Enterprise Infrastructure Industry to up Business Offering, giving CIOs more Sleep

What’s happening
Just last week, I was present and documented how the emerging Web industry is being sought after by Enterprise IT companies, now this latest ploy is starting to flip over as Social Media features integrate into existing enterprise environments.

Social Networking is nearly present in all communities, we know that as the groups fragment by age group (and there will be more niches and fragmentations over time) that for the fores sable future, that logging on and getting instant access to existing and new friends is satisfying our human needs to connect with each other and belong. While there’s an excess of White Label Social Networking sites out there although Cisco decided to buy Five Across.

Benefits of new web tools emerging
Having spent most of my career in Enterprise IT type companies as a web professionals (four enterprise Intranets and two enterprise Extranets), I could easily make the conclusion that Cisco is entering the “Enterprise 2.0″ Market. Which when broken down into human terms suggests that they will deliver to their established customer base a pre-packaged suite of productivity tools for the Intranet and Extranet. The sell actually won’t be too difficult, as there’s productivity benefits according to commentary from the folks at ConnectBeam where I’m an Advisor. In his analysis, those that are well connected are actually highly productive. Looking forward, we all know the Internet is going to be the platform for the next TV, other rich media, and the connective tissue for networked gaming that these infrastructures are moving Cisco up the platform into the business space –Where I know that other ERP systems may already sit.

If you want to learn more, as fate would have it, yesterday James Durbin and I had a lengthy conversation around Social Networking Analysis, an emerging industry to measure the benefits of how these networks are impacting individual productivity, velocity, and information emerges. He recommended I subscribe to Network Weaving, Connectedness, Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness, and Centrality.

Getting ahead of the Enterprise Web “Islands”
For much of my career as an Enterprise Intranet Manager many of my projects were cleaning up all the disparate sources of rotting data, processes and finding tools that can seamlessly improve the user experience –it’s going to happen all over again. Enterprise IT Dennis McDonald, discusses how the risks of the open information age needs responsibility. None of this is really new to Dennis or I, we wrote a forward looking white paper on how Social Media “Web 2.0″ will hit the Enterprise Intranet over a year ago. It was our conclusion that IT departments need to get ahead of business groups that can deploy social media programs without the aid of IT, and I believe that Cisco and other companies are going to enable just that.

This morning, my discussion with Dennis revolved around on our predictions of why enterprise companies are headed this way, he emphasis on actual implementation as the real cruz over any turn-key solution:

“By beefing up their offerings in the collaboration and social networking space, they are following in the footsteps of Microsoft and IBM who have also been rolling out “Web 2.0 enabled” enterprise infrastructure components. The proof of the pudding will be the skills of their business partners, resellers, and integrators. Those are the people on the front line with customers who are still undecided about so much of what we in the enterprise 2.0 area have been talking about.” -Dennis McDonald

Intranet adoptions will be interesting
I can already imagine how the Information Architect community, who is just getting settled into their roles after years of proving their worth will be introduced to user created taxonomies, amorphous content structures, and the shifting and moving of data out of their control. I’m the moderator for the Intranet User Experience group, a working group that will have to deal with this.

Bigger Picture
I get it. It’s more than an Intranet play or an Extranet play. Enterprise tech companies that can successfully introduce a platform that’s tied to existing corporate directory and identity systems, provide security, handle the load, and deliver measurement and metrics have a strong chance for being a successful deployment. The bigger sale is to help those worrysome CIOs to get ahead of business groups who will downloadable blogs, networks, and systems from being deployed in a disparate. It’s also about looking at digital media, they make that clear from their push on the Human Network, you can hear from the CEO directly.

Delivered correctly, IT Infrastructure companies that move upward into employee productivity have a larger play in the game; productivity, reduction in future cost, lock-in to the enterprise Intranet, and hard statistics and measurement to employee communication and productivity, it’s much more than just MySpace for the Intranet.

Over the next few months, I’ll keep an eye on marketing collateral aimed at this market, let’s see how close my predictions are.

[Disclosure: Cisco is one of the 30 something clients of my employer, PodTech Network. I'm on the Advisory Board for ConnectBeam. These are my opinions only]

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 8:18 am and is filed under Enterprise Web, Extranet, IPTV, Intranet, Social Networking, Web Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.