Defrag Blog

Microsoft’s earnings announcement has me thinking about SharePoint this morning. I still think that the *huge* success of SharePoint in 2007 is the great unwritten story. I’ve heard folks like Brad Feld and Jeff Nolan mention it, and I know that Microsoft partner companies in the trenches are well aware of it, but I have yet to see the “press” pick the story up (maybe I just missed it). I also have yet to see anyone breaking out what kind of effect that success had on the “MBD” (office and sharepoint) division at Microsoft. If anyone has that info, I’d love to see it.

At a higher level, the success of SharePoint speaks volumes about what’s happening in one of the intersections that Defrag occupies (collaboration and information overload). And it gets even “interesting-er” as you mix in posts like this one from Matt Tucker over at Jive Software (Jive’s own Dawn Foster was at the last Defrag).

I see two big trends emerging:

1. “Collaboration” is not a “nice to have” IT purchase: C-level types tend to see IT spending in 2 camps — “nice to have” and “must have.” Or, more traditionally, “productivity enhancing” and “cost reduction.” No matter how you slice that pie, most people would think of “collaboration tools” as “nice to have” purchases. Except for one small problem: People who are not “IT purchasers” can easily set up collaboration tools for themselves. The result is a collaboration environment run wild — as employees set up blogs, wikis, rss feeds, gmail accounts (and who knows what else) that are A) not under the “control” of IT and B) may not even live inside of the corporate firewall. As such, IT seems to be waking up to the fact that they *must* get their hands around what’s happening in terms of collaboration, or risk running into data protection and compliance issues that are a pure nightmare waiting to happen. Throw in the business intelligence and productivity benefits, and you suddenly find collaboration to be a “must have” purchase.

2. IT architecture is increasingly cloud-based: To limit collaboration strictly to “on-premise” software that lives strictly within the firewall takes away at least 50% of the benefit. As such, companies like Jive (and Microsoft) are pushing on how to stretch the architecture of their products to more closely reflect the “cloud reality” that most *users* take for granted. This trend makes things like RSS and XMPP (call them “cloud protocols” for lack of a better term) extremely interesting.

All of that may seem a little “in the trenches”, but the result is a mix of rss, twitters, blogs, wikis, shared documents, distributed widgets and business intelligence that can significantly increase the rate at which individuals and organizations can turn raw *data* into actual insight…ie, the very thing that we think Defrag is about (that process). It also opens the door for a whole bunch of other “stuff” around ambient tools (me.dium) and semantic tools (AdaptiveBlue) that we have yet to really think through.

Will 2008 be the year that collaboration success turns into collaboration disillusionment? I don’t think so. Granted, there are some serious problems around authorization and authentication (see Cisco’s collaboration-related acquisition of Securent for an interesting thread on this), but I don’t think that slows this train down.

The “problem” of re-arranging how we deal with data, so that the organization, discovery, usefulness and intelligence of it becomes an *implicit* act is one of the truly great problems facing technologists (in both an enterprise and user-facing sense). And its the sheer scope (both technologically and organizationally) of the problem that keeps me knowing that we have some seriously fertile ground to till at Defrag.

And for my fellow “macro” folks: Will Microsoft’s earnings renew faith in the tech sector’s “immunity” from the current slowdown? This morning’s futures look good (to be sure), though I’d tend to think we have to “test the bottom” one more time. That said, I think John Chambers will prove to be prophetic in his 2007 talks about how what’s happening around collaboration in the enterprise will be the next great driver in technology.

[Later: Pete blogs about The Silent Rise of SharePoint and points to a report that details SharePoint's growing dominance (50% of Exchange deployments use SharePoint; number of SharePoint apps expected to *quadruple* this year). Wow.]