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.

At EchoSign we're extremely pleased to be attending our third Office 2.0 conference. For us, the theme this year was spot on — the focus on Enterprise adoption. What a change from 2006, when Ismael's report back was that Office 2.0 was primarliy a solution for VSBs (very small businesses) — and not yet ready for large co. adoption. What a change 2 years make! We saw it at EchoSign, with early wins after Office 2.0 2006 with BT, GE, Rite-Aid, and a handful of others... and then saw the trend accelerate for real right after Office 2.0 2007, where the enterprise was clearly interested... to now where 30% of our customers are enterprise, growing with a bullet: TimeWarner, Qualcomm, Comcast, Alltel, XO, and on and on.

This dramatic change is fueled by two rapid evolutions of Office 2.0. The first, is while in 2006 Office 2.0 apps were not as robust as traditional apps, today they are actually more so. Your data is safer; downtime is painful, but relatively minimal; horizontally scaleable infrastructures and cloud computing eliminate storage and compute cost barriers; and Salesforce.com proved that web services, by being more configurable, can in fact be more powerful and thus better suited to the enterprise than a traditional app. A power Salesforce.com or EchoSign user can configure these apps to do magical things.

The second is economics. To put it simply, large enterprises get a smokin' deal with Office 2.0 apps. Now that they are robust, reliable, feature-rich and clever, large enterprises can take advantage of these apps and buy them at a small fraction of the price of old school competitors or a home-grown app. And since web apps are more and more configurable, enterprise customers can likely get them to do more or less what they want. For 10-20% of the cost. With far fewer headaches.

Again, cheers and a great topic. In just two years, Office 2.0 has morphed from a fringe idea used by VSBs and championed by this guy with the Frenchish accent whose name everyone mispronounced, to a game changer for hundreds of thousands companies and enterprises of every size. In another 2 years, nothing will be done the old way.