With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

Practice Fusion currently has "over 18,000 users," which would appear to be a big increase on the 1,300 medical professionals they had one year ago. The product originally launched in November of 2007, so it's nearly two years old now.

Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Healthcare?

A post on the Practice Fusion blog today asks the question: is "cloud computing" right for health IT? We reported earlier this week that cloud computing is infiltrating virtually every corner of technology right now, but it still has dangers. We noted the recent hacking of Google Docs to steal internal Twitter documents, as one recent high profile example (high profile because the stolen documents were subsequently emailed to some news outlets, some of whom published the 'hot' docs).

However despite these risks Practice Fusion claims that the cost benefits of cloud computing in healthcare are significant, particularly in its EMR niche:

"Cost and poor usability have been cited as the biggest obstacles to adoption of health IT - especially Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems - and has resulted in problematically-low EHR adoption rates. Eliminating this cost, and the IT maintenance burdens that are often beyond the reach of small medical practices, clearly removes these significant roadblocks to EHR adoption."

Security and safety is of course the big potentially negative issue with cloud computing. But Practice Fusion points to several use cases where it says that cloud computing has advantages over desktop apps: disaster-recovery, hacks (because "SaaS providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford"), and privacy. All of those points come down to the premise that a cloud computing / SaaS specialist, such as Practice Fusion, has more expertise, more resources, and is generally better able to deliver those safety and security requirements.

That all sounds great in theory, however every case like the Twitter stolen documents one serves to undermine that argument. And there are just too many such cases right now.

Nevertheless, we're sure that over time cloud computing will become ever more secure. It's clear that Practice Fusion is a young company that is growing well. With Salesforce.com on its side too now, the future looks secure for them.

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

Salesforce wants to be the dominant cloud platform for business. Their view is that computing has seen two waves: the first was the mainframe, and then the PC client server, and now the third is cloud computing. They have been consistent about this since their inception in March 1999, so this is no recent bandwagon hopping.

2. They Have a Good Shot at Meeting This Ambition

They have a powerful mix of capability and relentless focus. They have the resources -- cash, cash flow, clients, track record, management team, and so on -- needed to execute on this vision. Their competitors are bigger, but Salesforce has the advantage of focus. They are pure play, and they have no legacy to protect.

3. They Are a Marketing Machine with Flair

Having attended a few big rah-rah events, such as Java One, I see that Dreamforce compares well on scale, details, and flair. Its messaging and visuals were consistent and powerful, and everything just worked well. This all costs a lot of money (which relates to the next point), but that money has to be well spent, and they seem to be doing that. The presentations had real flair and humor. Benioff knows how to be controversial to get press. They are a billion-dollar business that still acts like a start-up. Even the music was good.

4. Their Biggest Issue Is Maybe Price

There are many lower-cost competitors to their base CRM application. Now that SaaS is increasingly accepted, due in part to Salesforce's evangelical marketing, smaller competitors spending a tiny fraction of what they spend on marketing can undercut them. Their most visible competitor is Zoho, and it does not look like Zoho is going to shy away from this battle, and they have staying power. So Salesforce is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand they are competing with Oracle and SAP for big enterprise accounts. On the other hand they are fighting low-cost competitors, such as Zoho. This will require all their marketing and management skills.

5. They See Today's Troubled Economy as Their Moment to Win Big

They got their early big traction in the last downturn around 2001 and 2002 and have never looked back. They are greedy while others are fearful. They spend more, grow, and hire, while other firms lay off people. The basic economic advantages of cloud computing, such as lower capital expenditures and a faster time to market, resonate in a downturn to the point that they overcome the resistance of conservative buyers to cloud computing.

6. Their Vendor Eco-System Is Making Money and Acting Bullish

Salesforce knows that this matters. This is the lesson they learned from Microsoft. Will they move into the spaces currently occupied by vendors? Of course they will. Vendors will have to be agile; that is just how the game works. But today, in these tough markets, we see vendors that are profitable, growing, hiring, and raising money. The winners in many segments are being defined now. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur in this space. Salesforce knows how to leverage all its capability to make a few winners do very well and then promote that success big time, thus inspiring others to come on board.

7. They Believe That Good Software Design Matters to the Core Economics of Cloud Computing

They refer constantly to their "multi-tenant kernel," which sounds very techie for a such a marketing-driven company. It does appear that they are not suffering from the scaling and reliability problems that we have seen affecting consumer Web 2.0 ventures such as Twitter and Facebook.

8. They Also Know How to Partner with Big Companies to Make Themselves Look Bigger

They wheeled out large companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, as partners. The message was, "We are at the center of an eco-system with big partners." This makes large conservative enterprise buyers feel comfortable.

9. Focused Research and Development

They have a predictable and focused R&D plan, with a major theme each year. This again makes large conservative buyers feel comfortable: they know what to expect.

10. They Will Need to be Careful About Usability Issues

They are adding so much functionality and so many partners that they face the danger of users getting confused and going to simpler point solutions. That "hairball-of-complexity" problem bedeviled Microsoft as it grew fast, but Microsoft enjoyed a lock-in that Salesforce cannot count on. The SaaS world is naturally lock-in resistant, with low switching costs. There is no sign of this being an immediate problem for the company, but it is something they will have to look out for.

See also our most recent story about Salesforce: Salesforce.com Says Hello World.

Adobe's Kevin Lynch considers it his company's role to enable the "fourth generation of software" that will bring a fusion of cloud computing and rich desktop applications to users (by using Adobe Air, of course). At the same time, though, he also acknowledged that Adobe is looking at purely web-based applications with Photoshop.com and Acrobat.com, though he sees Adobe's focus as being on enabling technologies.

In contrast to this, Dave Girouard, who manages Google's enterprise business, sees it as Google's mission to bring users "entirely into the cloud" and not just to create a "cloud-like" experience. Girouard also used this opportunity to chastise the enterprise computing world as 'stagnant' and 'unenlightened' when it comes to considering the user experience for its clients and employees.

Saleforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff mostly talked about the importance of developers in building applications on top of Salesforce.com.

In the second part of the interview, the panelists spent most of the time talking about delivering value in the cloud and possible business models around cloud computing.

Comparing his company to Oracle and SAP, Benioff said they were "dying models" and comparing Salesforce.com to them would not even be fair.

Most of the panelists agreed that Microsoft's entry into the cloud computing business validated the market and, maybe unsurprisingly, argued that developers should look at the different options that are available to them now and decide which one would work best for the apps they are building.

It was a big party. Amazon and Google were also invited. The message - all aligned with Salesforce.com in their quest to be the dominant Cloud Computing platform for business.

LinkedIn was not at the party. The announcement of Force.com for Facebook, which you can see here, was illustrated with recruiting applications, which is LinkedIn's primary domain. This was designed to show that companies, i.e. the Salesforce.com customer base, could build Force.com applications and deploy them on Facebook.

Sheryl Sandberg told us why we should bother - 120m users on Facebook, 30m joined in the last 3 months (the same number that took them their first 3 years to build).

Oh, and Microsoft was not invited either. In any case they might have got upset at all the jokes about Sharepoint that Benioff used whenever he wanted to play to the gallery.

Benioff told a compelling big picture story that computing has gone through two waves, from mainframe to PC client server and that now we are in the third wave of Cloud Computing. Salesforce.com got into that game early and have the clout and the drive to imagine being the number one player in Cloud Computing for business - assuming that Google will be the number one for consumer.

Salesforce

Today, Salesforce.com also announced that it has created a number of tools that will make using the Visualization API easier for Salesforce's own customers and developers. These tools include code snippets and API harnesses and will allow Salesforce customers to create custom reporting and analysis applications for Salesforce's CRM solution or on top of Saleforce's newly announced Force.com platform.

Reporting in the Cloud

As Google points out, more and more companies are storing their data in the cloud, so being able to visualize this data and creating good reporting tools is becoming increasingly important. Creating these reports in the cloud as well seems like a logical step, and we expect that quite a few new applications will be created on top of the Visualization API.

For many years, Salesforce.com has had the policy of announcing their next big move on the eve of their annual Dreamforce event (aka, where Salesforce partners get to pitch their stuff). In past years they announced internal facing applications, used by employees. Even if the employees were talking to customers, it was still an internal app. The news was simply that it was SaaS.

Today Salesforce.com Says Hello World

They are announcing a way to build apps that connect the internal facing processes that drive and account for transactions with the external public web based apps. This is a big move. The two examples they showed were travel and recruitment, but it does not take too much imagination to think of more. Given the size of the Dreamforce ecosystem on display in the convention center, one assumes that there is a big pipeline of apps under development.

Which Way Do You Face?

As with any new tool or API, there are other ways to achieve the same end. The question is simply which way is more efficient. It is really a question of which way you face. Do you look from the web into back end enterprise systems? That is the traditional way it is done today. The web developer asks the back end system how they want their data and how it will get data back. The Salesforce.com way looks the other way, from the back end systems out to the world.

Timing Is Good To Get Developers

They are likely to get a lot of traction with developers for three reasons:

1. Enterprise SaaS is going mainstream, it is a big market to get into right now.

2. Consumer services are facing a downturn, developers need something new.

3. Getting into back end processes is a better way to build long term client engagements.

Platforms Here, Platforms There

Platforms are everywhere. Developers love Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine looks so cool. There will be a bit of tug within the developers between what looks most technically elegant with least lock-in, versus what will make money quickly and reliably. It is possible that Salesforce will appeal to these more pragmatic types, the ones who have been the mainstay of the Microsoft ecosystem in the past.

In this era everything is different - the stack, the players and the potential for value creation. Let's outline the basic shape of this emerging era, in particular defining what makes up the new stack.

At the Top - SaaS: these are the end user services that we actually interact with, such as Basecamp. This is the "final mile". This is what we used to call application software, vertical systems or value added systems. Although SaaS is sometimes also used to describe the layer below, we prefer to label the top as SaaS and the middle as Cloud Computing. Typically this layer has had thousands of companies. These are our bootstrapped Gritty Entrepreneurs.

In the Middle - Cloud Computing: this is the Cloud where we witness the "sound and fury" of BigCos battling it out - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and others. This layer is the most fluid and where all the deals are. This layer can be seen as two layers, but the difference is very blurry. Some SaaS companies create some "middleware" that they position in this layer. Some start-ups create middleware as their primary focus, with an end game of getting acquired by one of the Cloud BigCos. Over time, these will tend to get rolled up into a few big platforms that compete by providing higher levels of abstraction for developers.

At the Bottom - Core Technology: this is what we might call "traditional Silicon Valley", hard core patent-protected technology sold to big companies that use it as part of their stack. Arista, the latest venture from Andreas Bechtolsheim falls into this category.

Spectators And Players

Most of us are spectators in the Cloud Computing game. It is fun to watch the big guys duke it out and ReadWriteWeb will continue to report on that. Entrepreneurs need to understand the strategies of the big players who will be their "platform partner". But we all have lots of opportunities to be players at the top of the stack, in the SaaS layer. This is where there are low barriers to entry, massively reduced R&D costs and incumbents who will be slow to embrace SaaS for fear of cannibalizing their core business.

Has The Stack Value Inverted?

Traditionally, value was at the bottom of the stack, which is why Microsoft and Intel were so dominant in the past. With a few notable exceptions like SAP, the top of the stack tended to be smaller companies.

It is possible that this has inverted, that the real value is now at the top of the stack and not at the bottom. For example, Arista will probably be very successful, but their market will be limited to the few companies who build huge data centers. Those clients will place huge orders but will also have a lot of negotiating clout.

Lock-In And Network Effects?

So maybe the value is all in the middle now? This is certainly where all the action is today. The two big questions at this layer are:

1. Lock-in? How easy will it be to move your SaaS service between Amazon AWS, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and other contenders? Today there is quite a lot of technical lock-in, you cannot move from one to another without some re-coding. But is that a big deal? No, because a) any Platform that jacks up prices will get hammered by their competitors and b) when you do need to move, it may require some coding changes but the move is transparent to end users. So, very little lock-in.

2. Viral Network Effects? Market leaders will get a lower cost of sale, but there is no social media viral effect at the Cloud Computing Platform layer.

Without Lock-In or Viral Network Effects, this layer will be commoditized. It will be very, very big but it will be a thin margin commodity business that is all about scale.

So The SaaS Cream Floats To The Top?

This is our theory. The value is with the small SaaS companies in the "final mile" interacting with end users. This is what we are seeing with our bootstrapped Gritty Entrepreneurs.

What About Players Across Layers?

Next week I will be at Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com annual event in San Francisco. Salesforce.com is the SaaS pioneer that defined the market. At some stage they decided that being on the top layer only was not enough and they created their Force.com "platform" on which others could create applications.

IBM also operates at many layers of the stack. But they do so with separate divisions that would be large companies in their own right.

It will be interesting to see how this stack evolves and specifically how well Salesforce.com succeeds with their mission to operate at both the top and the middle layer.

If you run a traditional enterprise software company, you have plenty of reasons to feel warm and comfortable:

1. Your conservative customers agree with you that change is bad and new technology is a terrible risk. (The people among your clients who don't agree with this won't be talking to you, they will be busy innovating - so you won't hear an opposing view).

2. Your Annual Maintenance Revenues continue to grow, as clients cannot risk a problem with software that is mission critical and complex. As your product is now quite stable, the profit margin is wonderful. (You don't notice that the SaaS barbarians are scaling your castle walls using these fat margins as ladders, saying: "Our SaaS monthly cost is less than your current AMC".)

3. Your Professional Services business continues to grow. Conservative clients prefer to go to the company that built the software, rather than a third party, so you can eat into your ecosystem whenever you have a revenue short-fall. (The fact that the software needs this much implementation hasn't gone unnoticed by the SaaS proponents).

In this benign financial environment, you look at a downturn as a good time to emphasize words like "tried and tested, stable, enterprise, integrated, customized, safety" and so on. You can assume that any drop in License Fee revenue is simply a cyclical problem, that good times will return automatically.

The frog in the slowly boiling water also feels warm and comfortable for a while...

It Is Hard For Old Timers To Get SaaSy

Repeating old mantras in the face of fundamental change is natural, because making that change is really, really hard:

1. Putting SaaS financing on an old product is simply the ASP model and that is terrible economics. You will report horrible results to investors for a long time before it turns positive.

2. However carefully you position your SaaS offering versus your traditional product, you will legitimize SaaS to your conservative clients and hasten the decline of your traditional business.

3. Your current client base is not much help. You need to position the new SaaS offering for a new market, where you will be competing on a level playing field with the start-ups.

Lou Gerstner observed in his famous book on IBM's turnaround in the early 1990s, "Teaching The Elephant To Dance", that culture is everything. Big companies need to learn to act like start-ups again.

IBM: Still Dancing

Lou Gerstner's culture shake-up must have been more than temporary, for once again we see IBM, as big and as old as it gets in IT, leading from the front. Just like they embraced the PC as it threatened the Mainframe and then embraced Linux and open source, so now they are embracing SaaS. This is despite facing all the risks described above.

IBM can be bold primarily because the most critical culture that Gerstner brought back was talking to the client to find out what they want. You can always find some people in a big client who support the old way. But if you have a conversation at senior management levels and contrast SaaS with the old model, you will find tremendous enthusiasm for SaaS.

IBM's move into SaaS is complex, as they are a big company with many moving parts. They are also experts at extending the life of really, really old technology with a tweak here, an image make-over there. AS/400 anyone? IBM is also very good at packaging up all the pieces in a way that clients find attractive, with a few little bits of high value "special sauce" added to all the free and commodity bits in the package. In other words, IBM knows how to make money whichever way the wind blows.

Vignette: Rejuvenating Their Enterprise CMS Brand

Anybody remember when CMS (Content Management System) was the hot technology? If so, maybe you bought stock in Vignette when they did their IPO in February 1999. If you sold before March 2000 you did pretty well. Since then of course, the VIGN stock price has suffered the Dot Com bubble burst and nuclear winter.

For a while Vignette used their IPO cash hoard to buy up smaller cash-strapped enterprise vendors for bargain prices. That seemed like a street smart thing to do, but then SaaS came along to take away some of the fun. Then in April 2008, Vignette changed tack and acquired Vidavee, a SaaS player in video content.

Vignette is well-placed to do more. They have cash in the bank, positive cash flow, they have always understood what enterprises want from the Net and now they can make more aggressive moves in SaaS.

How Is The SaaS Pioneer Doing?

Next week I am at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. Salesforce.com has done more to build the SaaS market than anybody. They are in an interesting position. If we view this as a battle of Romans (big, established enterprise vendors) versus Barbarians (pure play SaaS start-ups), Salesforce.com has the scale of the Romans and the positioning of the Barbarians. It should be an interesting week.

"When we met Marc [Benioff], he had a vision and had written a two page e-mail detailing that we need to make this as easy as buying a book on Amazon,' Harris says. At the time, there was Amazon, Google and E-bay.

In early 1999, they built a prototype. Stealing tabs from Amazon and buttons from Yahoo!, they built a site.

Om: What has the transition been from then and now and why?

Harris: As a technology, we wanted to build a platform first. One that is beautiful from a technology perspective. But you risk losing touch with why you're doing it. Originally it was going to be for sales people and there were various abstract layers; we quickly realized the need to unify them. We continued adding layers in response to our customers; columns, end user interface. At that point we realized it could be a platform; we didn't consciously do that.

When we started, a lot of people said they didn't want to trust their information to anyone; data, privacy, these were all big things, and people were concerned with trusting their customer records and leads with another company. We made the huge step, and now people trust the information services.

It's still very early days in platforms--are you going to use someone else's platform (app engine from Google, Amazon) or use your own?

It's all about the database. Databases have evolved. Today you don't really go into business to write it, you find one. I see platforms heading in the same direction.

We sell to business. We do a lot of work on compliance and security issues to meet the needs of enterprise. For business we are very appropriate; for websites, go to Google. Amazon gives you CPU time or storage. We too have a lot of technology that is pre-built that you can leverage if you want; analytics, search, 24.7 web services, API, it's all there.

Michael: What about compliance and security and is anything Salesforce.com can do to get apps to go viral.

Harris: We want to have a directory where people can go find pages quickly. Free pricing models are one way to drive a viral model. We are looking at ways how to work with Facebook. We are looking to involve developers more.

Om: Infrastructure; what are the challenges

Harris: About two years ago we did go through some serious issues and part of it was due to eBay. They could give us more power but no space, or space and no power - so we moved everything to new data centers.

We made two big mistakes: we changed everything all at once, which is a big risk for any business, and moved onto large scale systems. Pushing scale in a vertical sense created a complexity that was just too hard. Then we hired the guy from eBay to make sure it never happened again.

There is no blueprint on building a scalable service; you never replace it with V2 so you are forever changing it. There are best practices that have evolved, and people should follow them if they want to do this.

Early on we thought of tech innovation as software and infrastructure, and that innovation can occur on one or the other. To truly innovate you need to think of it as one thing and change all areas.

In that context LinkedIn's InMail just seemed like an irritation. However, I am now re-evaluating that. Partly because I am thinking that I may need something like SalesForce, just a basic contact manager. There are many good SalesForce alternatives; we are totally spoiled for choice in that area. But that seems like one more thing to manage/learn and possibly pay for (or use a free service that may not survive).

So, LinkedIn doing both starts to make sense. With a few provisos. The first is a pricing scheme I can agree to. That does not include Free, I don't trust Free in this context, because it too often means, "lock you in and then charge you too much later." Nor will I pay $20 or $50 per month for something that limits how many mails I can send.

Their $60 per year plan sounds good. That's $5 per month. But I would want unlimited mails for my own contacts whether they are in LinkedIn or not. They can still charge me for the right to send mails to people in LinkedIn who I don't know, which sounds like wonderful spam control. So for $60 I get Gmail like functionality. OK, InMail is a long way from Gmail, but all that is is some email software, and I am sure LinkedIn can license, buy or build some good webmail software, ideally with offline sync capability from day one.

Not only would this give them a really solid subscription revenue base, but every email would be viral marketing for LinkedIn.

Why would I use this rather than Gmail? Four reasons:

1. Automatic contact management, particularly the self-updating nature (i.e., a contact changes jobs and I can see that and their contact details are always up to date).
2. One less system to use, as LinkedIn is becoming enough of a habit that it now takes time each day.
3. Built-in spam filter based on white-list. Yes, Gmail has great spam control, but it is still a total pain in Outlook.
4. LinkedIn actually helps me sell/recruit/buy through networking. That is a totally different level of value proposition from just helping me to send emails or manage contacts.

Could InMail send/receive mail outside LinkedIn? Of course it could. Email standards are open.

I can envision all kinds of cool CRM 2.0 type features based on the social graph.

Of course, all this is possible because Microsoft has been asleep at the switch. It has been apparent for many years, to many people that the real social graph is in the email system and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange is where biz people keep their emails. Microsoft could have done this already, easily. Possibly they still could, but they are leaving it a bit long.

I am sure Google gets the opportunity. They have the same social graph within Gmail. I wonder what they have brewing in their labs?

Once you make the decision to break the Outlook habit as I have already done, the next step to something like InMail is not a very big one. Already my contact database in LinkedIn is more up to date and clean than my Gmail one.

Like all social networks, LinkedIn is under pressure to "open up." They may be be able to push back on that front if they create enough value so that biz people decide to live in LinkedIn as opposed to living in Outlook and SalesForce or the equivalent CRM. That would save hard $ from those services, so its a good recession play as well. LinkedIn has some weak plays for RSS aggregation, but they can easily do something better that makes LinkedIn more like a fully customizable start page.

LinkedIn could be the big IPO story that will validate this market and the one that we've been waiting for since Google went public.

1) on self-managed infrastructure running the Bungee Application Server;

2) on the multi-tenant Bungee Grid at datacenters in the United States, Europe;

3) on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), but managed by Bungee Labs.

Here's a graphic that illustrates this:

The pricing model is also attractive, and according to Bungee Labs spokespeople, much cheaper than Salesforce:

Bungee Labs is also looking into making some of their community source code available, for the Bungee Application Server under several software source code licenses. They have made two software licenses available in draft form for review and discussion. However they are not keen to completely open source the platform.

All of these moves - the federated hosting, utility pricing model, looking into open source - are designed to find ways to differentiate Bungee Connect in what is a tough SME market dominated by Salesforce and other big companies like Oracle and Microsoft. We were told that Bungee has 3,500 developers on its platform currently, which suggests that it needs to find ways to get more developer support and build its brand against stiff competition. Right now Bungee Connect is a sophisticated technical platform - we have covered it now 3 times on RWW, so it's obviously impressive - but one gets the feeling that competing against established brands like Salesforce requires innovative marketing too.

Federated hosting, low pricing and perhaps eventually open sourcing parts of the platform are good moves - but the bottom line is that those features need to attract new customers. It'll be worth checking back on Bungee Labs again at next year's Web 2.0 Expo!

Out of the some 20,000 sources utilized, some are traditional, but many are "web 2.0" like Facebook, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, as well as web-based news sources, blogs, and job postings.

LinkedIn Integration

The data which is found is then presented within the context of enterprise CRM applications in use today. Currently, SalesView is available as a mashup for Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, but will soon be offering mashups for Microsoft CRM and Landslide Technologies, and, by the second quarter of 2008, a standalone application will be available.

Salesview/Salesforce Mashup

The product will be offered based on the "freemium model - their words, by the way, meaning they're at least tapped in enough to subscribe to Wired - starting with a free version for light research. Pro and Team versions round-out the offerings, including more features, like unlimited watch lists, specialized providers, and the sharing of customized agents among members of the sales team.

InsideView's customers already include some big names like Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, Jobscience, LucidEra, Rearden Commerce, ServiceSource, StarCite Inc., SuccessFactors and Symantec.Cisco/WebEx, Jobscience, LucidEra, Rearden Commerce, ServiceSource, StarCite Inc., SuccessFactors and Symantec, among others.

In addition to InsideView, there are more companies that are also blurring the line between enterprise business and the social web. Another CRM offering, this time from Tactile CRM, started using the Google Contacts API to import Gmail contacts into their web-based CRM tool.

And then there is Oracle's CRM on Demand service that was announced in November 2007, which includes social networking features like those found in MySpace or Facebook, such as the ability to create and join groups, ala Facebook.

Another is Kintera, whose software-as-a-service has been calling itself "social CRM" for awhile, since their product captures online activity, like email and web form donations, and merges it with offline activity, entered via standard data entry techniques.

However, InsideView claims to be one of the first true examples of a Socialprise CRM application, and, in comparison with others, it seems like a valid claim.

"We are experiencing an inevitable convergence of social media, user generated content and enterprise applications. SalesView is born of this trend, and delivers on its promise with a smart, fresh and complete approach to business search and intelligence," said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer of InsideView.

The connected social web in business? Bring it on. And while you're at it, maybe it's time to consider unblocking Facebook on the firewall, too.