Adapting To A New Tempo: ‘Streams In Business’ Research Report Versioning

I have been deep in the investigation of streaming applications designed to be used in business for several months. Think of it as Twitter or Facebook for the enterprise (a list of the companies involved follows), also know as microblogging for the enterprise.

For months I’ve been heads down, evaluating products, getting demos, writing my observations, and basically heading toward publishing a report on the state of the market. The date of publication has slipped a bit, for two very different reasons. First, I have been dealing with a bit of a family crisis, as my very ill father has had to enter an assisted living facility, and is now receiving hospice care. But more pertinent to the study itself, the pace of the technical world has made the research and the report very difficult.

These difficulties also included the obvious fact that the staff of the various product companies are extremely busy. This has led to rescheduling of demos, slipped deadlines on demo materials, and in some cases companies opting out of the study simply because they have no time. (Note: some of the companies in the study are sponsoring my research, but some are not, so money is not a requirement, although it comes with extra benefits, including a chance to review their respective chapter of the report, and a briefing after the report is completed.)

Another factor making the research difficult is that new streaming application companies are popping up all the time. In just the past two months I came across Podio, Cohuman, and Flowr, and all have become involved in the study.

And a third factor is that the products keep changing. While I was writing up the section about Flowr, this week, I logged into my Flowr account to check a detail. I saw that some major user interface changes had taken place, and I sent an email to my contact there asking for updated screenshots for the chapter. I am still awaiting them, but I will likely get them in the next few days. However, by that time, something equally significant may have happened on Yammer, or BantamLive. I might have to turn around and ask those companies for updates. And so on.

It is these last two factors that are the most challenging, as an increasing tempo and rate of innovation in this hot corner of the social business marketplace makes pinning down the players in a short window of time very difficult.

I had a insight the other morning, in that semi-asleep moment just before fully waking up. I saw the report as a version, just like the products that I am reviewing.

So rather than trying to be completely comprehensive, and issuing the report once per year, I am going over to a more agile model.

The report will be versioned, and the first version — coming out the week after next — will be version 2010.1. I have decided to make the calendar year the prefix of the versioning scheme, for simplicity’s sake. I plan to release new versions every six to eight weeks (2010.2, 2011.1, etc.), adding new product reviews and updating others, as major updates in the streaming apps are announced or released.

Here’s the outline of the report, version 2010.1:

The Streams In Business Research Report 2010.1

preface

Introduction — A summary of the subject, the approach taken, and the scenarios used to evaluate the products (see Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation).

Product Evaluations: Positioning, Scenario-based Evaluation, and Conclusions for the following products

• BantamLive
• Coffee Bean Technology
• Cohuman
• Flowr
• IBM Connections
• MangoApps
• Newsgator
• Podio
• Socialcast
• Yammer

Conclusions

• Dimensions of Differentiation
• Communication 
• Coordination
• Context
• Community
• Complement
• What’s Ahead

In upcoming versions, I hope to include other competitors such as Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, Traction Software, Huddle, BlueKiwi, Brainpark, Jive Software, and others too many to mention. That is a function of their ability to work with me on the evaluation, though.

What Does This Mean To A Report Buyer?

Obviously, this rapid change in the market has repercussions for buyers of the report (and buyers of the products, as well). For example, Betty Ling might buy a copy of the report on 5 November, and by 15 December new product releases may come along to change her thinking about which product might be the best for her company.

Since we can’t put a brake on the market, We can offer the buyer the opportunity to stay up with it. So, I am going to modify my pricing model to allow a buyer three versions of the report. So Betty could download the 2010.2 version of the report in December, and also a copy of the 2011.4 report in June 2011, just to see what’s out there.

A buyer will received the current version at the time of purchase, and then can request up to two more copies via email, and those versions will be sent along. Additional versions will be available for an additional fee.

The report subscription — up to three copies within 12 calendar months from initial purchase — is $195, and this include access to all free and for fee webinars that I hold on the topic.

For information on the report and the webinars, sign up for the mailing list, here. We will be mailing out updates in the next week about the report and webinars.

Streams In Business: Yammer and Bantam Live Announcements

I have been head down on a project this summer, and I am very excited about what will soon coming to light. The Streams In Business Study And Report (formerly Microstreams In Business) has had me focused pretty exclusively all summer on a very innovative group of products, all sharing common characteristics and planned userbase: streaming applications applied in the context of business.

Just to clarify what is a streaming application, an excerpt from the upcoming report:

What Is A Stream And How Is It Different?

A ‘stream’ is the implementation of a social model of interaction, relationship, and communication. Social tools are generally based on the idealization of social networks, in which people connect to other people in many ways. John might connect with Mary, who also connects to Ahmed, but John may not know or connect to Ahmed.

Streams are based on directed networks, where John ‘follows’ Mary but Mary may not ‘follow’ John back. This is derived from the public blogging model, where authors publish their work freely and anyone may choose to read those works, or to subscribe to a feed from that blog. In a sense, streams are an extension, or advance, on the basic publishing model of blogs. This is why some have chosen to call streaming ‘microblogging’, focusing on the similarity of publishing involved, and making a distinction between long-format blogging and short-format ‘microblogging’. This distinction may not be the most productive one, especially in the business context.

So, streams are based on directed networks that emulate or parallel social networks. Relative to any user, there are upstream contacts (those that the user follows, ‘following’), and the downstream contacts (those that are following the user, ‘followers’). Note that a follower can be followed, as well.

There is growing interest in the use of these technologies, as I discovered with a poll earlier in the year. But just as important is the level of innovation going on in the space. These week, two of the companies I have researched for the report made big announcements

Yammer — It has been two years since Yammer debuted at TechCrunch50, and won best of show. This week at TechCrunch Disrupt the company announced the ‘new’ Yammer, with a bunch of new features:

The New Yammer Is Here!

Since our inception, Yammer has had a public API, allowing third parties to develop applications on top of Yammer. We’ve now expanded to a full platform, on which third party companies can develop new applications and integrate existing enterprise apps. We’ve built several of our own applications that are available today:

• Polls – Tap the wisdom of crowds by quickly and easily creating a poll and asking co-workers to identify the best option
• Questions – Ask co-workers and quickly find answers in a searchable knowledgebase
• Events – Invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses.  Download event into Microsoft Outlook or Google calendar
• Links – Share URLs with co-workers in a form that displays web content such as videos and images inline

Soon we’ll add other applications to the list including Ideas and Tasks. In addition to our own applications, we’re partnering with the following companies who are building applications that integrate with Yammer. 

• Zendesk for Customer Support – Attach a Zendesk ticket to a Yammer message so that all customer service agents can collaborate and resolve issues quickly
• Box.net for Enterprise Content Management – Reference files from Box.net’s leading cloud content management solution in Yammer messages
• Crocodoc for Document Mark Up and Review – Collaboratively highlight and comment on PDFs, Word documents, images and other files that are attached to Yammer messages
• Lithium for Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) – Enables employees to share and discuss feedback from brand influencers and customer conversations that take place in Lithium’s leading customer community solutions
• Expensify for Online Expense Report Management – Notify the appropriate people when an expense report requires action

I think that Yammer’s notion of becoming a platform for other services to plug into is interesting, but I’d like to see an interoperability protocol rather than a bunch of competing APIs from a slew of platform companies.

Positioning around the platform idea is a sign of the rapid maturation of this marketplace, though, and I bet that in a subsequent iteration of my Streams In Business study I will be evaluating APIs of platform competitors, like Podio, that I saw earlier this week for the first time.

[And candidly, I continue to wonder why it took Yammer two years to implement tasks.]

Bantam Live — Bantam Live is a NYC-based start-up that has integrated a full twitter client into their stream CRM solution:

via BusinessWire

The new offering is at no extra charge to existing plans. Features include:

- Twitter Functionality: Tweeting, replies, timeline, profile, @mentions, retweets, saved searches, lists, following/follower stats, favorites, tweet emailing, etc. are now all here in a tabbed interface, similar to the new Twitter site. The essential communication features of how people use Twitter to interact are now within the social CRM app of Bantam Live.

- Contact Management: Users can create new contact names and profiles from Twitter within Bantam Live with one click. First name, last name, headshot and bio are automatically populated along with tags in a newly created contact record page in Bantam Live that embeds the contact’s live Twitter feed.

- CRM and Activity Stream Collaboration: Users can search for keywords in tweets and discover new prospects, customers, and partners. Replying directly, importing new contact names and their tweet content, commenting on tweets to team members, creating and assigning tasks to coworkers, and notifying coworkers of such activity are features that are now available. All activity is recorded in the history section (next to the contact’s live Twitter feed tab) on a contact record page in Bantam Live. Moreover, all activity is displayed in the Bantam Live activity stream for team members to monitor and interact.

Bantam Live’s focus is to help small businesses that are using Twitter as upstream input to their sales outreach activities. A Bantam Live user might discover someone in Twitter complaining about a competitor’s product, and use that as an opportunity to find out more from the dissatisfied customer. That could lead to an internal work flow, like analyzing the information, or kicking off a sales effort, all managed within Bantam Live.

It’s obvious that open social contexts like Twitter naturally lend themselves to being augmented or extended with other streaming applications, in the case of Bantam Live, one focused on sales. I think this trend is going to be huge.

For example, only today, I had a demo of UberVu, which takes a very similar approach — allowing users to ‘listen’ to Twitter and other streaming sources and to converse with the individuals making the posts — but all in the context of a sophisticated and rich analytics framework. Ubervu users can post information, and task others to take action based on it, all in the context of a visually rich context for marketing and business intelligence.

As I said, these advances only underscore the point I made earlier: these streaming tools represent a sweeping change for the better in the business context, and their adoption rate is likely to accelerate as these tools grow in capabilities and with rising awareness of their potential in the marketplace.

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Update on the Study and Report

The Streams In Business Study And Report (formerly Microstreams In Business) project has been delayed, partly because of unusual demands on my time because of unforeseen family issues, and party because I have been coming across new companies with very innovative technologies that I wanted to research and get into the report.

The study has focused on the following technologies, with sponsorship from those denoted with an asterisk. A number of companies that I contacted declined to be involved. Note that involvement requires only that the company undertake to mock up the scenarios that I outlined in Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation.

Products:

• BantamLive*
• BlueKiwi
• Coffeebean Technology*
• CoHuman*
• Flowr
• Huddle
• IBM Connections*
• Mangospring
• Newsgator*
• Socialcast*
• Traction Software
• Yammer*

I am planning to complete the report in the next week or so, and to schedule a series of free webinars digging into various aspects of the technologies revealed in depth by the scenarios involved.

If you are interested in learning more about the report or webinars, click here.