Will consumer-based technologies invade corporate computing?

The Economist ran an interesting piece in their special Christmas double issue about how consumer technologies are migrating to the enterprise. As an example, Arizona State university has migrated 65.000 students from its own in-house groupware applications onto Google Apps for your domain.

I believe strongly that this is a significant move that indicates what the future of enterprise computing will look like. But it's hardly new; learning platforms have for several years been a mostly software-as-a-service driven service and many large educational organizations has (perhaps without realising) taken the first steps towards migrating their systems to web-based services.

This raises one question; why has the learning platform in many cases been the "pioneer" in getting large organizations to choose Software-as-a-Service? The answer: the IT Directors, or more spesifically- the absence of the IT director. The purchase of learning platforms are largely run by end-users (teachers, school administrators, etc). This makes the organization focus less on hardware and technological perks.

So if you are a company that today (like Google, flickr, del.icio.us, digg, etc) get your business directly from consumers, is all you have to do find a way to circumvent the IT Director? Hardly. I see three major hurdles that must be faced for a consumer based company to successfully invade corporate computing:

Pricing
Most of the successful consumer services today get their revenues from text ads such as Ad-Sense. But a large company will probably not want to have their employees being distracted by adverts. For a university (at least in Europe) it would be politically difficult to finance their services through allowing their pupils and students to be subject to adverts.

Sales organization
Selling to the enterprise is something completely different than selling to the enterprise. You will need a sales organization that can handle large tenders, do key account work and "kick in doors".

Ownership
If you sign up for flickr you grant them a limited ownership of your personal data. They can expand their services an capitalize on you as a customer within the boundaries of the responsibility they have as a data controller. I believe that the enterprise, being a university or a large company, will not want to (and might very well not be legally allowed to) pass on their ownership of the data.

So will Google succeed with their Apps for your domain strategy? Probably - but it will need some modification. More on that in an upcoming post...

We're in!

Months of hard work has finally been crowned with success; BECTA announced today that it's learning together with our UK partner Viglen has qualified for the Learning Platform Services Framework agreement!

What does this mean? A huge market for learning platforms will now open up in the UK. Ten suppliers has qualified for the tender so there's no free lunch; there's still a lot of work to be done before we can say we have succeded in the UK maket. But with a government target of providing all learners with an online personalised learning space by 2008 there is no doubth there's a potential of growth for our company. And the more customers that will join us - the more resources will be available for furter development of the product!

Microsoft Learning Gateway

Before you read on, I need to make one thing clear. This post is not me trying to bad-mouth a competitor. I wouldn't do that in a blog-post, nor would I do that in a sales meeting or anywhere else outside our offices four walls. Microsoft is in many ways a partner of us, we use their technology extensively, we integrate towards many of their products and we do joint projects with them in several of our markets. Sometimes (mistakenly) what is known as Microsoft Learning Gateway might be considered a competing product to our own - but it's not. This blog should therefore only be considered a friendly advice to our friends in Microsoft.

"Microsoft Learning Gateway" in it current version has not become a success in the educational markets that I have a detailed insight into (and probably not anywhere else). Why?

1. It's a concept, not a product. It's a concept consisting of quite a few products; MS Sharepoint, Active Directory, ISA Server, SQL Server, Class Server, Exchange Server, Communication Server and Windows Server. The concept is to big and complex for anything other than very large educational organisations. (Please note that several of these products are very successful in the educational market so my criticism in not directed against the different products but the concept itself).

2. Integration. Integration between the different products described above is not something that is provided out of the box. There are available components for integration but they are not "out of the box" and you will probably have to write a whole lot of your own code to get the different servers to work together in a way that satisfy your requirements.

3. Delivery model. So how do you deliver 5-10 different server products to school? - "Here's the installation files, see ya!" No way schools of even medium sized local authorities or universities have the competence to implement and maintain this solution themselves. Microsoft simply doesn't offer hosting as a part of their solution. They have to turn to partners to supply this type of service. This makes the whole process

4. Lack of multi-language support. In Norway we have two official languages. There is no way you can commonly implement a learning platform that doesn't support the use of both languages. MLG does support different languages - but not on the same instance of the application.

5. Class server. The only piece of software in the MLG platform specifically engineered for the educational market is Microsoft Class Server. It is a very old fashioned piece of software that requires a client installation (for teachers) and basically doesn't do much more than create assignments.

6. Where does the MIS fit in? If there is one piece of software that you will find in pretty much any educational institution in Europe it is the "MIS" - or "student administrative system". This is the back-office administrative software that creates classes, prints diplomas, stores assessment data, absence, etc. The MLG solution simply does not take this into consideration, leaving a gaping hole in the "complete" architecture MLG is trying to provide.

7. Price. Keeping in mind the number of products and services you need included in this service and you might be up for a surprise when the actual cost of the solution comes on the table.

8. Sharepoint. I'm not saying that sharepoint isn't a good product - but it is no more than a framework for building up complex intranet and collaborative solutions. You have to fill it with these structures (sites, groups, etc). This is far to complex for any teacher to do themselves.

And I could probably go on even further... But what is the solution to these obstacles? The answer is simple; start listening to your own boss! 28th of October 2005 Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie outlined Microsoft's new strategy in an infamous internal memo. It marked the start of Microsoft's pursuit for a piece of the emerging "software as a service" market. (More than a year later I still think that Ray Ozzie's strategy might not have found it's way to every corner of the Microsoft universe...) I strongly believe that if Microsoft want to succeed in the educational sector they need to build a strong enterprise "software as a service" solution, not unlike what we see the contours of with the office live services launched last month. Building these services will be the easy part- not cannibalizing on existing partners will however be hard.