Dennis raised a credible perspective in a comment to my entry on "Enterprise Twitter". I thought I would respond in a separate post since I do not have a feed specific to comments and since his comment misinterprets my position:
1. I do track these products/services and I am aware that ESME is now a part of the Apache Incubator scheme.
2. I already subscribe to the ESME blog and have for some time.
3. These points also reflect comments I hear often from enterprise IT groups (architects, infrastructure planners, etc) concerning introduction of new messaging/communication tools. Since I tend to talk to a lot of these folks, I would consider my comments constructive actually for vendors in this space to consider.
4. I am not dismissing the enterprise Twitter space in a blanket fashion. That opening comment misrepresents my position. If you examine the recent post on Enterprise 2.0 Planning Considerations I specifically call out "Enterprise Twitter" as a space to watch in 2009. I am however not wearing rose-colored glasses when pointing out the hurdles these solutions will face as they emerge within enterprise environments. I do expect that vendors putting together unified communications and collaboration platforms will be forced to address the type of social messaging represented by tools such as ESME. I would point you to some thoughts I posted earlier regarding social presence as well. In turn, ESME and like tools will need to integrate (in some instances), and interoperate (in almost all cases), with UC platforms. I suggest you look at the recent IETF proposal sponsored by Cisco and IBM regarding intranet federation for IM and presence systems - that might be food for thought on integration and interoperability/federation even though these tools are not centric to SIP/SIMPLE.
5. It's easy to throw stones at IBM and Microsoft - and yes, there are aspects of those platforms that are proprietary - but they are deployed within large enterprise environments in a dominate fashion (in addition to Cisco). Microsoft does have an asset here with its Parlano acquisition and IBM does have options to open up Sametime to handle some behaviors demonstrated by "Enterprise Twitter" tools - so game on. Twitter-like tools will not have a free-ride without competition from existing messaging/communication vendors.
6. It is nice to hear that ESME has multiple pilots - however, pilots come and go (especially given current economic conditions). Production deployments are a better yardstick. I'll be tracking this space in 2009 and look forward to analyzing and advising organizations on how this market evolves.
@Mike I respectfully disagree with your blanket dismissal of the enterprise Twitter space in the way you have. (Declared interest in ESME as you may already know.)
You might wish to know that ESME is now a part of the Apache Incubator scheme. That gives access to a lot of thought leadership in providing tools that are not wedded to proprietary platforms and access to enterprise class development skills.
Speaking personally (my colleagues might disagree) but I see little value in aligning to IBM for instance when they have their own solution in the works and tend to exhibit an 'only made here' attitude to solution selling.
We provided solid process integrations to SAP NetWeaver as part of the early alpha and despite your reservations, have pilots ongoing in a number of places, one of which we can mention is Siemens.
I'd be happy to get our business process and technology leads to provide you with a technical briefing if that works.
In the meantime, I'd refer you to the blog: http://blog.esme.us where you can keep tabs on what's happening.
Thanks for your attention.
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