Enterprise 2.0 News

While the main competitors (Salesforce and Microsoft) entertain each other with the lawsuits, SugarCRM gradually strengthens its market position. Yesterday the company officially announced the release of SugarCRM 6. The major changes have affected the interface - it became much easier, more convenient and flexible. Users will be able to leave on screen only these elements that are used. The new convenient contextual search panel lets you view search results without leaving the current page, and the new recent pages panel makes navigation easier. It's interesting that the new interface is available only in payed (Professional and Enterprise) editions, but not in the free Community Edition. Because of this the company received another portion of critics, because it actively uses the "open-source" term for SugarCRM promotion. ***

The online project management and project collaboration service Zoho Projects becomes interesting for software companies, as it gets quite functional bug tracker. It allows you to add bugs, assign owners, collaborate on bugs and control their statuses. There are flexible options for email-notifications of various actions in the system. You can set the individual processes and rules for the automation of certain operations - for example, when issue status changed, it can automatically be assigned to another owner (for example, to tester) and change its priority. Unfortunately, the bug tracker is included only in the most expensive Zoho Projects subscription plan ($ 699 per year for 30 GB and unlimited number of users). But for these money you get the most featured online project management system on the market, which includes: project plan, calendar, tasks, file sharing, forum, chat, wiki, time tracker, billing, bug tracker, reports. In addition, Zoho Projects is seamlessly integrates with other Zoho services and Google Apps. ***

Though there is a big deal of debates around the "private cloud" term (if it's correct to call own data center, optimized with virtualization technology, a "cloud") - no one can deny that these things called "private cloud" are already selling well. The fact is that many companies are still not ready to move their IT infrastructures to public cloud platforms like Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure. But when they are told that "you can take the advantage of Cloud Computing (cost-efficiency, scalability) without any risk for data security, because the cloud will be locked in your office" - they like this. Obviously, private clouds are the necessary intermediate stage of transition companies to "real clouds" and cloud providers have to take a step back so that the process started. So it was with Microsoft. ***

As we have stated, mobile video calls are becoming the next big thing, and it seems, that Fring - is too small company to compete with such giants as Skype, Google and Apple in this market. Last week, Fring enabled making video calls on 3G for iPhone users. This new feature has become so popular that within a few hours after launch, Fring servers couldn't stand to load and Fring decided to temporarily disable support for Fring-to-Skype calls. In a few days Fring expanded its capacity, but Skype support has not been resumed. Today Fring blog has reported that Skype has blocked these calls and threatened to sue Fring. Quote from the blog: "They are afraid of open mobile communication. Cowards". ***

Almost a year ago GMail has become a full-fledged email-service for virtual businesses when it enabled users to send messages from GMail through any SMTP server, i.e. from any email-address (for example, now in your personal GMail inbox you can respond to customer emails and the customer will receive your answer from the corporate domain). However, one little issue prevented this feature of becoming usable - you could create only one signature for all email-accounts. And only a year later that issue was resolved. Now, you can create a separate signature for each email-account in GMail. Moreover, now you can format the signature in WYSIWYG-editor, add links and images to it. Sure that this feature will make Internet entrepreneurs happy. ***

Fring was the first video chat application on the iPhone. However, without frontal camera, it was not very helpful. But together with the front camera on iPhone, Apple introduced  it's own video chat program Facetime, that supported two-way video calls and immediately replaced Fring. Now Fring strikes back. Today, the strartup has launched the new iPhone app, which also supports two-way video calls, and in addition, has two major advantages over Facetime. First, it works via 3G (and Facetime - only via Wi-Fi), and second, it allows iPhone users to communicate with those who use Android and Nokia S40 smartphones, that run Fring (and Facetime supports video calls only between iPhones). However, the benefits of Facetime - are simplicity and iPhone native integration (to start a video call - you don't need to launch third-party program), and higher video quality. ***

Today, Zoho updated its Zoho Calendar and released it out of beta. And Zoho's chief evangelist, Raju Vegesna, called this service the best online calendar in the market. Given that he is a modest person, and Zoho never promoted its products with loud statements, perhaps, this is true. At least, this service is no worse than Google Calendar, simply because it's a complete clone of Google Calendar. Zoho Calendar allows to create multiple calendars, share them (with different access levels), set reminders (by email, RSS), send invitations, embed public calendars on your site / blog. It has a plugin for Outlook (for synchronization), mobile version and supports offline access with Google Gears. Calendars can be synchronized with external services via ICAL protocol. And of course, Zoho Calendar is tightly integrated to other Zoho services (CRM, Projects, Planner, Mail, Chat). ***

It sounds strange, but the IT director of Amazon (the leading cloud platfrom provider) Jennifer Boden is not a fan of cloud computing, like her boss, Jeff Bezos. She looks at the cloud carefully and rationally. That is why, the Amazon's IT infrastructure is still moved to AWS only partially. Moreover, the company did not move in this direction until last year when Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), which allows to separate an enterprise cloud from the public cloud, appeared. Nevertheless, the process is started, and now Jennifer is speaking at the IT event with the presentation (see above) about how Amazon moves to Cloud Computing. Note that it this concerns not the Amazon's online store but the in-house enterprise apps, like email, financial software, IT management, HRM, etc. ***

Following the release of the business-oriented tablet, Cisco has invaded another new for them Enterprise 2.0 sphere - today the company announced the availability of the cloud platform Cisco Hosted Collaboration. However, the platform is very specialized - it's intended only for hosting of Cisco's solutions: Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Telepresence, Cisco Unified Contact Center and Cisco Quad. And the hosted applications will be managed not by the customers themselves and not by Ciscom but by Cisco's partners. The platform will provide partners with a virtualized environment where they can quickly install multiple application instances on single server and offer them to multiple customers. Of course, this scheme will make Cisco's solution implementations less expensive and long-term, and will allow the partners to provide a subscription model. ***

It's not a secret that the iPad has no camera, because Steve Jobs hopes to collect another $1K from his loyal customers for this feature in next version. And most likely, he would succeed in the consumer market, but the enterprise market is now a big question. Because mobile videoconferencing - is the main advantage of such tablets over netbooks and smartphones for business. And because today Cisco introduced its tablet Cisco Cius, targeted directly at web-conferencing and business video applications. First of all - Cisco business apps: Webex, Quad, Cisco Telepresence. But since the device is running Android OS - it is open for solutions from any vendor. ***