• Moderator: Nick Hoover, Senior Editor, InformationWeek
• Speaker - Anne Berkowitch, Co-Founder & CEO, SelectMinds
• Speaker - J.B. Holston, CEO and President, NewsGator
• Speaker - Umberto Milletti, CEO, InsideView

Businesses can take advantage of social networks by finding innovative ways to reach out to people. Looking at who you know and how you know them can benefit you. Knowing a personal connection to someone that you are trying to contact (for sales) is helpful. The blurring between home, personal, and business life is making this information more available and better able to leverage. People are able to capture more valuable long term information from social networks.

A lot of social network applications can be taken from the talent management space. Deploying alumni networks as a talent source is also a great asset. Alumni represent a well-known and relevant population. This provides a great economic benefit from a social network.

If you are running a sales organization and looking at building a pipeline of leads, consider how these leads are relevant. The ability to get more leads is apparent in finding the right person, right connection, and right contact. Underlying everything are productivity and efficiency. How much time are sales reps spending researching and pursuing each opportunity? With information on social networks, the time can be greatly decreased. Knowledge sharing is something that can be actively measured.

The ROI varies with the business issue that’s trying to be addressed by a particular network. Recruiting for example has a very concrete, measurable ROI. Knowledge share gets a little more tricky. How do you measure how much is shared and the impact on business systems? Businesses need to determine what specific goal they are trying to address.

CFOs want to see ROI, not intuitive information. If you can demonstrate engagement and participation in these networks and knowledge sharing tools, more and more executives are getting comfortable seeing how it’s used at a qualitative and process level. It’s a very case by case basis.

One major crisis that we see in our customers is the competition between sales and marketing. Each wants to do their own thing, they go together like oil and water. However, the push of the economy is now forcing them work together. This is a great opportunity for IT to step in and help them collaborate and be more productive.

Other resistance from companies are how to manage what they are trying to accomplish while still giving employees free reign of sites like Facebook. What are the incentives for using these technologies? How does it fit into your company culture and productivity scale? You must bring meaning to the structure of engaging in social networks.

Social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook would not exist if people did not contribute information to them. However, if people don’t know that it is there, it does not exist. People need to see the value and get drawn in to engage. There are two ways that companies get into social networks. Tie it into the business process. The general idea of social networks are intuitive and easy to understand, which make it an easier case to present to chief executives. Make it clear - how do you go about it and what’s the value?

Social networks are intrinsically about extending the network, the more contacts you have, the more to choose from when researching a specific contact. It also has to be integrated into your dataworkflow. Companies are going to build a variety of networks inside and outside the enterprise. The big companies (SAP, IBM) are all rushing to offer collaborative and social network functionality. However, this is not entirely useful unless it’s integrated into the entire infrastructure.

Introduction

Virtualization is a word used by consumers and also by IT. But, do we all mean the same thing?

A very cool video from Cisco provided answers to “what is virtualization” from an  engineering perspective, data center perspective, IT perspective and the user perspective (virtual world).

Virtualization is about breaking the bonds between applications and server hardware, nodes and networks, applications and operating systems.

Why is this interesting? Virtualization holds the promise to transform the way we work, live, learn and play.

Why virtualize?

The real estate boom over the last 30 years has driven people to the suburbs. People didn’t mind commuting for an hour with lower gas prices. Today, we have a weak economy and gas prices are high. Something has to change.

Many are opting to stay at home. Businesses are trying out telecommuting, some (like Cisco) are even offering telepresence. This helps by reducing carbon footprint. Corporations are breaking free from physical requirements. The global workforce is also having an impact on the network. These changes are having a huge impact on the network.

We are on the cusp of transitioning from virtualization to VIRTUALIZATION.

“One to many….many to one.”

This is Cisco’s idea of virtualization.

Consider the different roles we play in life - one to many. Spouse, executive, friend, parent, gym rat. This would be “one to many”. This is exactly what virtualization does. It allows you to partition resources off that you can use on the fly.

Where do I start?

Virtualization starts with server and storage. But, it’s the network that touches everything - it spans the physical, the virtual, and the cloud. This provides the connectivity to all these resources. The network brings transparency to the picture. It allows you to better monitor performance and better implement security - great benefits!

Why do I need this?

At Cisco, we saw that we were only using 20% of our storage utilization. We wanted to virtualize our datacenters. When we did that, we were able to get 68% storage utilization. For each year that we were able to defer buildup, we saved $40 million.

From a business standpoint, virtualization helps you differentiate and work faster. Provisioning in minutes, improved productivity and competitive differentiation, using less power (environmental impact), and up the ante of business continuity. If VMWare fails? It’s OK. You can reprovision it on the fly.

Is it for everyone?

IT organizations tend to be siloed. You have the IT side and the Operations side. Each has responsibility. For virtualization to work, these walls have to come down. The concept of virtualization depends on shared resources.

Metcalfe’s Law of the Network Effect

Everytime you add a node to the network, you increase the value. This is what happens with virtualization. Every device you virtualize increases the power of each device. More control of environment and more efficiency.

This leads to…

Cloud computing.

Wow, show of hands from the audience when Marie asked “how many are using cloud computing?” and “how many are using your own clouds?” - not a lot of hands were raised. Interesting considering the coverage cloud computing has and the focus of it.

Cloud computing has three possibilities at Cisco:

• Flexible infrastructure (hosting)
• Abstract services (APIs)
• Application services (SaaS)

Automation is going to be key, and will need to integrate virtualization-aware elements.

Can you imagine if you wanted interoperability in the cloud? People haven’t even begun thinking about it.

Conclusion

As you virtualize, your role will change. You will think more about strategy. But keep in mind these “minefields” of virtualization:

• Insufficient planning
• Lack of standards
• Weak security

Security cannot be an afterthought. It has to be planned. We’ve seen new forms of malware, hypervisor attacks, and root kit infections.

As higher expectations from end users evolve, we’re becoming not server oriented, but SERVICE oriented.

Tips:

• Think holistically
• Consider IT culture - equipment and people

IBM’s presentation was cleverly titled 2mor0@Wrk - Tomororow work and Web 2.0.

Overview

Web 2.0 is delivering a whole different paradigm of communication. The slide is Lotus Symphony - NOT PPT. Over 2 million downloads.

There is an information overload that impacts individual productivity in the workplace. It has a profound effect on organizational productivity. A more complex organization entity provides more pressure and more inefficiencies in workplace. Up to 70% of time can be used looking for the WRONG information.

Collaboration mitigates information overload. It allows you to identify experts and opinions.

The collaboration agenda. Enterprises are at the onset of exploring these features. Web 2.0 is giving us the capacity to do more. Collaboration optimizes business outcomes - global, secure and dynamic.The most progressive companies are looking at UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS. Making sure that directories and profiles are fully mobile.

Collaboration should be a contextual part of the workflow, going directly into applications.

IBM’s collaboration strategy is to deliver these services through online or offline services.

Demonstration

Executive IT architect Ron Sebastian provided a demonstration of IBM’s collaboration strategy. IBM’s Web 2.0 solutions span delivery platforms:

• Platform - web as  platform
• Application - development
• People - social computing

Lotus Connections - a family of social computing software that provides profile lookup and community capabilities. Think of Facebook, Yahoo Groups, and delicious combined in one portal.

Ron demonstrated these social services embedded into a healthcare provider application. Semantic tagging is available, contact information and commenting. Not only are we providing service to customers, you can integrate sync capability to directly call the person you want.

The biggest aspect of Lotus Connection? It’s all integrated.

A new service - Project Bluehouse. This is a SaaS delivery of these collaborated capabilities. The store and share can manage and share documents within and outside the company. Access control is no longer an issue.

Collaborative Web 2.0 services available as standalone products that also work in a mobile environment.

Case Study: Natural Disaster Management Mashup

Boeing came up with twenty different scenarios that they could handle through their systems. The problem was the one they didn’t count on. One example was Katrina - how to deliver supplies to the area: what airports were open? Where could they land? The problem was they could not find one list of public, private and military airports, nor what was open. The mashup took different feeds to allow the deacon maker to make a more rapid and intelligent decision based on information on where they could fly in the appropriate supplies. From open information sites like AirNav.com and personal contacts, users were able to mashup the information to make better decisions.

Conclusion

IBM announced the IBM Center for Social Software, proving their commitment to connect, collaborate, and innovate. Users and academics can work together to how these innovations can be applied to businesses and provide value to the market.

There has been some question of whether or not IBM can pull this off and move into the collaborative Web 2.0 market. Despite some criticism, it looks like IBM has really taken a step forward in advancing their products and services to meet market needs.

People drive better business outcomes. Connecting, collaboration, and innovation is key. Having the right tools and information to do that eases pressure that many organizations feel and brings Web 2.0 technologies to the heart of businesses.

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