Built on top of their Lucid Works Solr distribution and extended using a range of additional Apache projects (including the Mahout "Machine Learning" engine), this platform allows beta-approved customers to build Cloud-based sandboxes to test their data sources to a satisfactory level of accuracy, without building up the necessary architecture in-house. 

Where this gets interesting is Lucid's reference to "Dark Data" -- their term for unstructured data -- and their acknowledgement that the vast majority of data retained within organizations is such dark matter. Much in the same way that IBM positioned the purchase of Vivisimo to perform a quality control or curation role as an entry point for unstructured data into a Big Data system, Lucid attempts the same with their LucidWorks Solr/Lucene distribution. Machine learning via Mahout adds the potential for some classification/categorization functionalities to be built into this curation process.  All caveats about machine learning still apply here.

As we mentioned last time, sandboxing is where many -- if not most -- customers are right now in their Big Data journey. Whether Lucid's beta program is suitable for these experiments will depend heavily upon your available skill sets to utilize the toolset.

Probably the best primer on that subject -- how the internet works the way it does -- is John Naughton's "A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet." Straightforward without being over-basic, it traces the history of the internet from ARPAnet, through NSFnet, to the internet that we are familiar with today. It might be over a decade since it was published, but it's still one I recommend to people interested in internet history.

Predicting the future often involves a good grasp on the past, and in that vein Naughton's recent column "Graphic designers are ruining the web" in the Observer newspaper brought back an old topic of web page weight to the fore. 

He cites a statistic that "[between] 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB." He goes go on to blame this on what he terms "graphic designers" (falling into that trap of conflating graphic design with web design). Naturally this brought on a bit of a backlash, not least from his own publication's tech team.

It's a good time to have this debate.   The real challenge here for digital managers -- performance for the end-user -- is not going away.  I've just written an advisory briefing for our subscribers, "Address Emerging Threats to Website Performance," which reviews some web development trends that are increasingly having a negative effect upon website user experience.

While Naughton cites images as being the baddies, the real performance culprit lies to a great extent with the vast number of remote elements that go together to make up contemporary pages -- such as advertising and analytics calls. The performance of these elements is difficut to predict, yet all go together to produce the final page render time.

Add to that the increasing complexity and dependency placed upon JavaScript and the yawning gap between available broadband and mobile bandwidths, it must make digital professionals yearn for the days when all they did have to worry about in terms of site performance was image optimization!

As I point out in today's release, the key is to carefully balance web architectures with data architectures...

Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, you should remember that you have many, many more choices.

On the face of it, most such services appear similar. They usually provide:

• Space for storing files (free up to a limit and then for-pay based on tiers)
• Syncing files with your various devices so you can access them on the move

However, once you move beyond the "mine is bigger than yours" debate, you will notice there are subtle differences among these services.

At a high level, I see four categories of services here:

1. Consumer oriented: Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and SugarSync are really focused on end users and have built some differentiating features. Dropbox, for example even has a Linux client and SugarSync allows you to sync any folder on your desktop and not just the one dedicated folder that most other services mandate.
    
2. File shares with document creation: Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive fall in this category. They are still focused on end consumers but allow more than just file sharing and storage. With Drive, you can edit and create documents using Google Docs, while with SkyDrive, you can access Microsoft Office WebApps.
    
3. Enterprise Focused: This category includes services like Box, Huddle, Oxygen, Citrix ShareFile, Glasscubes, Skydox and many others. These really focus on the enterprise segment. Box (like most others in this category) for example, provides granular controls for administrators to maintain access control for files and directories.
    
4. File shares with light collaboration: This category includes tools such as Alfresco and eXo which have traditionally focused on other enterprise needs (Alfresco does Document Management while eXo is a Portal platform), but have now started offering a cloud service that has some bit of file sharing. You could also consider SharePoint Online / Office365 in this camp.  These tools, however, typically lack advanced capabilities, such as file sync across devices.

Doubtless some of these services could be placed into multiple categories, and some will eventually evolve to provide services focused on more than one category.

But if you are an enterprise evaluating these sort of services for your needs, remember to look beyond the hype. Our forthcoming Cloud File Share evaluation research will look at such issues more closely and provide detailed evaluations of these vendors. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback on these categories, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

On May 9, we'll be conducting a webinar that will answer those questions and shed light on:

• How you should think about cloud options for your technology solutions
• Creating a mobile strategy that actually improves, rather than hinders, the customer brand experience
• Why implementing social tools without a proper business strategy can lead to disastrous results

You can register for this free webinar here. 

This webinar will be a preview of many of the topics that we will be discussing in depth at this year's info360 conference. In NYC on June 12-14, we'll be presenting a number of sessions including:

Social Workplace Market Overview 2012

Keynote: Consumerization of IT

Acronym Soup: ECM, WCM, CMS, WEM, CEM, DAM Dissected

The Right Way to Select Enterprise Collaboration Technology

DAM (Digital Asset Management) 101

Understanding the Marketing Technologist Toolkit

How to Negotiate the Right Price for Enterprise Software

The Advance Rates to the conference are available until May 4. We look forward to seeing many of you in New York!

As broadcasters undertake these conversations, it is worth keeping in mind the lessons emerging from the other industries like banking, financial services, and telecom.

• Cloud requires new skills and newer approaches. Enterprises are quickly realizing that success in the cloud requires different focus areas and new skills. For instance, it puts new emphasis on application management. While cloud resources may be consumed on-demand, it is also necessary to turn the tap off when not needed - something that calls for a greater resource management and optimization techniques than before. The highly publicized outages of Amazon cloud services last year served as a wake up call for putting in place different Disaster Recovery strategies.


• Attractiveness of cloud economics is not a foregone conclusion. Aside from the technical considerations and analyzing how well the requirements can be met by the available cloud services, it is also worth taking a closer look at the cost-calculus. Pricing models prevalent in the cloud (e.g. per-user / month) look attractive for small to medium businesses, but for large enterprises, the per-user model is not necessarily cheaper. In my previous consulting work in the not too recent past for large global enterprises, when the capacity requirements are high, I have seen the scale tip in favor of building out their data centers over cloud providers. 


• Don't be surprised....but cloud models not fully mature yet. From a technical standpoint, in addition to the performance and security requirements, we examined the readiness of the cloud file sharing services (file sharing is a key requirement in broadcast) -- and the current state of the market is not very encouraging.


• Understand implications of higher OpEx for your business. The argument of capital avoidance in favor of operational expenses is also worth examining in light of your own situation. Depending on investment cycles, some companies prefer an upfront outlay instead of recurring expenses.

• Have realistic expectations to avoid disappointment. As a way for broadcasters to test the waters and ease into it, Al Kovalick identifies candidates for the cloud in the broadcast chain.  But setting the right expectations around what can be achieved initially is also very important. As many enterprises that have switched to Gmail have found, in the larger scheme of things the savings may represent just a drop in the ocean.

In sum, cloud or no-cloud, just deploying web tools and browser based applications can go a long way in improving the current state of collaboration for cross-functional teams distributed across geographies and spanning organizational boundaries.

In early 2010, Walmart acquired "VUDU," a high-definition video-on-demand technology company, and made it part of Walmart Entertainment. Using VUDU’s technology, Walmart is launching (on April 16th) a service for customers to access their personal DVD collection on multiple devices for a fee of $2 per DVD.

Here is how the process works: you take your DVDs to a Walmart store to get linked to your account. After that you can watch them on multiple devices (computers, game consoles, internet TVs, mobile phones). You’ll need an internet connection for video downloading or streaming. For $ 5 per DVD, you can get access to high definition versions as well. You’ll need a special player for viewing on iPads and iPhones. The DVD you take to the store is marked with a special ink (it still plays) to prevent it from being used twice. 

The technology for storing (in the cloud) and keeping track of user rights to content is based on the Ultraviolet product, which supports multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Walmart has tied up with five major studios whose titles will be available. Disney is not one of them, AS it supports a competing product called KeyChest for DRM. 

You can think of this as outsourcing to Walmart your content migration to the cloud. I did not mention content archiving because this is not Walmart’s first foray into online video. An earlier attempt in 2007 partnership with HP fizzled fairly quickly.

It remains to be seen how well this D2D service fares in a competitive environment against Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others - that will determine the long term future of continued access to online content as well. 

So, what are some of the interesting things in this D2D initiative from a content management perspective?

• Multi-channel delivery is the big trend in the video world. Media Asset Management solutions can play a big role in this as the keepers / aggregators of metadata, but it is not a current focus area for them. 
• Content is king but acquiring rights is a big hurdle. (e.g., Star Wars movies are not available.)
• Online technology alone won’t suffice -- business processes need to encompass online and offline worlds (e.g. DVD verification, rights agreements)
• The world is not flat and geography is paramount (D2D is presently available only in the US -- global rights issues are another Pandora’s box)

To that end, Google has won a handful of big deals, but in discussions with some larger early adopters, a hype cycle appears to be playing out:

1. Customer leadership gets excited about "Cloud"
2. They make a big splash by outsourcing key functionality to Google Apps
3. It turns out later that Google's approach doesn't always work well for the entire enterprise
4. Customer quietly dials back to core GMail offering, plus perhaps a few related Apps

This hasn't happened to every large Google Apps customer -- and other vendors frequently hype their wares too -- but it has repeated itself in several cases.

This hype cycle most recently played out with City of Los Angeles, who as it turns out received a $250k discount to help sway others that Google could sweep large enterprises. I missed some of the fall-out that transpired during the winter holidays, but the intrepid Mary Jander did not. Read her detailed exposé here.

Subscribers to our Enteprise Collaboration & Social vendor evalutions know that Google's critical early architectural assumptions have bequeathed Apps with a legacy of suitability for some small- and medium-sized business scenarios, but also made it less amenable to major enterprises.

To be sure, Google Apps could present a good fit for you, especially if you crave GMail. But don't just "go Google" in some quixotic attempt to cloudify your business or wipe your aging IT investments away in one swoop. Consider Google Apps like you would any other vendor's offering -- which means: test first, test broadly, and test competitively against other solutions. Let us know if we can help.

Consider that:

• Mobile has been a big driver of cloud
• Tablets (iPad in particular) have become increasingly prevalent within enterprises
• Enterprises are paying more attention to cloud and mobile

Since Box wants to become more enterprise-y, it has taken advantage of these trends, witnessed most recently by its announcement a new offering called OneCloud.

First a little techie lesson: each application on an iPad has its own file system -- a sort of a sandbox that other applications can't access. What this means is that if you create a document using iWork, it is stored in iWork's filesystem. If you wanted to edit it later with say Quickoffice or store it in Evernote, you couldn't do it (or let's say it's not trivial to do so). So there's no shared file system and nothing like a (Mac) Finder or (Windows) Explorer that allows you to navigate the file system on your device and open files as you'd like to. This kind of sandboxing has obvious limitations in the way iPad can be used productively.

Box released its OneCloud offering last week to try to solve this problem. It wants to become that shared file system that all other applications can access. For now, Box offers integration with 30 apps, albeit with a tighter integration among just four. Box calls the latter "premier apps," meaning you can do a bidirectional or as Box calls it, a round-trip integration between these apps and Box. You install these apps from within Box's iPad client. Think of it as a virtual operating system within iPad's iOS.

This is an interesting attempt, although certainly not the first one of its kind, despite what Box's PR would have you believe. For example, another cloud file sharing vendor, Oxygen also provides integration with 3rd-party apps, including with those that Box announced. Oxygen, in fact exposes itself as a WebDav folder, which basically means you can use it with pretty much any application.

At this point, Box's approach seems cleaner and more user-friendly. But it also means that for optimal benefit, you have to always be connected to the Web -- not a big deal for most but certainly a big deal for many countries (including India) where unlimited mobile data plans are either a farce or painfully expensive.

Many tools want to be that single repository for your enterprise. Alfresco attempted this with its own Cloud offering and integration with Dropbox to target mobile and iPad users. Now, even though Box still lacks quite a few essential features required to manage enterprise content, it has staked its claim to be a single repository of all your content with OneCloud. We will see how this latest attempt to consumerize enterprise systems pans out.

By the way, we will review Box, Oxygen (and a few other vendors) -- including how they differ in approach -- in our forthcoming Cloud File Sharing Tools evaluation stream.

There are clear advantages to the SaaS WCXM model: get rid of the extra IT support overhead and the burden of installation, maintenance, hardware support. In the same breath, SaaS WCXM vendors are failing to pervade the WCXM marketplace.

We’ve seen some M&A activity in this segment in the past year, but little meaningful product development.  For more details, consult our recently updated 2012 WCXM "Cross Check" marketplace analysis.

Now, if you're evaluating a cloud WCXM supplier (either SaaS, managed hosting, or true cloud), you might be thinking about things like data security risks. Security is important, but other requirements may emerge as equally salient. For example, your WCXM system will likely need to “talk” to other pieces of software in your enterprise ecosystem. At least from our experience, as integration requirements get more sophisticated, SaaS vendors increasingly fall short, particularly when it comes to the layer of experience management functionality in addition to good ol’ web content management.

But I'm also curious about your experience. Have you been evaluating or experimenting with cloud-based deployments of on-premise WCXM solutions? Or worked with a true SaaS WCXM system? I’d love to hear about your victories and challenges.

Yet I remain a bit puzzled as to why the service has gone live at all, since it's clearly far from complete, usable, or reliable. The fact that it took four weeks to build what is essentially a simple web app is all well and good (even though it repeatedly delivered error pages in my test). But the real value that in this sort of application should derive from quality of the information it delivers. Currently the quality of that information is dismal.

From what I can gather 250 firms submitted information on a total of 1500 services they could deliver to the public sector, and all of them have gotten duly listed on the site.

That was the first red flag, and indeed further investigation reveals that as of now not one of those services has been tested or certified in any way at all; the claims have just been taken as verbatim. Even so, Cloudstore allows you to circumvent thorough tendering processes through the Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC), yet cannnot guarantee whatsoever the quality or fit of the services it promotes. 

I found:

• Services offered that run on products that do not meet Government standards
• A dominance of the usual major IT suppliers, claiming to offer almost anything (regardless of actual expertise)
• Many well known and experienced government IT suppliers missing
• Currently no details on what future accreditation will actually mean or demand of a supplier or service

This last point in particular concerns me deeply. Surely it seems fair to assume that "accredited" services and suppliers will have had their organization vetted, that they are viable and solvent, that they have experienced and reliable products and support, and that they meet technical standards.  Buyers will also want a solid understanding of these criteria and how they were met. Surely this is the basic due diligence that any buyer has to undertake? Yet I found no indication here of what accredited status will mean, how it will be administered, and how it will be checked and maintained.

I had high hopes for this system. Perhaps it was just a really bad idea to launch it now, long before the real work has been done.  To my mind this store should not have gone live until all the services and suppliers had been thoroughly vetted and assessed. Expert reviews of the remaining suppliers and further research of the market to ensure that a wide array of viable options is actually represented (rather than just those that have volunteered themselves) also seems necessary.

Until that time, this has little more value than a search on Google or Craigslist, and comes with potentially more risk of those, since it intends to help you shortcut necessary selection steps.

I'm all for speeding up and removing unnecessary bureaucracy from the procurement process, which is actually a one focus area of our business; but to repeat, the web application itself is not the important thing here. You can label it "cloud" and get more buzz, but at the end of the day it's the quality and veracity of the information delivered that matters most.  That information is nowhere near ready for consumption right now.

The open source eXo portal platform  released their latest version 3.5 last week. eXo platform is a "portal-like" offering that we cover in our Portals and Content Integration report. It's based on the GateIn open source portal container that eXo co-developed with Red Hat JBoss.

You'll find a few new features in the latest release (e.g., a wiki module), an updated look and feel, as well as various functional improvements. However, as with so many vendors, the focus here is really on cloud and mobile.

First, mobile: eXo released mobile clients for Android and iOS devices. Fine.

The bigger story is around cloud. The new version of eXo supports multi-tenancy, and can be used by organizations to white-label as a service. eXo says they plan to offer their own cloud service later this year. Calling it User Experience Platform As a Service (UXPaaS), eXo will be offering it as "eXo Cloud Workspace" (currently in private beta). It's not clear yet if their partner JBoss will also provide that service or not. eXo could also end up competing with other vendors who chose to white-label it as their own service, which could get tricky for you the customer.

eXo claims to be the first "cloud ready" portal platform. That's only partially true because their cloud offering will not contain a full set of portal features. In the initial release, the cloud version only offers a subset, under the auspices of what it calls Social Intranet. That's not too bad, though, because it aggregates some useful services: a wiki, discussion forum, document libraries, and shared workspaces. You will also be able to do some development using eXo's web-based IDE. But the more advanced features of eXo's portal platform (such as web publishing) will not be available.

You may note a few similarities between what eXo has done and Alfresco's new release that I just blogged about (both of them, incidentally, are commercial open source platforms).

Both of their cloud offerings are expected to have similar features that include activity streams, dashboards, workspaces, document libraries, and a wiki. Both of them also follow a similar  membership model resembling that used by Yammer, based on your email domain. So for example, I can create a workspace based on adurga @ realstorygroup . com ID, and my colleagues can join that workspace.

The other interesting similarity comes in mobile offerings. Both have chosen to go with native apps and not HTML5-based web apps. They're concluding that for document- and collaboration-heavy scenarios, native still rules over web. Just remember that this strategy can run counter to enterprise bring-your-own-device policies.

While both vendors produce a different messaging, the products themselves contain overlapping features. So the lesson here is to look beyond the marketing hype and check out the real functionality (not to mention the vendor itself!). We will of course dig deeper to uncover the real customer experience, and provide more details in our reports and advisory papers.

The key features and implications for what Alfresco calls its "Cloud Connected Content Platform" are:

• The ability to publish content to external channels, such as YouTube, Facebook, SlideShare, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, you can only publish assets from Alfresco's document library to these channels. This is really different from say publishing a simpler web post to Facebook (unless of course you manage that post in Document Library).
  
  
• A new module to transfer files from Alfresco's repository to a file system.
  
  
• Replacing its Lucene-based internal search with a Solr-based alternative. Granted, Solr is based on Lucene, but now all the plumbing required to make Lucene work gets done by Solr and not Alfresco. This also means you will have to recreate your indexes and many services (such as blog and discussions) that used Lucene queries will now employ database queries. This should not have any impact on your applications themselves, but you should still test it carefully. You also can't use Solr if you employ the old AVM-based WCM or use Alfresco in multi-tenant mode. The latter prohibition is rather surprising given Alfresco's upcoming cloud service.
  
  
• Integration of Alfresco's in-house Activiti workflow engine in lieu of the incumbent JBPM. We have covered this before in our reports and it was only a matter if time before it happened. JBPM is still included in the base package for the time being but will remain disabled by default in new installations. I suspect it will slowly be deprecated over the next few versions. So this would be a good time to think of how you will migrate your workflows from JBPM to Activiti.
  
  
• A new app to access content from mobile devices. For now, Alfresco seems to have focused only on Apple's iOS and mainly on the iPad. This is probably a sensible prioritization because tablets (and in particular iPads) have a dominant share within enterprises. Alfresco is also working on an integration with DropBox, which would offer two key features: the ability to access Alfresco from all the devices that DropBox supports, as well as critical synchronization capabilities for things like document check-out, offline work, and multi-device sync.

There are various other changes too, but as you can probably make out, the big story seems to be around cloud. Alfresco plans to offer its cloud-based offering later this year, based on Version 4. Much of this is really new and by that I don't mean just in terms of technology. For example, their proposed integration with DropBox really tries to marry enterprise functionality with one that is consumer facing. We can't say how this will pan out in organizations but we'll keep watching.

Meanwhile, you should remain skeptical about anything that uses "Cloud" in any way and ask tough questions. Fortunately, there's help easily available. Check out this advisory paper: Are cloud-based file-sharing services too immature for the enterprise?

It's a question that many of our advisory customers have been asking us, so we decided to answer it in briefing format.

Cloud-based file-sharing services have obtained some traction, even among larger organizations, because of ease of provisioning and mobile access, as well as for exchanging files with external parties. At least five major providers now target enterprise customers for hosted file sharing: Box, Dropbox, Huddle, Oxygen, and ShareFile.

Just today in fact when talking with a major industrial manufacturer, the excitement and possibilities of working with such suppliers was tempered with concerns over their readiness and maturity to deal with real enterprise needs. To quote this prospective customer, "All these vendors tell us they work with big enterprises, but when we speak to them it feels like it's the first time a real enterprise has asked real enterprise questions of them..."

Certainly cloud providers are here to stay, and if employed in the right circumstances can bring real benefits, but it's still early days as our research paper details.

Yet despite the interest, one area I find few buyers investigate thoroughly enough is that of file encryption.  Presumably you make the assumption that if you are going to pay a third party service to manage your electronic files that they will do so in a safe and secure manner, and most times they will.

Managing data securely involves many things, but one element that suppliers make quite a song and dance about is the fact that they encrypt your documents/data, making it "100% secure." But things are not quite that simple, and you need to ask some more probing questions before taking that sort of claim at face value.

For example:

• Are my documents encrypted whilst "at rest" in your system?
• Are my documents encrypted whilst "in transit" to your system?

In most cases you'll find that documents are not encrypted whilst "at rest," and even where this gets presented an option, there are often sound technical reasons why any hosted or cloud service would rather not encrypt everything all the time, not least of which would be the impact on processing and delivery times of your data. In most cases documents only get encrypted whilst "in transit" -- in other words whilst they are passing through the internet to and from your premises.

You may also want to ask who has access to the keys to encrypt your documents. Is it just you or does the service provider also have access to the keys? That will likely start up a whole new conversation with some surprises, not all of which may be pleasant.

It doesn't matter whether you are considering contracting with an industry Goliath like EMC, Amazon, or IBM, or new upstart like Box, Huddle, or Oxygen. The fact is there are plenty of questions you will want to ask of any service provider before committing to any kind of contract; yet in our experience even simple questions like those above are often overlooked. 

Over the past few of years we have advised many organizations who are considering handing their corporate assets to a cloud-based service, and it's a trend that will surely grow in 2012. It is also one that as buyer advocates we worry about, for buyers themselves need to make the effort to dig deeper.  Suppliers are unlikely to be falling over themselves anytime soon to lift any fog of confusion that currently exists.

Not surprisingly, most architects have taken an intense interest in cloud-based computing, across both its public and private (and hybrid) incarnations. These same architects typically also participate in software selection decisions. Then here's what happens: architects immersed in planning cloud-based futures often get surprised to discover how poorly traditional software vendors fit into that world.

Among the unpleasant surprises that can emerge:

• Most off-the-shelf ("COTS") tools are not readily cloudable, or claim cloud-readiness but must be installed in a specific cloud environment (like Azure) and often cannot take advantage of some key cloud benefits, like elasticity and rapid provisioning of new instances
• Many SaaS-based offerings (increasingly favored by business units) do not actually employ cloud infrastructures -- not the end of the world, but requires probing the attendant consequences
• Some self-described "cloud-based" solutions are really just managed hosting services for traditional COTS packages -- in short, outsourcing your datacenter, and not much more (sometimes much less)

Architects looking to engage business stakeholders on the benefits of cloud need to understand that...

1. Non-technical people may have a very different idea about what "cloud" means
2. Vendors coming in to solve business problems may have similarly fuzzy (often conveniently fuzzy) notions

So it becomes all the more important for architects to remove any rose-colored glasses when looking at packaged software. There's a reason why software that's purpose-built for cloud deployments works better in that environment than toolsets struggling through a cloud retrofit. Let us know if we can help you sort it all out.

Telligent Systems, a vendor of social software to enterprises, announced that it has acquired San Francisco based Leverage Software. Leverage also is focused on selling social networking software for enterprises but follows a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Different enteprises have different preferences for running their software applications -- behind the firewall, on-demand, or some combination of both. Employee-facing functionality would seem to favor on-premise, but not always.  On-demand versions of software typically boast more frequent updates.  While on-premise versions might get a major overhaul only once a year (or every three years...), hosted versions tend get updated much more frequently. This can be useful in rapidly evolving sectors such as the social software field.

Not surprisingly, then, social software vendors follow a variety of approaches. For example, Broadvision offers only a SaaS version, OpenText Social Communities is available only as an on-premise solution, while Jive and Microsoft offer both SaaS and on-premise versions.  And so on.

With this small acquisition of Leverage, Telligent can tell investors and the market that it now offers an on-demand solution. Telligent says that Leverage has an iPhone app for social functionality as well, so the mobile box gets checked. Finally, both Telligent and Leverage products are built off the Microsoft tech stack, which might bode well for future integration.  Analysts have taken note and are gushing over all the buzzwords.

For you the customer, the reality will not likely be so rosy. New features from acquired vendors appear in marketing brochures long before they appear on your screen. Telligent has acquired a revenue stream, but now must add a new product line to an already somewhat unweildy set of incumbent offerings.  Also, it's not easy to operate SaaS and traditional delivery models in tandem.  I'm not worried about the vendor here; I'm concerned about you the customer.  Don't trust the initial "roadmaps" that get marched out. 

The enterprise social software suites marketplace is relatively young and we can expect to see more M&A activity in the coming years as larger and mid-sized vendors try to cherry-pick oppotunities. We'll keep looking out for your interests...

This is our sixth year in a row doing this humbling exercise. If you'd like to see how we've done previously, you can view past predictions here: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Here's our 2012 technology predictions:

1. Big data meets web marketing
Digital marketing systems -- from analytics, to adaptive personalization, to social media monitoring platforms -- generate huge amounts of data. The ability to extract and leverage meaningful nuggets from these vast stores of information represents a persistent but increasingly important challenge for marketing specialists. 2012 will see specialist (typically SaaS...see below) vendors pull away from the pack of integrated WCM suites and other adjacent technologies that implement e-marketing functionality as a simple, add-on service.



2. Enterprise search marketplace opens up...again
The major vendors in this space are undergoing substantial transformation: FAST is getting sucked into the SharePoint vortex; Autonomy is facing an unclear future under HP; and Endeca remains fitful and distracted. Look for upstart vendors to fill the void as they did earlier this decade when the market was more open. In particular, look for specific applications based on the open source platform, Lucene.



3. Social services get called on the carpet in SharePoint
SharePoint has seen stratospheric, often viral growth in enterprises around the world. Licensees are beginning to discover, however, that its lack of contemporary social networking services and polished collaboration applications are limiting its effectiveness and driving business units to self-provision other tools. 2012 will see the rise of a variety of SharePoint-specific, supplementary offerings, from new and existing vendors alike.



4. CRM and CMS on a collision course
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) have long been central pieces in the digital marketing toolkit; however the lines between these two systems will continue to blur in 2012. More and more, marketers want to set content and interaction experiences based on customer interaction, so CMS vendors continue to add CRM features, while CRM systems add more web publishing features. In the long run, we think integration is more promising than convergence; in the meantime, expect some messy collisions.

5. Death of the intranet as we know it
Intranet managers still have a key role to play in enterprise collaboration and information management, but employee expectations and the role of the intranet have changed dramatically over the past few years. Savvy companies will focus on the broader employee experience in a mobile, "digital workplace." 2012 will see a significant reallocation of resources from corporate communications to more business-oriented functionality.

6. BPM springs back to life
Process still matters, and workflow applications continue to dominate enterprise document and records management efforts. 2012 will see a renewed interest in good, old-fashioned BPM, as enterprises seek to orchestrate activities across organizational boundaries, including partner and supplier systems.

7. Rich media goes mainstream in the enterprise
Video is no longer an emerging technology for the enterprise. New social initiatives in particular will bring more media into internal systems. To be sure, a gulf remains in production quality (between professional and amateur), and employees will continue to look for increasingly sophisticated capabilities as both media producers and consumers. In 2012, enterprises will respond with specific, rich-media initiatives.

8. Big data blows into the cloud
More and more information management systems are generating or leveraging "big data." Yet, many enterprises don't have the resources, capacity, or expertise to properly store and mine this data. Fortunately, "big data" characteristics (such as unpredictable data inflow rates and the need for elastic processing capacity) make it a natural fit for the cloud. As a result, data-rich applications -- such as social media monitoring -- will increasingly go to market with SaaS-only delivery models.

9. Pervasive mobile-only apps
2011's mantra could have been "mobile first." 2012 will see "mobile first and last," as enterprises develop mobile-only interfaces to certain internal applications without focusing any effort on traditional, web-based (desktop/laptop) UIs. Many of these mobile apps will consist of specialized mashups among existing systems. A key driver here is the inexorable rise of tablets. We'll also see interesting examples where enterprises will tweak business processes to leverage tablets (e.g., in-store tablet catalogs).

10. New job titles emerge
Major technical and operational changes are driving new roles -- often informal, hybrid roles -- within the enterprise. 2012 will see the formalization of some of these roles into broadly recognized job titles. Samples include:

• Marketing Technologist - to master the increasingly complex services around e-marketing at scale
• Social Media Monitor - to interpret, understand, learn from, and respond to the fire hose of relevant activity on public social networks
• Enterprise Community Facilitator - to support localized community managers and foster productive cross-silo interaction
• Enterprise Media Producer - to produce or edit high volumes of video for internal and external consumption
• Director or VP of Digital Assets / Digital Media Manager - formal DAM roles emerge to establish ownership -- not just of assets, but of the systems and metadata -- of DAM and MAM

11. Security fears rise: phones, tablets, portable drives, the cloud -- where is our content?
Nearly everyone is a mobile worker. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets means that employees are walking around with disk drives containing company information. A lost or stolen phone or tablet containing sensitive information will likely cause a backlash in enterprise security departments. We've already heard of some highly regulated enterprises banning enterprise access from employee phones. For many employees, 2012 will bring even more rules and regulations around how they can use their mobile devices and renewed enterprise interest in digital rights management applications.

12. Lines blur between commercial and open source technologies
In the WCM and portal marketplaces, major open source projects are "commercializing" fairly rapidly, while many (though certainly not all) commercial vendors are adopting more open development and support models. This means that in 2012, customers will see increasingly less distinction between commercial vendors and "commercial open source" suppliers. The bigger gulf -- though it remains largely one of licensing -- is emerging between commercially-oriented open source projects and community-oriented projects across the WCM and portal landscapes.

Here is RSG's Alan Pelz-Sharpe to shed some more light on our predictions:

1) "Bring Your Own Device" policies will push HTML5 adoption for mobile access to enterprise applications
This has definitely happened, although HTML5 adoption remains quite incomplete.

2) Content-rich customers will rebel against Web CMS marketing spins
The key phrase here is "content-rich." We've definitely seen some disappointment among high-volume publishers (e.g., media), who don't want e-marketing and other corollary services from their WCM vendor.

3) Microsoft will turn to partners to fix SharePoint shortcomings
Yep. It's an old story. As a SharePoint version ages, Redmond stops arguing that it's feature-complete and encourages customers to seek out supplementary tools from partners.

4) The top end of the Web CMS market will be redefined
This happened. OpenText/Vignette and IBM continue to fade. EMC gave up on Documentum Web Publisher, Oracle is effectively deprecating its UCM (neé Stellent) WCM in favor of its new FatWire acquisition, and the future of Interwoven TeamSite/LiveSite has gotten even dicier with HP's acquisition of Autonomy. The big boys, long fading, have almost disappeared, getting replaced by a bevy of more focused alternatives.

5) Intranet community managers will adopt public social functionality
We've definitely seen more of this, though it's still not pervasive.

6) SaaS vendors will try to separate from "The Cloud"
Nope, we were wrong. If anything the opposite: SaaS vendors have uniformly embraced fluffy Cloud terminology to ride that wave of hype. This was the case even among those SaaS players that don't actually employ Cloud-based technology.

7) Buyers will have a greater acceptance of newer standards
In some cases (CMIS, HTML5) yes, but in other cases (activitystrea.ms, OpenSocial) not so much, yet.

8) Case Management will become the leading application from high-end ECM vendors
Absolutely. Case management actually constitutes a family of applications relevant to many different types of organizations. It's where much of the non-SharePoint ECM action lies today.

9) Digital Asset Management vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities
This happened, though perhaps not as heavily as we predicted. It remains unclear whether traditional DAM players have the chops to compete effectively with more video-oriented vendors.

10) E-mail will remain the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system
Alas, we were correct. Companies ditching e-mail remain very much the exception and not the rule.

11) Portal software will increasingly produce services for other portals
Hard to know exactly. Major enterprise software gets talked about more than implemented, but portals seem the opposite. Enterprises who have committed heavily to portal technology continue to invest in those platforms -- or perhaps more tellingly -- in the systems around those platforms. Yet more enterprises are getting comfortable with multiple portals, including "portal lite" applications.

12) Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations
This is an organic trend that's difficult to track, but we saw increasing evidence of it last year, as consultancies and integrators desperate for more talent continued to comb the ranks of enterprises for experienced specialists. There's no recession in information management technology right now...

By my count, we were about 9 out of 12, or 75%. Not bad, not awesome. About the same rate as previous years -- and a reasonable co-efficient to add to our 2012 predictions. Look for those new predictions from us in the next few days....

In recent years, the drumbeat has been for SaaS-based WCM vendors. By renaming themselves "cloud" vendors, the thought went, surely now they would sweep aside all those incumbent, fuddy-duddy, on-premise solutions. Recently Gartner declared a "big shift" towards cloud WCM for a vendor webinar.

Here's what I think: Not gonna happen.

Are SaaS-based solutions more popular than ten years ago? Yes. Have they reached liftoff in the marketplace? No. Let's look at three of the bigger players we evaluate in our Web CMS Report:

• Clickability: sold to a CDN vendor with venture investors taking a bath; future a bit uncertain
• CrownPeak: working on its first major UI overhaul in nearly ten years, and suffering from a meandering roadmap
• OmniUpdate: doing relatively well in the market, ironically by focusing intently on a very specific niche -- higher education in North America; other WCM vendors are also succeeding in higher ed

Meanwhile, many if not most traditional WCM vendors are doing quite well. Among mid-market and select open source projects, doubling or tripling their customer bases in recent years.

The more interesting development, I think, is the broader trend on public websites for outsourcing both development and hosting, as internal IT and development resources struggle to keep up with fast-moving technologies and marketing needs. Note that managed hosting for, say, Drupal or Sitecore is not the same thing as a native SaaS-based solution. But for many customers, it's a happy medium.

The majority of buyers often don't even consider the SaaS option for WCM. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of myths and red herrings surrounding the concept. On the other hand, I also understand when customers, particularly larger enterprises, look out over the WCM supplier landscape and conclude that SaaS vendors are not the strongest reeds in the pond right now...

It is an important question that we probably don't ask enough, and buyers might want to ask the same of ECM (Enterprise Content Management) suppliers. Yes, seriously...

Take for example EMC Documentum. Their motivation is driving their storage and cloud business. On the other hand Oracle with its newly named WebCenter Content product wants to drive its database and business application businesses. And IBM FileNet is focused on complex business process management and the associated consulting and support services.

Cliché maybe, and certainly I am oversimplifying here, but you don't have to scratch far below the surface to know that I am in principal correct.  They may all be ECM players at the high end of the market, but what got them there and keeps them there is different in each case.

Each time I return to researching for our product evaluations and advisory services  (currently focused on Search, ECM, and Cloud File Shares) I initially think "They all look the same as one another!"  And from a distance they do. They have been designed to do the same job as one another, and to sell in the same markets.  Marketing and messaging staff move between one similar supplier to another, and in time it can be hard to hear clearly through the noise.

But once you get your finger on what really drives each firm the differences start to reveal themselves. Full-blown ECM systems are complex and are typically made up of many interlocking modules, so identifying the differences in approach and their strengths and weaknesses, as we do in our product evaluations can take a lot of work.  But even seemingly simple services such as Cloud-based file sharing systems like Huddle, Box.Net, and Dropbox have more differences, flat contradictions, and individual DNA than a casual glance might suggest. Buyers who would take plenty of time to understand the nuts, bolts, and DNA of an ECM system are well advised to do the same when considering seemingly low cost, low stress Cloud services. Otherwise you could be in for some nasty surprises.

The side of the story that's glossed over on the show, though, is why someone abandoned the storage units in the first place. Were they unable to pay their storage rental bills due to hardship? forgetfullness? death? Surely, the original owners never expected a stranger to buy their posessions (prized or otherwise), let alone for it to happen on a television show.

I couldn't help but think of the parallels between physical storage space and the seemlingly limitless digital space available in "the cloud." I'm sure most of us think that we'll be the only ones who will ever have access to our photos on Facebook, our contacts in LinkedIn, our e-mails in Gmail, our files in Dropbox or Box.net or Office 365.

Much attention has been paid the security of the cloud from hackers - and rightly so - but users of cloud storage providers should get clear agreements in place that clearly states what happens if for some reason we stop paying our storage bills. Who owns the content? Is the content transferable to another owner? Is it transferable to another system? Does the content ever get destroyed?

The producers of Storage Wars are not likely to be thinking of a digital version of the show; but on TV or not, I doubt any of us would want our content to simply go to the highest bidder.

Just a year ago, SharePoint was practically the sole contender in light document management scenarios; now the environment has changed substantially. With heavy investment funding, Box is rapidly positioning itself as a SharePoint contender, going so far as posting a billboard in Silicon Valley stating, "Box.net vs SharePoint -- Sharing should be simple. Challenge us..."

But is Box.net really a SharePoint killer? If not, what does its rise tell us about how enterprises are (and are not) utilizing SharePoint? I am a cheerleader for no one, but cloud-based simple file sharing services such as Box.Net will likely play an increasingly important role in major enterprises.  I'd also welcome hearing your thoughts -- particularly interested in your experiences using hosted file-sharing in larger enterprises.

Truth be told (and despite the hype), SharePoint 2010 isn't truly multi-tenant either. Though it's far ahead of its predecessor, the current version of SharePoint in O365 still has plenty of warts. For example, Microsoft announced a "new" feature of SharePoint Online in Business Connectivity Services (BCS).  Terrific!  The trouble is that BCS is a feature of SharePoint on-premise and Online is just catching up. 

During the keynote demo, Microsoft demonstrated BCS.  They showed a SharePoint Online application connected to SQL Azure that produced some nifty charts.  The demo got applause, but prompted Jeremy Thake from AvePoint to tweet: "Why use azure worker role to submit vote & not straight in #SharePoint list? 'coz we can!'"  Unfortunately, the real answer is that BCS only supports connecting to a web service (specifically a Windows Communication Foundation or WCF service).  As a result, this other web site (the Azure worker role) actually "shimmed" the SQL database with web services to enable the connection.

Beyond BCS, the story is quite uneven.  For features like Word, InfoPath and Excel Services, Microsoft has crafted a "value-added" subscription model (pay more, get more).  Other services, like managed metadata (a major feature of SharePoint 2010) are simply unavailable.  And, as I’ve mentioned, in the BCS case, Microsoft had to cripple the service to make it cloud compatible.  In the end, despite the new 2010 architecture, Microsoft was unable to effectively manipulate their service applications to truly understand multi-tenant environments; the services simply can't differentiate one tenant from another within the same farm (though if you have a private farm, the architecture works relatively well).

That said, no could argue anything other than SharePoint is poised to compete effectively with Google apps and other low-cost alternatives among individual professionals and small businesses.  Pure on-premise implementations were out of reach for the vast majority of small businesses and, certainly, individual professionals.  O365 falls into both the "it just works" and "it's good enough" categories of technology favored by SMB customers. 

Other so-called "SharePoint Killers" have been beating the cost, complexity or adoption drum (or all three) to differentiate themselves from the behemoth on-premise enterprise SharePoint product. Unfortunately, many of these products merely compete with SharePoint along one or two functional dimensions (like simple file sharing or light document management). However, their arguments hold less credibility in an O365 world, where the cost per user for enterprise-class e-mail (Exchange), internet-based collaboration (SharePoint) and real-time messaging (Lync) legitimately starts at $6 per month. Moreover, all of the services packaged in O365 are quite well integrated into the most widely adopted desktop productivity tool on the planet -- Office. 

So for the Davids of the SMB market, Goliath is calling and he's looking a bit more trim. For the larger enterprise market, SharePoint in the Cloud still has a ways to go....

1. A SaaS offering which may or may not employ cloud-based infrastructure
2. Managed hosting services, perhaps from a partner, which may or may not employ cloud-based infrastructure

Depending on your requirements, either of these options could constitute an improvement relative to an on-premise installation in your own datacenter.

Things get trickier, though, when you consider exploiting true cloud services like Amazon EC2.  As enterprises transition to more dynamic, personalized services, site owners are bumping up against the limits of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to address performance at scale.  Now consider for a moment the largest WCM vendors who would ostensibly power the world's busiest (and therefore most cloud-interested) public sites.  Those vendors by and large have not helped their customers exploit cloud services. 

To be sure, there are some technical challenges here, though I don't think they're insurmountable.  Also, many enterprises just don't want to extend to cloud-based infrastructure on principle, sometimes for very good reasons.

However, I believe the real problem -- the part that has vendors pausing on both public and private clouds -- is licensing models.  Unlike collaboration or document management tools, most WCM tool licensing is weighted heavily towards CPUs rather than seats.  Vendors who were already hiccuping on pricing models for virtualized internal deployments seem positively hogtied about cloud installations.

What should you do?  If you want to investigate cloud-based infrastructure for your increasingly dynamic WCM installation, press your vendor to come up with more value-based pricing, something that may expand with your success, but also contract if you shrink their footprint.  Right now, most licensing models have you paying for unused capacity.  Elasticity should go both ways. 

As you explore your alternatives, we're happy to help.