Just like the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, is Web 2.0 a bubble waiting to burst? Analyst firm Research and Markets says that it is:  

“The Internet changes everything” was a common phrase in the 1995-2000 period. Indeed, a lot of things did change for business, but a lot of things stayed fundamentally the same. Anyone who had the nerve to say that some early Internet businesses were overvalued, that there was a bubble and that many of the ventures had no business fundamentals was decried as someone who didn’t “get it.” …  

Today, the Web 2.0 phenomenon is being described as another bubble in the making, although few have the public nerve to predict when the bubble is going to burst. … By taking a realistic approach to Web 2.0, both types of stakeholder can help ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bath water when the bubble does burst. 

OK, everybody just relax. There’s no question that the Web 2.0 “phenomenon” has suffered its fair share of hype, but to say the current situation mirrors the heady dot-com days of yesteryear is a bit of a stretch. 

Yes, there’s no shortage of Web 2.0 evangelists predicting that blogs, wikis, mashups and so on are “changing everything” — much like those who in the 1990s declared that e-commerce was reshaping life as we knew it. Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. 

The major difference between now and then, however, is that venture capitalists are much more selective about which Web 2.0 companies they back and how much they invest. During the 1990s, that was hardly the case; any two-bit programmer with a dial-up connection in his garage could land big bucks from hysterical VCs eager to cash in on the so-called Web boom. 

As Scott Duke Harris of the Mercury News wrote earlier this month, VCs also have significantly less influence now than they did then, because entrepreneurs themselves are more savvy and self-sufficient: 

Once upon a time on the Web, there was a lot of talk about “burn rate” — a phrase describing the way start-ups like Webvan and Pets.com went through venture capital like a blowtorch. Many flamed out. 

Today, the operative phrase is “bootstrapping.” In “Web 2.0,” a term reflecting the medium’s maturation into a dynamic, cost-effective business platform, penny-pinching entrepreneurs simply don’t need venture funding as much as they used to. 

Consequentially, the business fundamentals of many current Web 2.0 startups are actually pretty solid. A number will inevitably fall by the wayside, as a certain percentage of startups always do. But there’s no reason to believe the Web 2.0 phenomenon is a bubble waiting to burst. Blogs and wikis, which are relatively cheap to develop and deploy, have already proven their worth in the consumer market and the enterprise, and you can expect them to continue doing so for years to come.

I spotted them this afternoon as I was perusing my VoiceCon conference agenda. There they were, those three little letters that can make or break any IT project: ROI.

Calculating the ROI of any proposed application or service is often essential to convincing management to fund the IT project in question. Unified communications (UC) is no exception.

At a session dedicated to determining the ROI of UC, reps from systems integrator INX, IP telephony vendor ShoreTel, and the ubiquitous Microsoft offered their advice:

• Look for hard savings first. How much less per month will it cost to maintain a UC system, versus your current, traditional communications tools?
• Then look into productivity gains. And be specific. If you determine deploying UC will improve productivity by 5%, how will workers spend that extra time?
• Recognize that ROI is different for different types of workers. For knowledge workers, ROI is best measured by looking at end results: increased sales and revenue, for instance. For contact center workers on the other hand, ROI depends on reducing transaction times. For example, how many more transactions per hour do you expect call center reps to take thanks to UC?
• Consider the future. Microsoft predicts the costs of VoIP will be reduced by half within three years. Be sure to take into account market factors like this when trying to determine the ROI of UC.

On Wednesday morning here at VoiceCon, Siemens and IBM announced a new OEM agreement that lets IBM license Siemens’ unified communications (UC) application, OpenScape. IBM plans to use OpenScape to improve upon its own Lotus UC offering, called Unified Telephony. 

After the announcement, I sat down with Andy Chew, Siemens senior VP for unified communications, and James Lawton, Siemens VP of strategic system integration. We talked a little about the IBM OEM, but what interested me more were their thoughts on the state of the UC market and Siemens’ approach to SMBs. 

Chew, who’s based in the U.K., told me that he thinks the UC market is still “immature,” but that migrating to UC should nonetheless be a priority for SMBs. In addition to improving communication capabilities and lowering costs, SMBs can adopt UC with little risk if they opt for the hosted services or SaaS route, he said. 

Siemens currently offers hosted versions of its UC offerings, which SMBs can purchase on a monthly basis. If a customer decides Siemens’ OpenScape is not for them, for example, it can simply drop it without having to worry about breaking any long-term contract. 

As for security, Lawton assured me that at Siemens “security is at the base of everything.” While I can’t verify that independently (at least not from the floor of VoiceCon), it’s encouraging at least that a major UC vendor like Siemens seems to recognize the importance of security, especially for SMBs that might not have the resources to withstand a devastating cyberattack.  

Security, Lawton said, “is a mantra for us.” Amen to that.

Greetings from sunny San Francisco! I’m here this week for VoiceCon, where unified communications (UC) is the hot topic. The conference started in earnest on Tuesday morning, and so far includes a nice mix of technical advice as well as higher-level discussions (and debates) about the future of UC.  

One of the first sessions of the conference actually covered an even more basic topic: Just what do we mean by unified communications in the first place? While difficult to define, after taking in a number of the presentations here, this is my stab at it: 

Essentially, an enterprise UC environment is one in which network users can easily determine one another’s availability and communicate with one another using any number of tools (be it IM or VoIP , for example), whichever is most convenient at the time.  

The key to achieving value from UC in the enterprise, most here agree, is the ability to embed UC directly into business processes. For example, with UC capabilities built in, an account manager can not only identify but also get in touch with a colleague or customer directly through Salesforce.com. He or she can see if the person they need to talk to is online or not, figure out the best way to get in touch with that person, and with a click of a mouse do just that. 

The bottom line: UC is all about improving communication effectiveness.  

But I want to know what you think. Got a better definition for unified communications? Well, speak up and let’s get the conversation started!

It’s time to assess the risks posed by sloppy road warriors

One-third of mobile workers make a habit of hijacking their neighbors’ wireless connection or jumping onto unauthorized connections in public spaces, according to a new wireless security survey from Cisco Systems Inc. and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).SMBs these days have plenty of road warriors, so you should be asking yourself, what are my users doing? And do they know the dangers of this?This Cisco survey said that 73% of 700 mobile users claimed that they are not always cognizant of security threats and best practices when working on the road. Why is this? Take a look at the news and read about the latest stolen laptop with thousands of customer records on it.

If everyone on the planet jumped up and down at the same time, would the orbit of the earth shift? I doubt it. But I do know that if millions of people try to log in to their Skype accounts at the same time, it can knock the peer-to-peer Internet telephony service out of action for days. 

How do I know? Because that’s exactly what happened last week.  

For those unawares, Skype’s network crashed last Thursday, leaving its 220 million users without service for nearly two full days. The company, which is a division of the online auction giant eBay, initially blamed the outage on a “software issue,” while some bloggers speculated that a more sinister cause, namely a DoS attack, was behind the crash. 

Service was finally restored on Saturday morning, and today Skype’s Villu Arak explained on his Heartbeat blog what really took the network down: 

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update. 

File this incident under “unintended consequences.” I can just picture the millions upon millions of Windows users dutifully downloading their weekly update, restarting their machines and expecting all to be right with the world. Instead, they unwittingly shuttered, at least temporarily, one of Web 2.0’s most celebrated progeny. 

For parent company eBay, its response (or lack thereof) seems to have caused more damage to its reputation than the service outage itself did to Skype’s network. 

On GigaOM, blogger Om Malik writes: 

And in this moment of crisis, eBay’s senior management was AWOL. Ebay and Skype management are happy to talk to the press when delivering the good news, but in this crisis situation, the silence was deafening. 

Perhaps more ominous for Skype’s future advances into the SMB and enterprise markets are comments like these, posted on the All VoIP News blog:    

After the recent Skype outage I certainly would not use Skype for my business. If Windows updates cause millions of people to reboot their computers, and thus Skype is effected, there is something wrong. 

Ultimately, I don’t think you can blame Skype for failing to anticipate such a fluke occurrence as a network outage caused by millions of users rebooting their computers after a routine Windows Update. I know I certainly didn’t see it coming, and I doubt anyone else did either. Internet telephony is still a work in progress, and snafus like this are bound to happen from time to time.  

But Skype users certainly have a right to expect a better response and better customer service when such a drastic event does happen, especially from a major IT player like eBay. For its SMB users especially, those who depend on Skype to conduct daily business, anything less can prove costly. Maybe too costly to take a chance on a VoIP service like Skype in the first place 

So in addition to “unintended consequences,” here’s hoping eBay and Skype also file this incident under “lessons learned.”

The Baby Boomer retirement crisis has been like a guillotine poised over the heads of IT executives for a couple of years now. I’ve seen reams and reams of research papers, white papers, press releases and vendor pitches on how to deal with this crisis. We’re all waiting for the so-called brain drain to strike. Analysts and vendors are offering up oodles of good advice on how to prepare for it.

First, there is the advice on how to identify which parts of your organizations are at risk. Then there is the advice on how to make sure you retain the business knowledge and legacy technology skills that these retirees will take with them. Then there is the research on how to find replacement labor in a world where universities are producing fewer and fewer technologists.

But is the brain drain happening yet?

I’ve also read that many Baby Boomers are planning to work past retirement age. I’ve talked to several former CIOs who retired in their early sixties, yet they continue to work part time or full time as consultants. One fellow I talked to recently retired in his mid-sixties from his position as CIO of a government agency, and he planned to start a small consultancy to keep himself busy with part-time work. Before he knew it, another government agency in crisis came calling and he was working as an interim CIO for half a year.

The first Boomers are turning 62 this year. Fifty years ago, 62 was considered pretty old. These days, 62-year-olds are starting third careers.

So my question is this: Are any of you starting to lose Baby Boomers to retirement? What sort of business knowledge and legacy skills are they taking with them? And how are you dealing with it?

I’d love to hear from you. Write me at smcgillicuddy@techtarget.com.

The results are in from the Antivirus Fight Club at LinuxWorld, and, as expected, Clam AntiVirus, an open source project, did quite well when measured against commercial products.The competition was much more involved than initially described to me by Dirk Morris, CTO of Untangle. There were three rounds in the fight. Each antivirus product faced three groups of viruses.

First they faced a set of five test viruses (harmless files used for testing antivirus technology) from the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR). The second set consisted of 12 “in the wild” viruses collected by Untangle. The third set consisted of 17 viruses submitted by the public.

Overall, Kaspersky performed the best of any AV product. It stopped 97% of the viruses thrown at it. Clam AntiVirus performed second-best, with an overall catch rate of 91.4%. In third place was Norton, Symantec’s consumer AV product, which had an overall success rate of 88.6%

The worst performers were SonicWall (54.3%), Hauri (45.7%), Fortinet (45.7%) and WatchGuard (2.9%).

In his summary of the Fight Club results, Morris wrote that he is “surprised by how poor [sic] many of these solutions are performing. … Our goal in this test was not to scare people, or even drive people away from some vendors. We simply want to encourage discussion. Tests like these need to be open and transparent

There are bound to be some skeptics about this test. As one reader commented, this sample size of viruses is somewhat small. Would it be useful to introduce a larger test set of viruses?

Also, for some reason Untangle left Trend Micro out of this competition. Perhaps if there is a rematch, it will be included.

Projity announced this week the beta release of OpenProj, an open source, on-demand project management application that the San Mateo, Calif.-based SaaS vendor says is a “complete replacement” of Microsoft Project and a perfect fit for SMBs.  

According to Projity CEO Marc O’Brien, OpenProj has a similar user interface and virtually identical functionality as Microsoft Project. The two applications are also interoperable, meaning OpenProj can open all native Microsoft Project files, and vice versa. 

As an open source application, OpenProj is downloadable over the Internet for free, compared with Microsoft Project’s licensing fee of $1,000. Making the switch to OpenProj from Project, therefore, costs nothing, O’Brien said.  

Still, can an open source application ever truly replace a long-entrenched Microsoft offering like Project? The odds are slim, to say the least. 

But O’Brien has high hopes for OpenProj. He believes SMBs will be attracted to OpenProj not just by its nonexistent price, but also by its compatibility across multiple platforms — Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows –- and its accessibility from any PC with an Internet connection. 

In addition, O’Brien said Microsoft’s market positioning of Project makes it vulnerable. 

“It’s interesting because Microsoft Project is part of the Office family of products, but it’s not bundled in any of their suites,” O’Brien points out. “We think that gives us an opening.” 

OpenProj is currently available in French, English and Spanish versions, but in a sign of Projity’s lofty worldwide ambitions, other foreign language versions, including Mongolian and Tibetan, are in the works, O’Brien said.   

Since its announcement at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday, where he said it received a standing ovation, OpenProj is getting a “couple thousands downloads a day,” according to O’Brien. Ultimately, “We’re expecting between 7 and 11 million users very quickly,” O’Brien said. Lofty ambitions indeed. 

In a narrow sense, it is probably accurate to say that OpenProj can “replace” Project on any given PC or in any given SMB: It looks and sounds the same as Project and can perform all the same functions. But it is unlikely OpenProj will ever “replace” Project in the overall project management marketplace. With over 28 million registered users worldwide, Microsoft Project seems to have its heels dug in too deep for that.

The situation looks grim.  

More and more employees are bringing unsanctioned consumer technologies into the workplace and, if the trend continues, IT departments will increasingly find themselves swamped with maintenance and support requests and their networks teeming with unsecured devices and applications. 

Even worse, IT is helpless to stop the madness. Your only hope is to control meddlesome employees and their rogue apps by adopting something called an “internal customer care cooperative model.” 

According to “Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management,” a new and apparently Mahayana Buddhism-inspired survey/report from Yankee Group, almost half of the workers polled said they “feel more empowered than IT to control their personal IT environment.” They want IM and wikis and other social networking tools, and if their IT departments won’t supply them, workers are prepared to fill the void themselves. 

To avoid all-out IT anarchy, the report recommends that instead of trying (and inevitably failing) to stem the flow of unauthorized technologies, IT departments surrender to employees the power to manage their own IT destinies. According to Yankee Group: 

“IT must adopt a Zen-like approach to manage the technology and the rogue employee. Ceding control to end users via a internal customer care cooperative model reduces IT’s burden while improving customer satisfaction. The Zen support model is fundamentally different than most IT organizations today because it doesn’t seek to dictate policy and enforce standards, but rather set guidelines and steer users in the right direction.” 

To reach this “higher plane” of IT operations, the report recommends IT departments roll out Web 2.0 technologies — such as internal, Web-based portals — that allow employees to manage the ever-increasing legions of consumer apps and devices making their way onto corporate networks. The irony, of course, is that it’s the unauthorized introduction of mostly Web 2.0 technologies that brought us to this point in the first place.  

Regardless, Yankee Group warns that the time has come for a major change in the way IT departments interact with employees and that its Zen-like approach is the quickest path to IT enlightenment. 

“Enterprises can’t avoid consumerization or implement traditional approaches to managing consumerization in the enterprise because it’s failing,” Joshua Holbrook, Yankee Group’s enterprise research program manager, said in a statement. “It’s time for a new operating model; an IT care co-op is the solution.”