ESME Blog

Many of the people and companies where ESME could be useful may not be familiar with the notion of microsharing. They’ll maybe have heard about some of the cool things happening on the web like Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and Jaiku but may not be sure what they mean. Microsharing is about making connections between people you already know and discovering those you don’t in an environment that allows you to easily find the information you need that helps you get things done.That’s the start. There is much, much more but that’s a good use case to be mulling over.

Even those that have will be concerned about security issues. As we make ready for showing ESME to the world, the security issue has been something that we have been noodling around. This article from ReadWriteWeb puts it into perspective and this extract makes clear the nature of the problem.

Enabling secure, fine-grained communication across the firewall. This is the big issue for enterprises. Not many vendors do this right yet. Today we see too much binary “you are either inside or outside”. The winners will enable security in a much more fine-grained way.

Unfortunately, there is one section where the author misses the mark by a country mile:

The vendors who really get it, who are driving this include Wordpress, Google and 37 Signals. The losers in this game will be Oracle, SAP and lots of other traditional enterprise software vendors. The incumbents understand the problem and have plenty of smart developers and they have the capital to buy any of the start-ups. But they face the classic “innovator’s dilemma”. Any serious move in this direction will hurt their current cash cow, validate the start-ups and alienate their allies in the internal IT departments.

I find these kind of sweeping statements disingenuous. I don’t care how much the writer thinks they ‘know.’ There is no substitute for a reality check. In a previous article, I referenced Thomas Vander Wal’s view on the UI side of things and in yet another, Mike Gotta  talks about Oracle and SAP as dark horses. I’m not going to say too much but I do know SAP gets this far better than people give it credit for. The business model issue is real but some of us on the ESME team think we know how that can be solved. Oh yes – and one thing the big players understand very well: building robust applications at scale. That’s a huge challenge for any other player, especially when it comes to integrating the solutions. That’s where ESME is going to score a slam dunk. From day one, we made it clear that having hooks to NetWeaver and an ABAP client would be high on our agenda. We’ve done one and we’re hot on the other.

Image credit: ReadWriteWeb

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Flattering commentary from no less than CapGemini’s Andy Mulholland. I first met Andy way back when, maybe 10 years ago in London. He’s always been a great thinker, leader and conversationalist. Talk about how time flies:

First up is SAP, who deservedly, or not, are often thought of as being pretty staid, but are right out there in the forefront of Micro Blogging with Twitter. Actually, SAP are doing pretty well in the use of ‘interactive’ technologies to support their customers, partners and their own staff, and have brought into their in-house team some hot expertise from some well known Web 2.0 leaders. My SAP colleagues are active in this for the simple reason that they tell me it works for them in making ‘sharing’ of information, expertise, etc easier. However Twitter is a long way further on from the now fairly mature use of the basic capabilities that ‘Wiki’ and ‘Blog’ based collaboration provides so to find ESME, Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, a behind the Firewall version of Twitter running on Netweaver was pretty interesting.

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