Social Networking is everywhere, we know that as the communities 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.
Having spend 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 on the board of advisors. 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 folks like EMC, Microsoft, SAP, and other ERP systems may already sit.
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 succesful deployment. The bigger sale is for those worrysome CIOs is preventing band and tribes of networks and downloadable blogs, networks, and systems from being deployed in a disparate and spread out fashion. 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.
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.
[Disclosure, Cisco, SAP, EMC are clients of my employer, PodTech Network. I'm on the Board of Adivisors for ConnectBeam.]
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