that online by providing different team building exercises for teams in SecondLife.
I think what all of these projects have in common beside the raw technology is that the work environment should be made to be a bit more fun. Games, online interactions, and the like are parts of “playing” with one another that leads to more effective teams. I think it’s an interesting idea. What do you think?

IBM just announced and demoed new advanced group collaboration and enterprise telephony capabilities for SameTime here at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando. The two will be delivered as new SameTime releases, SameTime for Unified Telephony and SameTime for Advanced, due out later this year.

SameTime for Advanced extends the group collaboration capabilities of SameTime, adding persistent chat and screen sharing. SameTime for Unified Telephony will help reduce the cost of supporting and maintaining mixed PBX environments by providing a common interface to all real-time collaboration within the SameTime client. While this won’t enable users to access some advanced features specific to a given PBX, they will be able to access 80% of the core features that remain common across most PBXs, Bruce Morse, IBM Lotus’s vice president of unified communications, told me after the keynote.

More specifically, SameTime for Unified Telephony lets users see the presence status of a telephone user whether they’re on an IP telephony system or an analog system. Incoming calls are announced through the sort of pop-up “toasts” that you would see in other softphones.

But SameTime for Unified Telephony is more than just placing calls from your desktop. As an avid IM user, it’s always annoyed me that I had to change my voicemail greeting by going through a long series of voice prompts on my phone or even to separate Web interface on my PC. Voice rules should change when my IM status changes. If my IM status says I’m in a meeting then in any sort of real unified communications platform the rules for processing incoming calls should change to being in a meeting. If I step away from my desk and my IM presence switches to away mode then that should have a similar effect on my phone system.

With SameTime for Unified Telephony you get just that sort of capability. Users are given a wizard engine that allows them to build find me-follow me rules for finding the best way to reach you based on system and status. These are in effect whether the individual is online or offline. A rule might say when “My status is set to ‘away’ then forward my calls to my cell.” Since status changes to offline are automatic, those calls will automatically be directed to your cell phone even if you forget to change your phone status.

Today, SameTime for Unified Telephony has been tested against several IP PBXs, including those from Avaya and Cisco, but it should work with any IP PBX conforming to SIP and other mainstream PBX standards. While those specifications will only give access to core capabilities on the switch, IBM may have the perfect opportunity to drink its own KoolAid. Use its own widget engine to create a widget for accessing advanced capabilities of each of these IP PBXs…an idea that Morse just loved.

Starting next week, I’m going to be on a two-week tour . (Don’t worry I won’t sing for you) taking in Orlando (20th and 21st) ; NJ, Norwalk, and Manhattan (22nd - 25th), Seattle (27th and 28th)  and the Valley(29th and 30). I’ll be chatting with CIOs about their collaboration strategies, meeting oodles of companies in the collaboration space, and praying for no snow as I head towards Newark (brrrr). I still have a few slots open so if you’re a vendor with a product that you want to pitch, an IT pro wanting to chat tech, or just looking to throw darts (that’s snowballs to you north easterners) drop me a line at dave@stanalytics.com and let’s hookup.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) might be in full throws this week, but some of the coolest devices may be found off the Net — blueprints and all. A burgeoning trend in open source hardware is putting up somedevices on the Web — from machines that make anything (including themselves) to cars — with the specs to make them yourself (See our list below). While still in its infancy, the trend could redefine hardware cost models much as its done for software. Read the rest of this entry »

IBM formally announced the deal today to acquire XIV, an Israeli grid storage startup. As we explained earlier in the week, XIV’s developed a storage solution that’s half the price of comparable Tier 1 solutions without sacrificing on the availability features and capabilities. As for performance, one IT manager I spoke with who had the technology in house, described XIV’s Nextra solution as “blazingly fast”.

The company has reportedly raised $3 million to date with net executive chairman Moshe Yanai owning 75% of the company. He will net $225 million in the deal and will become an IBM fellow, reports Globes.

But like I said yesterday, XIV still has to some scores to prove not the least of which is non-stop operation. The Nextra solution didn’t allow for in-line software upgrades a year ago - a necessary passport into the Tier 1 storage world.