The Enterprise is Dead ... Long Live the Enterprise

So, the enterprise is dead ... or it certainly seemed that way at the Dow Jones:Enterprise Ventures Conference yesterday at the Fairmont in San Jose. The audience was small, and the sessions lightly attended. It seems all the life is out of enterprise investments. That's not news, I guess. Our VC Advisory Council has been telling us for a while that enterprise sales cycles are just too long and wide adoption hard to come by.

I had been invited by Peter Rip to join a panel "Postcards from the Edge - Where Enterprise and Consumer Apps Intersect." My preparation, and the panel discussion itself, encouraged me to blog on a topic that's been on my mind for some while: the revitalization of enterprise IT.

While the investors are bearish on Enterprise software, I think it's about to change radically for two reasons:

• The integration techniques and technologies dubbed Web 2.0 -- SaaS, mashups, AJAX, identity metasystems -- will allow enterprises to refactor and integrate business processes -- inside and outside the firewall. See Dion Hinchcliffe's excellent post which observes that "... Web 2.0 is a global SOA." There's good precedent  for the notion that Consumer trends and technologies have often led the enterprise. Instant messaging wasn't simply adopted by enterprises, but it was adapte -- for use in call centers for example --  and the underlying SIP service is emerging as the base for VoIP.


• Office 2007. OK, OK, I can almost hear you saying " ... another Microsoft product pitch ... why am I wasting my time on this shill?" but hear me out. Here are a few of the unique elements in Office 2007 that will change the development proposition for IT:


• Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) -- a basic element of Windows -- is now in its third release. It's a basic element of Windows Server, and it has 400,000,000 Office users waiting to store data in it. However, WSS is not just a document store, but a fully customizanbe and programmable collaboration and portal environment.


• The Business Data Catalog (I mentioned this in an earlier post) will simplify access to (and integration between) existing systems, like SAP and Siebel. I described this in some detail in an earlier post "What happens when business data is liberated?"


• The Open XML formats in Office make documenst accessible without the application that created them. Documents are databases now.


• The Windows Workflow Foundation makes workflow a native feature of Windows. This is as useful for users creating ad hoc processes, as it is for developers building new formal processes.


• Excel is on the server, which offers up the power of the spreadsheet with both the control and reach of a server-side implementation.


• A range of development tools, from simple end user customization, through new tools for Business Professionals like Sharepoint Designer, to the Visual Studio Tools for Office for professional developers. Read Mike Fitzmaurice's blog for insights on this topic.

It's entirely possible  that I'm just nostalgic for a vital enterprise market, and maybe I have been drinking the company Kool-Aid.  I know my colleague Don Dodge is sceptical ... and wrong :-)

I'm betting that we'll see Web 2.0 techniques and Office 2007 rejuvenate both enterprise IT and the enterprise ISVcommunity. As an example, here are just afew of the ISV's doing some great work on Office 2007:

• Accruent -- Real Estate Lifecycle
• Colligo -- Offline Collaboration. I posted on Colligo once before
• Ascentn -- Business Process Management
• OSISoft -- Real Time Process and Performance Management
• Knowledgelake -- Enterprise Content Management
• K2 -- workflow

... vive l'enterprise :-)