Osterman Research Blog

As communication evolves, it becomes more viral and more rapid in its distribution.  For example, a letter is essentially a one-to-one communication.  An email is, at best, a one-to-several communication.  Social media, on the other hand, is potentially a one-to-millions communication.  The implication of such an enormous increase in the speed and breadth with which communications can occur is that the response to such communications when things go wrong becomes much more important:  ignore a complaint delivered via a letter and little will happen – ignore a complaint delivered via Twitter and lots of bad things could happen.

Take the case of Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office.  On Tuesday, Wilson tweeted, “@DelTaco I will accept $12,000 to plug their [expletive deleted] food.”  Four minutes later he tweeted, “Please disregard last tweet – was a private text to my assistant”.  Five minutes after that he tweeted, “Loving the new @DelTaco Macho Bellgrande Burrito! It’s Beeftacular(tm)!”  Whether or not this was a planned exchange or a mistake by Wilson who thought he was sending a direct message to his assistant, it illustrates the viral nature of social media communication.

There is an interesting new company whose focus is on helping organizations to manage customer service using social media as a platform.  Conversocial, based in London, offers a cloud-based platform to help organizations manage comments, complaints and interactions with customers and commenters using Twitter and Facebook.  The tools included in Conversocial’s offering include workflow management so that individuals can be assigned various tasks, tracking tools to enable management of customer and commenter interaction, prioritization of content (complaints get handled before general comments, for example), analytics to gain insight into how a company is engaging with the Facebook and Twitter communities, publishing tools that include the ability to schedule updates across multiple pages, and other capabilities.

The primary goal of Conversocial is to enable rapid response to comments and complaints on Twitter and Facebook, while at the same time reducing the amount of time required to manage these interactions.  The company offers various packages designed for single social media managers through large teams of individuals who are charged with responding to social media communications.  Their solution is quite interesting and is definitely worth a closer look.

Last week I attended the Sendmail Messaging Infrastructure Summit 2011 and the week before that Trend Micro’s Insight analyst event – both very good meetings!  Here are some thoughts on both companies:

• Trend Micro is doing very well financially: the company’s CFO reported that Trend could fund 891 days of its operating costs with no revenues coming in – Microsoft, also doing well financially, could do so for 434 days, while one of Trend’s biggest competitors in the security space could do so for 108 days.  An unusual measure of a company’s financial health, but an interesting one nonetheless.
• Trend has a strong focus on security in virtualized environments and it’s a focus that I think is serving and will serve the company quite nicely.  The company’s Deep Security offering is the foundation of their cloud security capability and offers a wide range of capabilities, allowing security to be built around the data itself so that it can, in essence, be self-defending.  Given that virtualization will be key to success in most cloud data centers, the ability to efficiently provide security in a VM environment is essential.  Trend’s agentless anti-virus, for example, can reduce overhead on physical hosts, allowing greater VM density relative to agent-based approaches.  Without going into details, Trend is winning a lot of key accounts using its agentless security model and has seen its server security revenue increase fairly dramatically.  Trend is also making a major push with enterprise public cloud providers, as well as in the SOHO market, in mobile, and in the big data market.
• The primary message from the Sendmail event – and one with which I wholeheartedly agree – is that the cloud for mid-sized and large enterprises will be based on a hybrid model.  While smaller companies can likely use off-the-shelf offerings from cloud providers, larger companies tend to have specialized applications and use cases that demand some proportion of the infrastructure remain on-premise.  Even Microsoft admits in its BPOS documentation that it may be necessary to keep some of the email environment on-premise.
• The meeting also provided some valuable insight into how companies decide to go to the cloud.  For example, the CIO of one of Sendmail’s customers was impressed with BPOS – aided by a personal visit from Steve Ballmer – and decided to migrate the company’s many thousands of users to the cloud.  However, the decision was made before the review, input or approval by any of the company’s IT architects.  After their review was completed, the company concluded that more than one-half of its key requirements could not be satisfied by BPOS, and so the migration of email was put on hold, although the company is migrating SharePoint to the Microsoft cloud.

While completely unrelated events, one of the key themes running through both meetings was the importance of very good planning for large companies migrating to the cloud, whether public or private.   Clearly, the cloud is where much of messaging and collaboration will migrate over the coming years and for good reason – it allows better allocation of resources, lower costs, greater efficiency, etc.  However, for large organizations every aspect and nuance of the messaging and cloud experience needs to be thought through very carefully, particularly in the context of security and application support.  Yet, many key decision makers are not doing so with enough rigor or input from key stakeholders, and without sufficient consideration of every ramification of a wholesale move to the cloud.

Over the weekend, I heard from a friend that Messaging Architects was going out of business.  This rumor was based on a comment attributed to someone at Novell about the expiration of their licensing with MA.  I checked out the rumor with both MA and Novell and found the following:

• Messaging Architects is alive and well, they are profitable, and they are seeing growth in both software and service sales.
• The rumor was borne out of an expired license resulting from the transition of Novell’s IT to ACS, but the license was immediately replaced by a temporary one from MA’s support team.
• A senior person at Novell had also heard the rumor, but knows nothing of its origin.
• A senior person at MA told me I was the only one that had checked with them about the rumor.

I had a good discussion with @Andrew_Barnes last week about the evolution of email and messaging in general.  We discussed a column I had written a few years ago about a truly intelligent messaging system, which I have rewritten and updated here with some additional thoughts on where I would like to see messaging go.

Today, most of us can be contacted, or have files or information sent to us, using any number of addresses or contact numbers.  In my own case, I have a corporate email address; a calendar; multiple personal email addresses; a fax number; a corporate telephone number; a personal telephone number; a mobile number; accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+; a corporate postal address; a personal postal address; several instant messaging handles; a Dropbox address; a YouSendIt account; an account for the online document repository for our annual service subscribers; as well as various other accounts.  For the most part, these services are separate and do not share information, nor is there any sort of policy applied to how, when and why they are used.

Now, imagine that I had only a single point of contact, such as my email address, and a management/policy engine that managed my interactions with people, data, calendars, physical addresses, etc.  For example:

• I could establish a policy that traditional email communications would go to my email inbox and be tagged appropriately:  urgent, normal, business, personal, etc.  Urgent emails could be turned into a text message or a voice call to my corporate, personal or mobile phone based on time of day or where my calendar said I should be.  Invitations could be turned into calendar entries to await my approval, but invitations for appointments within the next 12 hours would be sent to me as a text message or instant message.
• Any files that were sent to me would automatically go to the appropriate online document repository and I would receive a notification based on their urgency and content: an email for non-urgent communications, a text message for urgent content, etc.  Moreover, all content would be scanned and archived appropriately.
• Voice calls would be sent to the appropriate device (corporate desk phone, personal phone, mobile phone) based on the sender, urgency of the content, the time of day or my location.
• The management engine would know my calendar, location and transit status (moving or stationary) and would notify me appropriately:  my mobile would never ring with an urgent message while I was in a meeting, while driving or when I was in a theatre unless it was from my wife or daughter, for example.
• Social media content would be scanned for information that was relevant to me and I would be notified appropriately based on the timeliness of the information, the author, the subject, etc.  For example, a Twitter post extolling the virtues of the Eggs Benedict at the Four Seasons in London would simply post to my Twitter account, but the post ‘Apple and Microsoft to merge’ would be sent as a text message to my mobile.
• Text messages sent to my mobile could be received as text messages if they were urgent or received only as emails if they were merely informational.
• Faxes could be sent to me as an email based on their content, or relevant information from the fax could be culled and sent as a text message if it was urgent.
• The system would attempt to contact me about urgent issues until I had responded in some way.
• In addition, and in rare cases, I could designate that some types of attachments be printed automatically and mailed via postal services.

Such a system would benefit recipients because the right information would be received on the right device in a coordinated fashion, and all communication could be received via a single interface.  A system like this would also benefit the sender, since he or she could send any content to a single address with a greater assurance that the information would be received on the right device, at the right time and with the appropriate level of urgency.

Some of the capabilities I’ve described above exist today – and the technology to manage all of this certainly does – but we have a long way to go in terms of building truly cohesive messaging systems that will enable this type of seamless communication.

It’s difficult to see a reference to Steve Jobs’ passing yesterday without also seeing the word “visionary” within a few words of his name — and rightly so, because he truly was a visionary, the likes of whom we see only a few times each century.

But let’s consider what Jobs did from a purely economic standpoint:

• His vision, passion and hard work created tens of thousands of jobs (roughly 50,000 people work for Apple), all of which provide employees with discretionary income to contribute to a variety of causes.
• In FY2010 Apple generated $65.2 billion in revenue and paid $4.5 billion in corporate income taxes, not to mention the personal income taxes paid by its employees and the sales taxes paid by its customers.
• When Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, its adjusted stock price was $3.28 per share (as of 12/31/1997); the stock price on the day of his passing was $378.25, helping to fund the retirement accounts for tens of thousands of investors.
• The technology and design for which he is responsible has generated entire industries that themselves produce enormous amounts of employee income, retirement income and tax revenue.

Jobs did his work almost without reference to himself or his politics.  He was responsible for creating more wages, more wealth and more tax revenue than the vast majority of politicians.  Instead of trying to change his world by running for office or marching through city streets or bloviating about what should be done, he simply went out and did what could be done.  While he probably did little direct volunteer work, his indirect contribution to charities and other laudable efforts around the globe are incalculable.  In short, his work and vision and passion were more responsible for helping others than those who talk about helping, but do little to make it happen.

Jobs will be sorely missed in many ways, not least of which is the economic impact he had on the world around him.

Many decision makers are fearful of moving any – or at least all – of their users to cloud-based email, collaboration, storage and other services.  Their concerns focus on a variety of issues, including the security of their data when stored in remote data centers, the security of data in-transit between their firewall and these data centers, their ability to retrieve data when required, the government’s potential access to their data, the uptime provided by cloud providers, and other issues.

To an extent, these concerns have some grounding in reality.  Some cloud providers don’t have a stellar record of uptime.  Some don’t make it particularly easy to retrieve data on demand.  Some might not encrypt data as rigorously as they could.  To be sure, there are lots of very good providers that keep data highly secure, but the concerns still linger.

This raises two important issues, and several questions, that any decision maker should consider:

• How will you know when the cloud – or a particular provider – is sufficiently safe to earn your trust?  In other words, what are the metrics that you will use to decide if a particular provider meets your requirements for adequate protection of your content or if they provide enough uptime?  Have you even established these metrics?  If not, when and how will you develop them?
• Have you applied these standards to your own, on-premise infrastructure with the same rigour?  That is, do you encrypt all of your content between remote locations and your firewall?  Is the content stored on your on-premise servers sufficiently protected from access by unauthorized parties inside of your organization?  Is your content protected from intrusion by external parties as you demand from cloud-based providers?  What sort of uptime does your on-premise system provide?

The bottom line is that decision makers should be concerned about content security, uptime, unauthorized access to data and other important issues.  However, they should be just as concerned about their on-premise infrastructure – and they should be asking the same questions of internal IT as they do of cloud providers.