Enterprise 2.0 News

It seemed that nothing new could be invented in online task manager. Employees create tasks for themselves and for co-workers and then control their status. Everything is simple. But in practice, this classical scheme causes several problems:
1. Not all employees like the task management service for planning of their tasks (for example, many of them prefer notepad), and they use it just to make the boss happy
2. Users add a lot of tasks and then (for a long time) looking at this list and thinking what to start with ... and then just go to drink coffee
3. Manager looks at the long task-lists of his employees and doesn't understand how quickly his project proceed. In the best case he can evaluate the staff effectiveness by the number of completed tasks
The new startup Teamly solves these problems very simply . ***

Rackspace Cloud platfrom, which, due to affordable pricing and ease of administration, attracted a lot of customers from Amazon, has added Windows Cloud Server to it's pool of services. Previously, it was possible to create only Linux-instances. However, unlike Linux-servers, Rackspace's pricing for Windows-instances is not so attractive and is higher than at Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure. Minimal instance configuration (1 GB of memory, 40 GB storage and 30 Mb/s bandwidth) costs $0.08/hour (about $58/month). Amazon's small Windows-server 1.7Gb/140Gb (i.e. about 2 times higher) costs $ 0.12/hour. In addition, Windows-server at Rackspace can only be scaled up and there is no way to scale down. Much more interesting is Rackspace recent initiative to create open-source cloud platform Openstack. ***

The virtualization vendor Parallels has released the new version of its application hosting management platform Parallels Automation 5. This solution allows hosters and internet service providers to easily add the application hosting to their services and increase revenues from the existing customer base. Parallels Automation allows to automate all aspects of providing cloud services and applications - managing customer accounts, creating and managing application containers, invoicing, collecting payments, customer support. The new version allows service providers to add services based on MS Exchange Server 2010 and MS Office Communications Server. Besides, Parallels Automation supports MS Sharepoint and MS Dynamics CRM, as well as about 50 web-applications that can be found in the marketplace apsstandard.org. ***

Surprise! Jason Mittelstaedt, CMO at RightNow (the company that for a long time has been among leaders of the CRM industry) says that nobody wants to hear about CRM anymore, because they have heard it all and no longer believe the promises of CRM vendors. According to Jason, last year, the annual CRM Conference, which was held by Gartner and sponsored by RightNow - was the dead event and attracted minimal public interest. Vendors were showing the presentations that they have given seven years ago. Jason argues that CRM is a bit old hat, and it is time for a new generation of software that RightNow calls CX (Customer Experience). RightNow is not a pioneer in Customer Experience theme. Industry players have been talking about CEM (Customer Experience Management) already for a couple of years. So, what's the difference between CEM and CRM? ***

Today, Google has rolled out the new GMail version and it's major upgrade is the fully redesigned Google Contacts section. Now the main GMail menu consists of 3 main items: Mail, Contacts and Tasks. And while the Tasks module is still like a toy, the Google Contacts has been remaked into a grown-up contact manager with interface, similar to Gmail (which has already proved its usability). You can now assign tags to contacts, like to emails. The contact page now includes the large Notes field that is convenient to log the most important points in relationships with a person. You can also see all email conversations with this person. Besides now you can edit the contact data without switching to the edit mode (like before). But the most interesting - is not the external redesign. It turned out that Google Contacts has its own product manager - Benjamin Grol, and when he represented the new features, he noted that Google is thinking about turning Contacts into a better CRM solution. ***

Today Skype has filed an IPO registration statement and plans to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering. Along with the IPO application Skype has published some of the their business stats and plan of its further development. It turnes out that the company is doing quite well. During the first 6 months in 2010 Skype has earned $406 million, that is approximately 25% higher the previous year. Nevertheless, taking into account that the Skype has already more than 560 million registered users (it's more than Facebook), the company's management wants to earn at least ten times more. In addition, they are worried that almost 90% of Skipe's income comes from a single service - SkypeOut. Therefore, the major objective of attracting new investments is the development of new paid of business applications. ***

Jive Software and other Enterprise 2.0 software vendors should start to worry. Acquia - the company that rules the Drupal project - has released the free open-source solution for creating social intranet and extranet portals Drupal Commons. Of course, before now many companies also were using Drupal CMS to power internal and external portals. If you look at any Enterprise 2.0 systems rating, you will find Drupal among leaders fo the industry. But Drupal customization - is not so easy. And Drupal Commons - is an out-of-box solution for enterprise social networks. It provides profiles, dashboards and groups. Each group has a blog, forum, chat, wiki, document storage with version control, polls, calendar, RSS (from external sites). ***

Finally, SAP has officially launched its SaaS ERP system, SAP Business ByDesign, which will compete with NetSuite, Workday and other cloud ERP solutions. As you know, it's not a fresh product. It was released 3 years ago, but due to the scalability problems, its sales were stopped, and still the system was used by fewer than 100 companies worldwide. SAP Business ByDesign is designed for SMB (50-500 employees) and primarily for manufacturing and professional services industries. It's a single multitenant service to automate all business areas, including manufacturing, financials and sales. The updated version SAP Business ByDesign 2.5 provides support for mobile devices, integration with MS Excel, custom forms and user interface based on Silverlight. But its pricing will hardly cause a revolution in SaaS sphere. ***

Today, Google has announced that it stops further development of its revolutionary collaboration service Google Wave. The official reason - "service has not seen the user adoption we would have liked". Two months ago Google Wave was opened to public and included into Google Apps, but apparently, not too many people gave it a second chance after not successful beta-testing. Google Wave will continue to exist, but in the future it may be closed - i.e. the service will be in the same state, as Google Notebook (although still with new user registration). For those who use the service, Google plans to open source the code of the main modules (so that they could restore the basic functionality on its own servers) and provide tools for migrating data from Google Wave. And now about why this occurred with the service that was supposed to change the world: ***

As you know, Google services are popular both for business and for personal use. That is why, many users often have a need to switch from working to personal account (for example, to check mail). This required multiple logout/login procedures. But now this process will be much more easier - Google is rolling out multi-account sign-in that allows to switch between accounts using the top menu. You can activate this feature and add accounts on this page. However, switching between accounts will work not for all services - only for GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Sites, Google Voice, App Engine and Google Code. In addition, those who activate multi-account sign-in - would have to to give up the offline features in Gmail and Calendar. Recall that soon another related problem will be solved soon - some personal services (Google Reader, Blogger, Youtube ...) will become available in Google Apps accounts. ***