Last week Stowe Boyd and I were both analsysts on a panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston called LaunchPad. LaunchPad is like Demo, where you get 5-6 minutes to talk about and demo your (new) product.

Stowe and I were supposed to give a one-minute critique each on each of the 4 vendors who were launching at LaunchPad (Collanos, Liquidtalk, Clarizen, and KnowNow (who has been around for about 7 years).

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For Stowe's and my exact comments see Michael Sampson's blog, and I also believe the session was video taped by Altus and can be seen in its entirety on the Enterprise 2.0 web site.

The problem was that I did not really have anything good to say about any of these fledgling vendors and began to fell like Simon Cowell on American Idol, when confronted with a no-talent act.

First Time Jitters

This was too bad that most of the looks we looked at were not really Web 2.0 tools. Some of them had nice AJAX interfaces, but for the most part they were the same Web 1.0 tools that we have seen for the last 10 years, the only difference being that they were Web-based and often offered as a SaaS (software as a service).

The biggest problem was that most of the vendors got on stage and proceeded to talk about their positioning, and the need for their tool, and about 4-5 slides into their presentation the buzzer went off and they never even got to the demo.

At one point I made a comment saying "show one slide to say what your all about and then do the demo!" There was a round of applause from the audience, as I believe they too were a bit frustrated with the process.

Sampson MC

Michael Sampson from New Zealand was the MC for this event and did a good job in both introducing the vendors and keeping them on time. However, I don't think there was enough preparation by the vendors for this event (see comments above). I suggest for next year that: A) each of the advisory board (and there are lots of analysts on the advisory board) submit a list of 4 vendors to Michael, and that Michael, from this list of 20-30 vendors, selects 4 to demo at the LaunchPad event.

In this way, not only will we have a longer list to choose from, but their solutions will have already been vetted by one of the analysts on the board before being sent to Michael.

Michael Sampson also did yoeman's duty by posting 42 blogs about the Enterprise 2.0 conference (to my 1 blog) and tried to get most of it up in real time. Altus, also made a great effort to get the sessions transcribed and tied to the videos and posted on the site the next day!

Format and Timing

I thought the format for the session was fine, but putting it just before the "From the Labs" session was tough technically, as well as for the AV people and the audience. Next year I would recommend splitting up the sessions with at least a break in between.

The Why of it All?

In a long plane ride home (it took me an extra 24 hours to get back because of United's network outage), I had some time to think about the Launchpad session. What I realized is that the vendors that demostrated (or that tried to) were doing the best they could. They had feedback from their customer (beta) and thought they were on track for big audiences of adopters at Enterprise 2.0. I think that Stowe and I were judging some of these solutions based on Web 2.0, and I think there are some fundamental differences:

- Enterprise is more focused on security then Web 2.0, so I don't think "Transparency" which is a hallmark of Web 2.0 is really part of Enterprise 2.0 (at least not yet).
- Many of the vendors that demoed were really at Enterprise 1.5, i.e. they were enterprise applications with an AJAX front-end and sometimes offered as a SaaS. In terms of Web 2.0 this is not groundbreaking, but it really is (upon reflection) where the Enterprise is. They are not at 2.0. Yes, they are moving, or being driven by employees, who as consumers, have more functionality than they can find in the enterprise. Yes, some enterprises are starting to adopt Mash-ups (but not a lot), and blogs, wikis (especially in development or R and D) and RSS.
- The enterprise still sees customers as a POS (point of sale) phenommenon rather than an ongoing relationship or partnership. In the spirit of Wikinomics (Don Tapscott) and Web 2.0, it might be your customers or partners that are creating your next products... not you!
- No one took a new approach, it was all adding on to what had gone before. In that sense it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary (which is always good for stronger adoption by the enterprise) and maybe it better met the needs of where the enterprise is right now than Web 2.0 would?

9/11 All Over Again

This feels to me like a conversation I had with a 3-letter agency of the U.S. Govt. who in 1999 had me present to them about collaboration. Unfortunately, the culture of security was so strong at that agency that they really did not collaborate with anyone else, and as I warned them in '99, 9/11 occured a few years later for just that reason.

I see this too with the enterprise, they are so focused on security and transactions that they are missing new ways to collaborate up and down the supply chain, or value network as we like to call it. It is looking at the customer as not someone to sell to once, but rather as a partner that you have an ongoing relationship with, and all types of value can be exchanged in that relationship. Some of the value is "emmergent" i.e. you don't know what the value is until it happens and you can't always predict it will happen. Also, it is often bottoms-up rather than top-down, which is why the hierarchical organizational structures of most companies today are holding them back, rather than helping them move forward.

Please realize that I am not saying security is not valuable, but I am also saying that collaboration is just as valuable and one should not be sacrificed for the other!

So What was Cool?

I think that Collanos adding VoIP to their solution was cool
I think that LiquidTalk's ability to record and publish a cell phone conversation effectivley time-shifting it was cool
I thought Clarizen's slides were great and would to have loved to see more of a demo. if Clarizen adds VoIP or IM into the mix as Collanos has, it would make it much better and also differentiate it from other project tools.
I thought KnowNow, even though they have been around for many years, introduced KnowNow Live (guess they are using the Microsoft Live naming convention). The question David Weinberger asked in an earlier keynote, I will also echo "Is is 9X better than e-mail?"

Tags: Stowe, Boyd, Michael Sampson, Clarizen, KnowNow, LiquidTalk, Collanos, collaboration, emmergent value, LaunchPad, SaaS, VoIP, David Weinberger, Jessica Lipnak, Jeffrey Stamps, wikinomics, Don Tapscott, Andrew McAfee,