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Office 2.0: The 10-12 Year Journey

jasonlkn — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:26:01 GMT

I am probably not the only one out there wondering if there will be a 2009 Office 2.0 conference. Certainly, I could just ask Ismael instead of this post. If the event does not happen this year, it may be because of Intalio's explosive success. Or perhaps because last year was a little quieter, and less energy-filled, than 2007.

But upon reflection, it isn't because Office 2.0 is dead or over.

With Microsoft having recently bought "office.com" and finally preparing to launch its own, 100% web-based simplified version of its Office suite, one could argue the battle was won, much like Salesforce.com's battle for "no software" clearly is over (hence, their need to shift to a cloud paradigm, since the world pretty much agrees SaaS is fine for most enterprises and businesses).

In fact, thinking about it, I would propose it's about a 10-12 year journey. It seems to me there are two ways technology and software experience paradigm shifts. The first is to create a new category or experience that did not exist before. When done right, this can explode. Look at Facebook or Twitter's or YouTube's growth in just a few years.

Office 2.0 however is not about doing something never possible before. Even its most exciting elements, collaboration and visibility, exist in on-premise solutions in one form or another. Rather, it's about making your core business applications 10x more useful than before, with the web as the vehicle to do so.

Those paradigm shifts, from one way of doing something, to a new way (vs. a brand new segment) seem to take about 10-12 years. Take a look at digital photography for example. The switch took over 10 years to go mainsteam. In the beginning, analog film was hardly broken. But now, it's somewhere between a joke and the refuge of an extremely small number of art photographers.

Looking back at Office 2.0 circa the end of 2005, it was defined by Ismael in a very narrow fashion, as a sort of Network Computer 2.0 used to run core businesses applications entirely on the web. A nichey concept at the time. Today, that idea has become mainstream and even so obvious to not even to be a distinct concept.

Penetration, however, remains similar to where digital photography was around 2001. We are 30-40% along this journey and road. Whether there is an Office 2.0 conference this year or not (in its past form), I'd challenge us all to rethink how we can collaborate together on its next phase, from mainstream to ubiquity.

Office 2.0 and Subaru

jasonlkn — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:08:38 GMT

Amidst the unprecedentedly horrible news in the auto industry today (GM down 49% in January), Subaru announced its U.S. sales were up for a second month in a row, up 8% in January.

I am hearing similar stories from my peers in SaaS and Office 2.0 who are "Subaru-like". A number of them have had record Q4s and strong Januarys. At EchoSign digital signature, were were up 250% YoY in January, for example.

No business is immune to the recession, but certain Office 2.0 players will outperform due to the "Subaru-effect":

* Unique functionality that people want to buy even now (for Subaru, the hot new Forester which doubled, more than making up for the old models, which withered)

* Instantly cost-effective with no need for ROI calculators (for Subaru, maintaining affordable financing options, for Office 2.0, cheap pay-as-you-go)

* Growing a small base in a large market (Subaru isn't Toyota - it hasn't maxxed out its market share, nor have almost any Office 2.0 start-ups).

To be clear, Office 2.0 isn't immune to this dramatic downturn. But services (such as our own EchoSign digital signature solution) that provide clear ROI, minimal risk, and which play in large markets can continue to grow and thrive.

Desktop as a Service Seeks a Market

dhdeans — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 03:02:03 GMT

There's a new term in the managed services space -- Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and it's an obvious extension of the SaaS model. Desktone is a company that provides DaaS capabilities to service providers. Its customers, according to CEO Harry Ruda, currently include Verizon and Softbank Telecom.

Ruda characterizes DaaS as a service whereby users obtain their computing services through a remote connection over a network. The physical compute power, if you will, is delivered through a service provider and paid for on some usage basis.

In other words, users can access operating system and applications through a completely hosted system, and the service provider would be responsible at the back-end for storing data, upgrading applications, updating virus protection, among other activities.

Computing Power of a Utility
It relies on the whole concept of utility computing, in which compute power is delivered the same way electricity is -- when you want it in a metered fashion. DaaS proponents even promise that their service, like electricity, is instant-on, because there's no booting of an operating system.

I'm skeptical about a technology that even its proponents admit doesn't work well over wireless connections, when you consider that laptops now outsell desktops because of their ability to work even when users are disconnected.

However, proponents insist that by handing management of PC resources over to a service provider, companies of almost any size can cut maintenance and technical support costs, as well as increase security because the service provider can focus more on patches and virus protection.

Another pioneer in this new category, MokaFive offers a DaaS subscription service for $100 per user per year that uses a virtual machine, which they describe as "centrally managed but locally executed."

That means end-users can choose from among any number of devices -- laptops, Macintoshes, smartphones, tablets -- and have corporate data protected, but can still use their chosen device for other applications or personal information.

Evolution is Easier than a Revolution
The arguments and variations of DaaS go on and on. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the DaaS model may be the fact that it requires extensive re-thinking of one's infrastructure -- either by replacing desktop computers with disk-less computers or significantly upgrading the network bandwidth, or both.

In contrast to DaaS, most of the current "fill-in-the-blank" as a Service models have been tried and proven, because they're a logical evolution from existing operational models. My skepticism remains intact.

Source: Business Technology Roundtable

The Role of Office 2.0 in a Global Recession

jasonlkn — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:44:18 GMT

It is an understatement to say how rapidly things have changed in the global economy in the past 60 days. In the last post on the blog, we discussed the impact of AIG and Lehman on the enterprise buyers. Now, those seem like the good old days, with even Google now having lost confidence in its ability to execute in the short term.

But the global recession will actually truly and finally focus the role of Office 2.0 technologies. An early thesis was that the value proposition around Office 2.0 was a combination of (1) free and/or dirt cheap and (2) collaboration. Free actually is harder to give away in a down market. The reason being that any product, even free, requires an investment to understand a new business process, and a new product. When businesses of all size are struggling to make their plans, there isn't much incentive to experiment, and free isn't enough to make up for any perceived distraction from protecting the core business.

Collaboration per se, while core to the Office 2.0 thesis, loses a huge portion of its perceived value in a downturn. Much of the boom in SaaS, Office 2.0 and webservices in 2007 and 1h '08 was around improving efficiencies in scaling organizations. When organizations instead shrink, communication is probably actually even more important -- but investment in communication whose ROI is tied to faciliatating growth is essentially dead.

So where does that leave Office 2.0? In an extremely interesting place that was almost unthinkable in 2006 (where many saw it almost as a joke or a hobby for webheads). Office 2.0 in Q4 '08 and 2009 is and will be about (x) increasing and (y) protecting revenue. That is the only place money, and effort, will be spent. We're seeing this firsthand at EchoSign, where paid customers are accelerating -- not to bring order to their business processes (the 2007/1H '08 theme), but rather, to protect revenue, to close that ever-rarer beast, the ready-to-buy customer, with an electronic signature before they change their mind. I would expect our friends at Freshbooks for example are seeing a similar trend.

Forget about cost savings from Office 2.0. Instead, the Office 2.0 that leaders have revenue-centric ROI that can be measured instantly, or in days, will thrive.

Office 2.0 and the Implosion of Lehman, AIG ... and the Enterprise Buyer

jasonlkn — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:08:57 GMT

This year's theme of taking Office 2.0 into the enterprise was a good and timely once with terrific speakers and case studies. However, I wonder if the theme will be as on point in 2009. With HP laying off 25,000+, Dell and others forecasting large IT cutbacks, and the implosion of the largest buyers of IT software, financial services ... I would posit the hope for Office 2.0 2009 is the SMB. With the VSB the target of 2006; the early adopters for 2007; and the enterprise for 2008, hopefully 2009 will be the time for the traditional laggards, the overworked and underresourced SMBs, to adopt Office 2.0 more rapidly. I believe we are seeing a very rapid and fundamental shift in Enterprise 2.0 buying habits from "bring it inhouse now, it's dirt cheap and great and works now not later" to more traditional ROI analyses with much longer sales cycle and cost justifications. Combined with IT spend freezes spreading across companies as I type, the enterprise boost for Office 2.0 may prove to be just that -- a boost but not the long term driver of adoption and change.

Document 2.0 followup discussion

fragnet — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:31:10 GMT

During the panel, a number of very interesting questions were raised. where does my document end up in the cloud? Can I trust the infrastructure to hold it?

Among the topics for discussion that I believe we only scratched the surface, were:

Document 2.0 and legal / preservation constraints

Document 2.0 and Information Overload

Enterprise adoption of Document 2.0 and barriers

Technology enablers and infrastructure for Document 2.0

If there is interest, we could continue the discussion here, possibly on the Office 2.0 panel page. Please reply on this message (unless we can use some kind of voting capability?) to let me know.

- Francois

Exchanging Contact Information

ghalimi — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:29:56 GMT

One of the many processes we would like to improve for next year's Office 2.0 Conference is the exchange of contact information among participants. We're trying to make it paper-less, without requiring any custom software to be installed on the mobile devices used by attendees. After looking at many different options, we believe that 2D code scanning is the best one. Here is the scenario:

A 2D barcode (DataMatrix Code, EZcode, QR Code, or similar) is printed on all attendee badges. Attendee A and Attendee B are both registered on the office20.com community website. Their respective profiles contains all the information usually found in a vcard. Attendee A wants to get Attendee B's contact information. Attendee A takes a picture of Attendee B's badge with her camera phone, and sends it as an email attachment to id@office20.com. A reply email is automatically sent back to Attendee A with Attendee B's vcard. Attendee A can also log on to the office20.com community site and download all her vcards at a later date.

In order to implement such as scenarion, we're currently looking at services like ScanLife and scanR. If you know others that we should take a look at, let us know.

Taking Office 2.0 to the Next Level

ghalimi — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:38:11 GMT

The Office 2.0 Conference 2008 is over now, and we've received a lot of feedback. Overall, the conference was a great success, and its content has significantly improved from last year. Yet many attendees pointed out that putting the show together in less than two months is making it very difficult for a lot of people to participate, either as attendees or sponsors. As a result, we've decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition.

The location remains the same, dates are set to September 21-23, 2009 (Monday through Wednesday), registration is open ($1,495 until December 31st, 2008), and we will keep our tradition of giving away a mobile device to every paying attendee. Also, we have made some changes to our sponsorship packages in order to simplify things, and make sure that early-stage companies get proper representation. Next year's theme is "The Global Office" and our goal is to gather one representative from as many Global 500 firms, national governments, and top 100 universities as possible.

This year, we got 500 registrations, 450 of which happened once the conference's website was released, less than a month before the event took place. For next year, the website is already online, more than a year before the opening keynote, so we expect to sell out quite early. As a result, we will reduce the number of press passes down to 50, and the number of free guest passes down to zero, so make sure to register early if you want to guarantee your spot at the event (the hotel cannot accomodate more than 750 people). The same is true for sponsors. We look forward to meeting you again in San Francisco next year.

For reference purposes, the video recordings for all 2008 sessions are now available from the agenda.

Update: GE (#12 on Fortune's Global 500 list) just confirmed that they will come back next year.

Veodia Videos Available

IzziBarker — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:08:07 GMT

Office 2.0 has been a whirlwind of great sessions, conversations, and viewpoints. Even though the conference is over, the conversations are going strong — you can continue to share your experiences and insights of Office 2.0 by showcasing the video recordings of the sessions on your blogs, wikis, and web pages. Veodia has added the code to embed the videos and player to each session document of the conference's agenda. Feel free to use the code — and please credit Veodia — to keep the conversation going!

Going 100% SaaS

ddruker — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:36:46 GMT

I enjoyed the 100% SaaS session yesterday, but have to say that I felt a bit unfulfilled in the end. We all had lots of fun with the preparation for the panel. Doug Harr's view that 100% SaaS means that your whole IT infrastructure simplifies down to a wireless router in your communications closet is certainly a provocative one.

We had lots of spirited discussion on what we saw as the boundaries (none of us think 100% SaaS is truly realistic today, particularly when you think about desktop software, personal productivity, telephony, file sharing, data warehousing, etc.), but all of us are seeing more and more companies, including our own firms, at 80% or 90% SaaS, and we all are getting tremendous benefits from this.

The questions from the audience took us more into the current state of SaaS than into what we think the future looks like, and what we know the industry needs to do to move the needle more and more toward 100%.

Here is some additional coverage:

I've got some deeper thoughts on my SaaS 2.0 blog.
Gadi Shamia has a summary of the panel and his thoughts on his Ala 360 blog.
Ben Kepes also covered the panel in his diversity.net blog.

Going 100% SaaS — take aways

gadishamia@yahoo.com — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:10:27 GMT

Yesterday, I moderated a panel titled “Going 100% SaaS” during the Office 2.0 Conference. There is a full video, so if you have 40 minutes to spare, you can see it all. It was also covered in Ben Kepes' blog. The panelists were 3 SaaS vendors (Dan Druker from Intacct, Rob Holl from Adaptive Planning, and Jeff Schultz from Bill.com), and one near 100% SaaS customer, Doug Harr from Ingres. Although we didn’t get to talk much about the future of SaaS, several interesting takeaways came out of the event:

100% SaaS is real — Companies like Ingres made strategic decisions to become 100% SaaS, and they move programmatically toward that. If it was not for Exchange and Office, Ingres would be 100% in the cloud.
Going more SaaS has many cost advantages — First, it costs less than buying licenses. Doug compared his $140K/year investment in SFDC to $1.5M he spent on Siebel licenses only at his previous company. Second, it allows companies to flex costs based on the economic situation and to avoid shelfware.
SMB and technology companies first — It sounds like the first to adopt SaaS are young companies, technology companies, and SMBs. There are many department-driven sales as well.
The CIO needs to become a real business partner — both before the session and during the session we got to speak a lot about the changing role of the CIO. Now, when departments can make software decisions and the issues of deployment are removed, the CIO needs to become a business partner and help the business units to make product decisions and help integrate the relevant pieces to the overall business process. CIOs that will protect their turf and will try to control everything will find themselves out of the strategic decision loop.
SaaS empowers SMBs — SaaS allows small and mid size businesses to benefit from features that were once used only by large enterprises. With little implementation and monthly per user price point, everyone can get the best e-signature solution, or start managing projects more effectively. TakeEchoSign for example, British Telecom (BT) is using exactly the same tool to get 1,000s of sales contract signed a day as a limo service provider renting 3-4 limos a day, and they both realized the same exact benefit: getting agreements signed in an hour instead of a week.
Security — I was sure no one would ask the question, but it was asked… all vendors said that with SAS 70 and self-imposed standards, SaaS provides better security than a server you maintain in house. Intacct, for example, is hosted in an IBM data center guarded by armed guards and using retina scan for identification — very few customers will go that far to protect their data… Jeff mentioned that a security glitch for a normal company can be unpleasant, but for a SaaS company it can be a death sentence — something that motivates SaaS companies to be very carful.

As Ben noted, we didn’t get to speak much about the future of SaaS. The audience had enough questions about SaaS today that we were stuck in the present. If there is anything telling about this fact, it is that SaaS still has a long way to go before it is measured feature vs. feature, application vs. application when enterprises are shopping for new capabilities.

Cross published on a la 360.

Day one roundup — cross post from ReadWriteWeb

benkepes — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:59:04 GMT

I'm at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where day 1 has just concluded. As with all conferences, the most valuable parts have been the discussions outside of sessions. And I can tell you that the corridors have been humming here. The conference is a who's who of business-centric cloud computing — everyone here believes that the future will exist in the clouds.

Here are some of the sessions I've enjoyed today, including the Google keynote, Project Management 2.0, and Money 2.0 (with video embedded below)...

Google Keynote

Matthew Glotzbach (Google Enterprise) listed the ten things that he can do in the clouds today that he couldn't do a year ago. It was a very Google centric presentation — but nonetheless a good reminder of how far we've come in a short space of time. Matthew's list included:

Having access to everything on the go — iPhone
Being able to search through all my email — Gmail
Chatting with customers and partners — in any language — Matthew gave a very cool live demo of inline translation of chat!
Collaborating simply — Google Docs and Sites
Organising travels — TripIt (the only non Google product making the top 10)
Easily collecting data from co-workers and customers — Google Forms
Building a scalable business application on the cloud platform
Using online templates for docs, spreadsheets, and presentations
Running fast, secure and stable web apps — Chrome
Securely sharing video in apps with Youtube for Google Apps

There was lots of backchat on Twitter from attendees that it was very much a Google pitch, however it has to be said that if Google is at the forefront of cloud computing, then they have a right to crow about it.

Project Management 2.0

Fellow blogger Zoli Erdos moderated the panel. The panelists were:

Dean Carlson (Viewpath)
Andrew Filev (Wrike)
Bruce Henry (LiquidPlanner)
Mark Mader (Smartsheet.com)
Guy Shani (Clarizen)

It was interesting that there didn't seem to be a huge amount of differentiation in the offerings — they're all perhaps fighting for the same customers. Comments were raised around PM 2.0 bringing the end of siloed information. Participants claimed that no one is a project manager anymore — everyone is a manager, responsible for tasks. Differentiation between mass scale PM projects that need Gantt charts, top-down control, massive documentation, etc. However for 99% of PM work that isn't needed. New way of thinking about a federated PM model where users can work in whatever way is best for them, and behind the scene information is federated backwards and forwards between apps.

Project managers today spend their time battling with crappy software — Project Management 2.0 releases them to do real project management instead of being a project secretary. The main takeaway, and one which I concur with, is that no one player will replace Microsoft Project. Rather, there will be an ecosystem of varied flavours of PM app that all have a share of the market.

Money 2.0

I'm biased here, as I moderated this panel. However feedback from participants and attendees indicated that the panel was really rewarding. We were a little time-compressed as the previous session had run late. The participants were:

Aaron Forth (Mint.com)
Marc Hedlund (Wesabe)
Justin Kitch (Intuit)
Jeff Schultz (Bill.com)
Mike McDerment (FreshBooks)

It was hard moderating a panel that was so polarised between the consumer and business space, but notwithstanding that it went pretty well. The audience was a little jaded, but the participants appeared to enjoy themselves and said they got something out of it. It was great to be around the real players in this space. There was some excellent discussion around what the Money ecosystem will look like in a few years time — the value to be gained once connectedness is all pervasive.

Check out the video from the panel below.

And it's over

benkepes — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:44:20 GMT

Sitting in the last session of the conference — Ismael is going over the tools used to run the entire operation — 500 physical attendees and a couple of thousand virtual ones. All planned and arranged in a couple of months — it's been a whirlwind. Overall it's been great to be around a bunch of people who "get it" — understand the cloud and what it can bring to business going forwards.

If I had any criticism it would be that a lot of time was spent talking about where we are at — not so much time spent visioning the future. Obviously with a number of vendors present this isn't a surprising fact — but nonetheless it would have been great to have some visioning sessions that were vendor agnostic.

Anyway... thanks to all the attendees, thanks a bunch to Ismael and his team, and I look forward to seeing you all again next year.

Meeting without travelling

benkepes — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:00:39 GMT

A panel discussion that the Twitterverse is no doubt interested in — check out the Twitter cred of the participants:

Robert Scoble (Fast Company)
Guillaume Cohen (Veodia)
Gary Griffiths (LiteScape)
Loic Le Meur (Seesmic)
Alain Mowad (Polycom)

The panelists introduced themselves and their businesses/offerings. The panel ranges across the spectrum from super high quality Cisco Telepresence systems, down to Seesmic for low quality ad hoc solutions.

Loic Lemeur announced that Twhirl will include video within the next two weeks. He discussed the fact that video allows relationships to be formed around the world without actual presence — it brings people closer together.

Robert told of WalMart's ability to buy fabric internationally over video conferencing, since the quality is so high.

Cohen tells of the savings that video conferencing brings — gas, time, environmental, etc. People can work remotely easily — so long as the video integrates tightly with their existing workflow processes — people feel more comfortable giving feedback over video than "in the flesh." Veodia does all the hard work in the background, and serves up one button for users to push — delivering up the best quality that the connection available can give.

Mowad says that Polycom is much more focused on real time video sharing — gives examples of tele-medicine and tele-education.

Questions from the floor...

What are the coolest things the tools could have?

Someone who has video on 24hrs a day when she works remotely — a sense of intimacy when they're not there.
How do you create a technology that becomes so immersive that one feels that they're really there?
Video brings an experience as close as possible to real life.
Video enables Seesmic to run an international development team with real-time collaboration.

How can video-conferencing work when there are larger teams?

Remote-controlled monitors that move depending on who is talking!
There's a threshold beyond which video conferencing just doesn't work — 9 or 10 people perhaps?
There is a perception of presence — the host of offerings — audio, video, IM, etc. build up a feeling of intimacy that means that the group feel together — even if the camera is focusing on someone else at the time.

Discussion ensued about the fact that going forward, the ability to catalogue audio from a video stream is needed — allowing for searching and text string recognition.

All in all an interesting panel — I guess it's all about context and preference — I'm a text guy and that's my preference — others work in images.

Windows 98 @ Office 2.0

gadishamia@yahoo.com — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:46:05 GMT

Yesterday I witnessed a very odd thing: a legitimate Office 2.0 badge holder firing up Windows 98...Assuming Win 98 can go wireless it may be a proof point for the power of the cloud... I even have a picture to prove it...

Gadi Shamia