Archive for the 'Europe' Category
May 8, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
 In the three months since I posted an initial Review of Business ByDesign in the OnDemand Beat, there has been a flurry of announcements and activity relating to the roll out date of the product.
Larry Dignan and Dennis Howlett broke the news the week before the annual SAP Sapphire event, that the planned 2009 rollout of Business ByDesign was to be delayed by up to 18 months.
Vinnie Mirchandani and a few of the other Enterprise Irregulars had a chance to meet with SAP Co-CEO’s Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker at Sapphire 08 and found out that there were a couple of key reasons why SAP pulled back on the original planned release date.
These are valid reasons indeed to delay Business ByDesign’s launch and might in this case actually help lead to a better product.
But in the meantime one can be certain that Netsuite (with its recent OneWorld release) and other OnDemand ERP competitors wont sit still during the next 18 months and SAP will have quite a bit more work to do to gain market share and partner acceptance of Business ByDesign once released.
May 5, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
One of the factors that has so far hindered wider adoption of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service in the US is a lack of consistent and inexpensive broadband service throughout the entire US.
A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation ranks the US 15th (Yes that’s right 15th) globally for broadband adoption. The US ranked number 4 in 2001 so this drop off in adoption is very alarming considering that we are in the midst of a major fundamental change in enterprise computing with Cloud Computing and Software as a Service becoming more prevalent.
The ITIF broadband policy report measures 3 major factors; price, speed, and availability to come up with its rankings.
The report has numerous recommendations to improve US broadband adoption and also has case studies from countries that rank both above and below the US in terms of adoption.
Three recommendations that I think may have an impact in the short term if adopted include:
- Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation. (This will help immensely with making broadband less expensive for SMB customers and start-ups and give the incumbent Telco and Cable providers incentive to modernize their aging infrastructure)
- Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks. (This is critical as has been proven in Korea…more and more Enterprise 2.0 and Saas applications will be available via mobile devices)
- Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available. (For the US to be more competitive in the future, Broadband access has to be universal throughout the US. Satellite broadband is relatively expensive and Satellite service is a still a bit spotty)
Unfortunately many of the recommendations in the report are based on government policy and that policy is always up to change depending on who occupies state and federal government positions.
But alas, a government broadband policy is crucial as the higher broadband adoption rates in countries like Sweden (pdf) South Korea (pdf) and Japan (pdf) were achieved via strong and focused government broadband policies.
April 28, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
 Attentio; a Brussels, Belgium based market intelligence firm, launched it Blog tracking tool Trendpedia last week.
Trendpedia; even in its current Beta state, is very polished and is a nice alternative to its moribound competition.
I decided to give Trendpedia a whirl with a quick comparison of mentions of Web 2.0 versus Enterprise 2.0. This comparison should be very interesting at this point in light of the over saturated coverage in the Blogosphere last week over Forrester’s release of a report that they believe that the Enterprise 2.0 market is set to hockey stick into the 4.6 billion dollar range by 2013.
Plugging in Enterprise 2.0 versus Web 2.0 reveals that In the past 4 months articles or mentions of Web 2.0 have averaged a steady 300 a day while mentions and or articles related to Enterprise 2.0 averaged about 30 a day during the same time frame.
What is interesting about the chart above is that posts about Web 2.O actually spiked 63% over the normal 300 posts per day after the Forrester Enterprise 2.0 report while posts about Enterprise 2.O stayed the same.
This simple type of analysis is not truly statistically correct as many bloggers use the term Web 2.0 or Business Web 2.0 when writing about Enterprise 2.0 applications so the data is a bit skewed.
But taking the analysis one step further I compared FaceBook (still considered a more consumer orientated Social Media) versus LinkedIn (standard bearer for Enterprise 2.0 Social Media) and FaceBook was mentioned 92% of the time versus 8% for LinkedIn.
FaceBook has had 94,000 mentions in the past 4 months
While LinkedIn had 8000 posts mentioning it in the same 4 month period
So although there has been much discussion about the end of usage of the term Web 2.0 along with the demise of companies that focus exclusively on consumer Web 2.0, it appears that there is quite a bit of lag time in the Blogosphere in terms of reflecting these trends.
January 18, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
 The organizers of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at CeBIT in Hannover, Deutschland have billed it as the first European Enterprise 2.0 conference.
The summit will be a one day event held during the annual CeBIT trade show on Sunday 4 March 2008. Although this initial event will be modest compared to established Enterprise 2.0 events in the US, this would be a good venue to get up to speed on the key players and trends in Enterprise 2.0 in Western Europe.
The conference organizers are also utilizing social media for participation in the summit and have set up both Facebook and Xing discussion sites for the event.
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In the three months since I posted an initial Review of Business ByDesign in the OnDemand Beat, there has been a flurry of announcements and activity relating to the roll out date of the product.
