ReadWriteEnterprise

I did not think of the very obvious when writing a post yesterday about Jive Software's new members to its board of directors.

The men Jive chose are all talented, intelligent and well-respected people. They have risen to the top of their fields. But where are the women?

Six months ago we did an overview of trends in the idea management market. At the time, most of the action was going on in the internal idea/innovation management area. This time around, the new trends are emerging around externally focused idea management solutions.

Each of the three trends we identified six months ago now has a corollary trend.

Microsoft is trying hard to become an open source friendly company, and it's made some strides since the days in which Steve Ballmer was calling Linux a cancer. But today, everyone pays lip service to open source. It's harder to walk the walk than to talk the talk, as we explored in our article on how to spot open-washing.

Microsoft has open-sourced various projects, is working with developers to run open source programming languages on its operating systems and recently hired a senior director of open source communities.

This morning, Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire social media monitoring company Radian6, a market leader in the social analytics space, for $276 million. Radian6 boasts half the Fortune 100 as customers, including AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS. Last month Salesforce.com announced Radian6 for Salesforce, a module that enabled Salesforce.com users to monitor and engage in social media without leaving the Salesforce.com interface.

Radian6 provides social media monitoring tools that go beyond just listing mentions of a keyword in social media. It provides detailed dashboards and basic sentiment analysis to give companies a more in-depth view of  how their brand is being discussed in the social media ecosystem. According to Constellation Research principal analyst and CEO R "Ray" Wang, "Most customers utilize Radian6 for brand management and monitoring, sales and lead generation, Social CRM, customer service, competitive intelligence, trend analysis, and crisis management." Salesforce.com already had some basic social monitoring and analytics features but the Radian6 tools will greatly enhance its abilities.

But are businesses ready to handle all the social data that can be mined from the net?

Jive Software is adding four new members to its board of directors, including one of Mark Zuckerberg's direct reports responsible for technical operations at Facebook; the current president of McAfee Software and the Google technologist responsible for the development of Google Chrome and HTML 5 initiatives.

The move is part of what appearts to be Jive's efforts to prepare for an Initial Public Offering. It shows investors that the company has the clout to achieve a level of strength that positions it to compete even more with its chief target: Microsoft.

You dial the conference call number. Or you can copy and paste it into Skype, or just click the link in your phone's e-mail app. Then you have to enter your 12 digit conference ID number, or whatever this particular system calls it. If you're on your phone and away from your computer, maybe you jotted it down on a piece of scrap paper. If not, you need to switch back and forth between your dialer and the app that the ID number.

You punch in the number. You wait. Nothing happens. You realize you forgot to hit pound at the end. OK, pound. The robotic voice on the other end slowly, carefully reads the whole number back to you. Are you sure this is the number you meant to dial? Yes of course it is, stupid robot! You hit "one" to confirm. You wait. Sorry, this access code is incorrect. Please enter your 12 digit conference participant ID access code number followed by pound now. Arh, that wasn't the right number after all. You try again, this time remembering to hit pound. The robot repeats it back to you again and you confirm. Finally, you enter the conference call, a bit late.

Pleasantries are exchanged, the conference gets rolling and then...someone's call gets dropped. Everyone waits for them to dial back in and run the access code gauntlet.

Over the weekend we told you about Oracle's killer quarter. One of the interesting things about how well Oracle is doing is that a large part of the company's revenue growth is coming from new licenses for its proprietary database software. Even as database types are diversifying and open source competitors step up their game, Oracle is still crushing it.

David Linthicum wrote earlier this year that the won't open source won't gain in the cloud. I disagree. Plenty of open source software is being used to build clouds. But I think what we're seeing is that the cloud isn't curbing the adoption of proprietary software.

Are you still using proprietary databases in your enterprise? Are you expanding the use of proprietary databases, or phasing them out?

In the early 1960s, Paul Baran invented packet switching. Packet switching became the foundation ARPANET, which later gave way to the Internet. Baran died at the age of 84 last Saturday. But packet switching lives on after all these years as the primary foundation of computer networking.

But just as chips, databases and programming languages have entered a period of increased specialization, we may be seeing the beginnings of specialized network topologies. Last week several Internet giants, including Facebook, Google and Yahoo formed the Open Network Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The group's first priority is a protocol called OpenFlow. The key idea is to give network engineers more control over switches by giving them customizable firmware, supplanting the one size fits all paradigm of modern networking equipment.

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Every week we take a look at the latest developments in its use in the enterprise.

This week we look at what may be the first mobile-only business suite, a new secure broswer for viewing enterprise Web applications on iOS and the rate of tablet adoption in the enterprise.

In part one we took a look at several features expected in Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, including facial recognition, instant-on and tablet support.

Now we'll delve into a few more, including a special bonus section with some improbable but possible changes to the flagship Microsoft product.