Where is the Killer Enterprise 2.0 App? Btw: What is the Killer Enterprise 2.0 App?
November 8th, 2006 by Paul Margolis
Ever since I first read Andy McAfee’s introductory piece on Enterprise 2.0 earlier this year, I’ve been trying to figure out how the advent of “E2” might create an opportunity for new software products (or services) companies that meet the specific needs of the enterprise.
In his article, Andy provides a lot of ideas for E2 products with his SLATES concept, which stands for Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals. It doesn’t take that much after reading Andy’s article to imagine SLATES products, or maybe a SLATES suite.
And Andy’s not the only one thinking this way. Lots of people have written about applications for the enterprise with this type of functionality. Some of my favorite postings on the subject are from Peter Rip, Ross Mayfield, and Dion Hinchcliffe. There was even a conference last month in the Bay Area on “Office 2.0” which was focused on personal productivity and collaboration applications. There are plenty of companies providing some portion of the typical collaboration and productivity functionality with a Web 2.0 flavor such as Socialtext, iUpload, 37signals, Zoho and EchoSign. My colleague at Longworth, Jason Yau, has been keeping track and so far he has a list of more than 40 such companies.
All of these companies seem to be circling around a set of collaboration and personal productivity functionality. It almost always includes blogs of some kind, wikis or something like them, AJAX-style word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, a light database, and/or ways to easily share, store and edit files. We’re convinced that over the next few years these products will start to penetrate the enterprise. We’re trying to figure out how this will evolve and if we find the right vehicle we’ll probably make one or more investments in this area.
But is collaboration and AJAX-based productivity apps all there is to E2? I don’t think so. We think the big idea behind E2 is not just bringing the technology like AJAX or application functionality like blogs to the enterprise, the bigger ideas come from applying the business concepts that have been developed in Web 2.0. Those business concepts arise from some very innovative thinking about how to apply the pervasive low cost connectivity of the Internet to developing and selling information technology. It’s that always on, high bandwidth, low cost connectivity that makes this all go.
The most important of these business concepts can be put in two categories: those that reduce the cost of production and distribution and those that reduce the cost of sales and marketing. Web 2.0 concepts that reduce the cost of production include community generated content, open source, customer self-service, offshoring, and Internet distribution. Web 2.0 concepts that reduce the cost of sales and marketing including building brand through blogs and wikis, online sales lead development, online demonstration and trial, selling to the individual within the enterprise, and free, freemium and, advertising-supported revenue models.
If we think of E2 in this expansive way, then there are many opportunities within the realm of applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise besides collaboration and productivity apps. Examples of the applications of these concepts that we are seeing include:
- Consumer product companies who are building their brands by participating on, and sponsoring consumer blogs
- Electronics companies who are sponsoring online communities to share experiences about their products including instructions on use and repair
- Software companies that are offering free individual-use access to their products online to later “upsell” to enterprise versions
- Business information companies that are using their customer communities to “clean” their data
If we think of E2 as the application of key business concepts based on ideas drawn from Web 2.0, then there certainly are a lot of potential applications.
What are you seeing in the market? What offerings can be sold to the enterprise based on Web 2.0 and the pervasiveness of the Internet? We’d love to hear your ideas.
Subscribe to our Feed
Enterprise 2.0 has not arrived until a large enterprise deploys a Web 2.0 application - enterprise wide.
For that to happen, like you have outlined, it has to be more than technology - but about business process improvements and efficiency, and manifestation of Web 2.0 technology into areas and forms that are yet to be seen.
We feel we just might be the first Enterprise Web 2.0 company to deploy enterprise wide a business application built and derived squarely out of Web 2.0 technology framework. We don’t think blogs and wikis carry such appeal for mass adoption and deployment across a single enterprise.
It is something that will be disruptive in terms of the business benefits it offers by enhancing existing enterprise business workflows manyfolds, yet the deployment and implementation of it inside enterprise is absolutely non-disruptive because it will provide a passable bridge to the ‘past’ or Web 1.0.
We are working with a Fortune 50 company (they sought us out) for an enterprise wide deployment spanning 60,000+ users.
This is what we are seeing and are about “those that reduce the cost of sales and marketing.” Basically all our paying customers in fact are using EchoSign to reduces sales/sales&marketing costs, and/or close more.
For us we combine the fact that storage costs are dirt cheap (so we don’t really have to charge a lot to store ALL your contracts); VOIP drives down for us fax costs; and always on connectivity (so you can close customers while they are still on the phone), to make a new type of service (automated contract execution) that would break without all three.