Archive for the 'Enterprise 2.0' Category
July 3, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
 One of the companies I had a chance to visit with during the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference was the team from LiquidPlanner. LiquidPlanner is an On Demand Project Management alternative to Microsoft Project with a key differentiator.
LiquidPlanner allows project teams to collaborate, manage and schedule projects in one central location. Its feature set has all the tools you would expect from a project management suite such Gantt Charts, project scheduling and import/export into Microsoft Project.
The key differentiator in LiquidPlanner is a built in a Scheduling Engine that gives project teams a relative probability of completion of tasks and deliverables in a given time frame.
The scheduling engine is actually very intuitive and in my testing, helped make visible problems that can delay a project or deliverable date. LiquidPlanner has a schedule flow around feature that automatically adjusts project tasks when problems do occur thus helping to keep an entire project on scope.
The feature set of LiquidPlanner is rounded out nicely with social collaboration tools that are a bit more polished compared to some of the other On Demand project management tools.
LiquidPlanner is unique in that the company is Seattle based and self funded by Charles Seybold and co-founder Jason Carlson (both Expedia veterans). Charles Seybold (who also was on the Microsoft Project team) seems to have a great handle on the business model for LiquidPlanner and it is encouraging to see startups in the Enterprise 2.0 space forecasting revenue based on actual Business to Business sales transactions versus the advertising model of social media companies.
LiquidPlanner’s commercial offering was released on June 11th at Enterprise 2.0 and is free for teams up to 3 users and priced at $35 dollar per month (or $300 for an annual plan) for teams greater than 4 users with a very generous 50gb of online file storage.
June 26, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
Back in Arizona after attending Om Malik’s inaugural Structure 08 conference.
The conference had extremely high attendance (The attendance I am sure was boosted even further due to the Velocity conference and the inaugural CloudCamp San Francisco taking place in the Bay area the same week) and I ran into Dan Farber and Steve Gillmor in the press area so it also had a bit of star power.
This conference had good marketing free content for the most part and the only session that seemed out of context to me was the panel on Harnessing Explosive Growth. Structure 08 was focused on Cloud Computing for the Enterprise so it was a bit much to have to sit and listen to yet more consumer orientated stories from the likes of Facebook and Meebo. It was also a bit jarring to hear that companies like Ebay and Facebook have no plans to put SLA’s in place to guarantee uptime for their users. When I worked for an ASP 10 years ago, SLA’s were standard and were required of us from all of our Enterprise customers…thus again proving that Enterprises and consumer facing companies like Facebook are in a different world.
The best keynotes in my opinion were from Greg Papadopoulos; Sun’s CTO and Zach Nelson; Netsuites CEO. Greg’s mention that Sun supports Open Services amongst On Demand vendors lead to a few groans in the audience but I think he is right on in saying that the On Demand market wont grow substantially until customers are sure their data wont be held hostage by vendors. And Zach Nelson laid out a great overview of the elusive Middle Market…a huge potential customer base for On Demand vendors that SAP learned recently with Business ByDesign; is hard to design solution for and sell into.
Gigaom Omni Media has become a true new media company along the likes of Tech Crunch and Read Write Web and Om has a full time staff of writers and editors. Thus instead of me giving an overview of the remaining sessions please read Liz Gannes live coverage of the conference here and check out photos here.
June 19, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
Recent Coverage from Enterprise 2.0 Conference
Continuing Topix coverage and feedback from last weeks Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.
SMB’s slow to adopt Software as a Service
Wall Street journal article from Roger Cheng that indicates that Small Businesses have been slow to adopt Hosted software.
Churchill Club Session on adapting Web 2.0 in Enterprise
Kris Olson’s take on Charlene Li’s moderated Churchill Club Panel on adapting Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.
Will Value Added Solutions be the Software as a Service (Saas) winner
Joshua Greenbaum makes a compelling case that Value Added Software as a Service solutions will eventually prevail over pure play off premise Software as a Service. I naturally fully agree with Joshua as the business model for our Software as a Service solution at Applation is a Value Added SAAS solution and most of the CEO’s I know in the industry are tweaking their business models and architecture the same way.
June 13, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
Om Malik’s Structure08 conference is being held on June 25th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Structure08 was created to inform businesses so they can plan their future computing infrastructure needs. Attendees will have opportunities to review new technologies and determine the right choices based on industry best practices, case studies, ideas and startups.
In addition, the conference organizers just announced this past week that Google will hold the first public workshop on Google AppEngine at the Structure08 conference.
Om has great pull in the tech industry and he has gathered one of the deepest speaker lists I have seen for a conference in quite a while. As a matter of fact I am curious as to how the packed agenda will be squeezed into a one day conference.
The OnDemand Beat Blog has a special discount code for Structure08 for its readers. OnDemand Beat readers can sign up for Structure08 and receive a 10% discount on registration at http://structure08.eventbrite.com/?discount=ONDEMAND
If signing up via the Structure08 registration page use Discount Code ONDEMAND.
Finally don’t forget that CloudCamp will be held the evening prior to Structure08 at Microsoft’s San Francisco Office.
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