Defrag Blog

I’m pretty optimistic by nature (isn’t every entrepreneur?). But I’m also a realist - and by realist, I mean that I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time observing “macro-trends.” Lately, things have just been “feeling” better in the stock market. Sure, the bears are talking about “bear market rallies,” but some folks like Jim Cramer have started to make bottom calls.

Setting all of that aside, I think there’s one aspect to the bottom call/macro-trend side of things that bears (pun intended) watching: “collaboration” as the next great driver of technology adoption. As GigaOm points out, John Chambers of Cisco “never misses an opportunity” to talk up collaboration: “We believe we are entering the next phase of the Internet as growth and productivity will center on collaboration enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies.” Networked web 2.0 technologies? Ahh yes, our old friend - “enterprise 2.0.”

As the U.S. economy recovers from this period of slowing (yes, I believe that’s beginning to happen), enterprise IT spending won’t just automatically explode again. Rather, IT managers everywhere will be looking for projects that give them the maximum “bang for the buck.” Focus will shift from cost containment (still a big driver) to “productivity enhancement.” And that magic little word (”productivity”) is where all of this collaboration stuff comes in.

Of course, the problem is actually bigger than simple “collaboration.” Dealing with the mounds (rivers?) of data - in both structured and unstructured terms - is the real challenge. What we’re ultimately going to have to deal with is how we can interact more efficiently with that data; how we can gain intelligence from that data. You see what just happened? We just wandered into a space where enterprise 2.0 meets the semantic web meets business intelligence - and no one single piece can get the job done.

Surely, you’ve heard this all before from me. The point here is not my usual “defrag brings the disparate parties together” rant. Rather, I’d like to emphasize how much wide open space there is for sheer technology innovation. Buying Webex simply won’t cut it. Implementing a social network won’t get it done. The answer is so much bigger, so much broader, that what we’re going to require is a big picture vision of the *problem* so that we can begin to collectively innovate on the pieces of it (a lot of that is already happening - but…).

The central point remains: the wide open space for software innovation in this space is immense.

While the rest of the world gets lost debating ad-driven models, or the use of technology in solving problems of scarcity, know that some of us are going to be concentrating on the strategic aspects of actual, grounded, software that is seeking to solve big, chunky problems of over-abundance.

Let the good times roll.

[sidenote: Early bird prices expire this friday - be sure to take advantage of that and join us in the defrag conversation.]