Chatter indeed has the essence of this new collaboration vision down cold. Holden says its goal of creating a "social enterprise" translated into three key collaborative elements: social profiles for employees and customers, an employee social network, and the ability to invite customers into that network. Unlike SharePoint, with its hierarchical, centrally defined group structure, Holden insists that the social enterprise breaks down hierarchies. "Teams tend to form organically," he says.
And he's got statistical validation of the benefits of this Facebook-like form of enterprise collaboration. Chatter regularly surveys its more than 100,000 active corporate customers about the effects of this form of collaboration, and its findings are compelling. Users see email volume drop 30%, have 27% fewer meetings, and find relevant information 52% faster.
Of course, wall posts and drive-by micro-blog comments hardly complete the enterprise collaboration picture. People will still create and share rich content, but whether it's a PowerPoint deck, spreadsheet, or video, there's no reason these can't be either linked into a Facebook collaboration space or hosted there, much like the way Flickr and YouTube, respectively, serve as image and video repositories. And like any good cloud-based sharing service, users will be able to control who sees what, kind of like Dropbox. And while Dropbox spurned Apple, perhaps the company would see a marriage with Facebook, as a pillar of an upgraded collaboration platform, as one made in heaven.
As I mentioned in my earlier column on the new generation of enterprise collaboration software, the concern with most of these services (though not Salesforce) is that they come from relatively new companies, with rapidly evolving products and business models that might change overnight. That's a worry that an "enterprise Facebook" would assuage in an instant. Sure, it's a relatively new company, but one worth an estimated $50 billion.
Google clearly sees the Facebook threat, and Google+ is its latest attempt at gaining social networking street cred. However, the company is still focused on consumers, not businesses; for example, it has just started to integrate "+" into Google Apps (its Google+ Pages is just a Facebook for Business copycat--another business marketing tool).
Circling back to Microsoft, while it has made SharePoint much more social in recent releases by cloning the greatest hits from the Web 2.0 generation, SharePoint is still too wedded to Office in that it works best when used via a thick, local client. Its Web interface is clunky, and it lacks native mobile clients, a huge hole in the post-PC era. Microsoft is obviously protecting its lucrative Windows and Office franchises; however, this short-term, profit-maximizing thinking seems to be causing Redmond to once again miss a major technological upheaval--a replay of its myopia about mobile devices and Internet services like search and SaaS. While it's not too late for Microsoft to win the next generation of enterprise collaboration, I'm not convinced that Office 365 and SharePoint Online are the answer. The company had better wake up to the potential Facebook threat, because Google almost certainly will.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
