Huddle, a leading provider of online secure social business workspaces, has successfully raised $4m in series A funding from Eden Ventures to support the expansion of Huddle’s management team, marketing efforts, product innovation and growth into new markets.

We are excited to partner with one of the leading investment firms in the U.K. Their support is a testament to the strategy and innovation that Huddle will continue to bring to this space, said Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Huddle.net

Huddle join other successful Eden Venture investments including Reevoo and Truphone

We believe the next wave of Web 2.0 is the integration of home and office applications. Huddle has integrated secure team workspaces into social networking platform that is intelligent, easy to use, and satisfies the security and management requirements of any global IT department, said Ben Tompkins, Partner at Eden Ventures.

In just six months since its launch, Huddle has averaged a 25% growth in new users per month with thousands around the world now using the workspaces in order to manage projects, deliver content, and collaborate on activities. Companies such as Edelman, Jazeera Airways, John Lewis, Reuters and UNICEF are already using Huddle to bring global teams together.

Click for a previous in depth review of Huddle and a recent podcast interview with Alastair Mitchell.

To celebrate their successful funding, Huddle have kindly offered all blognation readers a FREE Personal Package for life when you signup and enter the code FREE-INTRO.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 is a popular collaboration toolkit and environment, regularly deployed by medium and large enterprises, partly because of the way it is bundled with their Microsoft server licences.  It has wiki capability, but from what I’ve seen, it looks pretty limited.  The SharePoint wiki situation just got a whole lot better with the announcement by Atlassian, over at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit, of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence.  This integration of Confluence, one of the better “enterprise strength” wiki technologies already in use by over 4000 companies around the world, with SharePoint has got to be excellent for both companies.

It’s an interesting partnership for  Microsoft because of the cultural difference between them and a company that embraces Java and open source technology.  When I was talking to Jeffrey Walker, Atlassian’s President, earlier this week, he was very excited about it, and explained the highlights.   The connector has 4 key components:

• Single Sign-On so that users can access both systems and only see what they have permission to see
• A proper search mechanism across both SharePoint and Confluence content that brings the results together in one place
• Content sharing so that users can embed a Confluence page inside the SharePoint environment
• Linking, so that users in the Confluence wiki can access SharePoint lists and content, and then navigate to edit Microsoft Office documents in a single click.

 The download is available now at the Atlassian website, and you can read more on the Atlassian blog.  I hear there will be another web 2.0 related Microsoft announcement shortly, so it definitely puts the company in a stronger position in the enterprise 2.0 space, and provides an extra threat to the likes of SocialText and some of the other wiki players.

Company Index: Atlassian

Technorati Tags: Atlassian, Microsoft, SharePoint, wiki, social+media

The minds behind Flexiscale have been at the forefront of internet technology for many a year, from Internet Cafe’s through hosting companies, and now with Flexiscale, an on-demand Utility Computing backend. In the words of CEO Tony Lucas, it is a “…flexible, scalable, automated hosting platform.” As part of the Future of Web Apps Expo, the solution is being aimed at many Web 2.0 companies and start-ups (and to get on the radar of those setting up new 2.0 ventures). I spoke to Philipp Huber about what the platform can do for the brave new 2.0 world.

Right click here to download and listen to the podcast.

Yesterday, in New York at the Nokia theatre and broadcasting across the web, SAP formally announced their new, mid-market solution, which up to this point has gone by the code name of A1S.  Bill Wohl hoped that he would be the last SAP executive to use the term, and Henning Kagerman, the CEO, then introduced SAP Business ByDesign, an on demand solution which they finally described as Software as a Service - in previous presentations they had studiously avoided using that term.  This product has been 4 years in the making, with a team of 1000 people involved.  To indicate how significant they believe this is, Henning went on to say:

“I’ve been in the company for 25 years now and it’s the most important announcement I’ve made in my career to date”

Their plans are very ambitious.  They say they are creating a new, volume business for SAP and describe Business ByDesign as a next generation, on-demand product, which they are combining with launching a completely new business model with an entirely new customer experience throughout the product life cycle.  That includes the ability to try before you buy, so that you can prototype a solution, which would then become your live system once you’ve signed the Ts and Cs and bought the product. 

They are positioning BBD as a complete solution, with no compromises, but say it is not designed with  traditional categories like finance or ERP in mind, but is more service oriented and event driven.  The solution provides end to end processes that are role based, rather than modular, with a user interface that can be tailored to a person’s responsibilities.  They explained that the solution has project management functionality integrated to the financials and HR, whereas the typical mid-sized company might today use as separate PC or web based package alongside their standard commercial software.  They believe they will set a new standard for business software for mid-sized companies, and say they intend to change the on demand marketplace. 

Ian Kimbell demoed the product, and it certainly looked very flexible and function rich.  However, the screen design looked very traditional.  I didn’t see any AJAX style drop downs in the interface, and the help sub-system opened in a separate environment.  It looked to me like they have missed a big opportunity to simplify the user interface, and to really take on board the web 2.0 style and characteristics of many of the current web based applications that are so well designed. 

They explained that they have 40 pilot customers, and introduced the 20 who are actually live at the show, like Stemma or Compass Pharma.  They all gave the system a glowing report in terms of how it has been received by their users.  Peter Zencke, SAP Executive Board member, explained how the system is configured by a question and answer process, and that the solution is hosted in Waldorf, delivered through the browser, uses internet compression technology, and that they are steadily working on improving performance.  He said that BBD is not for companies that have a high demand for vertically specific applications, but that they are trying to do 3 things:

• Simplify IT
• Significantly reduce cost of ownership - previously they have talked in terms of 1/10 of the cost of their traditional solutions, and this was repeated by Léo Apotheker, the deputy CEO, later in the presentation
• And to exploit technology to address future business threats.

He went on to explain that BBD brings their SOA architecture and Software as a Service together for the first time.   The underlying technology uses NetWeaver, with MaxDB™ as the database (and not Oracle).   In the question and answer session they explained that it is a multi-tenant architecture, but that customers have separate databases. 
 
Earlier, Henning had explained the positioning of the product compared to their current range as follows:

• SAP Busines Suite (ERP 6.0) is for companies with more than 2,500 employees  - a $30bn market where they have more than 10,000 customers in 50 countries
• SAP Business All-In-One for companies up to 2.500 employees who need more complex, vertical market based solutions - a $10bn market
• SAP Business ByDesign for businesses with 100-500 employees - a $10bn market where they believe their analysis suggests there are 1.2m companies which they aren’t addressing with their other products
• SAP Business One for companies from 10 to 100 employees - a $10bn market who need more tailor made solutions, where they have 15,000 customers in 40 countries

I have said before that I find this positioning problematic.  If the flexibility and ease of use is as good as they describe, and the cost of ownership is really as good as they say, surely some of their existing customers using the other products will compromise on less vertical functionality in return for a more cost effective solution.  As well as winning new customers with BBD, what will they do for their existing customers paying standard maintenance prices?  Vinnie Mirchandani asks the same question.

Léo talked through the pricing.  The full solution starts with a minimum of 25 users at $149 per user per month, with additional lower cost options for types of users using limited functionality like consultants only entering timesheets.  He also explained that they are piloting their channel approach with 20 companies now, and that they will be building up their partner ecosystem rapidly during 2008. 

An area where I was little confused was over the forecast numbers they quoted.  Previously they have said on more than one occasion that they plan to have 100,000 customers by 2010.  They have said that the jump from their current 39,000 customers will come by adding mid-market customers mostly with the new product.  At this event they talked about ramping up to winning 10,000 new customers with BBD by 2010.  Without the history of what they have said before, the story and raw numbers are very impressive.  SAP is the market leader in business applications, and the new product strengthens their position, presents a big challenge to SaaS players like Salesforce.com and NetSuite.  The issue is that the story has completely changed from their previously stated intent of 100,000 customers.  I’m sure this is an issue that they will be hit with by a number of analysts and commentators in the coming days.

If you want to see the whole morning’s presentation including the Q&A session, it is available here.  You can find an FAQ about the product here.

On balance I think yesterday’s announcement sounds very promising, and was a very significant day for the Software as a Service market as a whole.  From this initial impression, with only a short demonstration, the user interface doesn’t look particularly exciting.   However, I’m sure the product will be a success, but I wonder how the new business model will co-exist with the traditional model inside the SAP organisation.  How much of an effect will it have on their existing customer revenues?    
 

The folks at Huddle have put some more polish on their already very cool service with a pair of announcements today.  First is that Huddles have two states now, Open and Private.  An Open Huddle is one where the members can invite others into the Huddle as needed. Perfect for a group whose members might grow and shrink over time or if you only know/have one contact at a company, but you know others need to be involved.  A Private Huddle, as you can imagine, is one where the Huddle creator is the only person who can add members.

The next bit of the news is that you can now import addresses from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or Outlook so you have ready access to many of the people you might want to join a Huddle.  This is a nice touch, since copy/paste is a drag and hand typing often leads to a typo (which can either delay a project or be just embarrassing).

Finally … Huddle is giving us all a present to celebrate their six month birthday:

Exclusive half-birthday offer - get Huddling for half-price!

That’s right, we can’t believe it either but it’s been 6 months since we launched out of beta. To celebrate we’d like to give everyone a great offer; signup to the Huddle Basic Package for half-price forever! If you already have a free account or want to setup your own private workspace - get 500MB storage, 10 huddles, 50 users, 10 whiteboards, branding and loads of other team collaboration features for all for just £4.99 ($10) per month.

Just enter the voucher code BIRTHDAY when signing up, or upgrading your existing account to take advantage of this offer.

Not bad, eh? I’ve been using Huddle since Office 2.0 and have several Huddles going right now.  While I love solutions like Google Docs and ThinkFree, I think Huddle has a lot of potential for collaboration.  I like being able to have several Huddles with sometimes overlapping groups of people … but each unique and separate.

I suggest giving them a try and seeing for yourself.  They’ve been winning me over.

Last Friday CODA plc, the UK software company who provide best of breed financial applications for mid-range and enterprise level companies, announced that they would be developing an on-demand, or Software as a Service offering.   In of itself, that isn’t particularly exciting news, although it’s a good message that one of the traditional UK software players is embracing the new approach.  Dennis Howlett wasn’t too impressed and called me, as he knows I used to work for CODA for 5 years as well as now working with Twinfield, the competing, online accounting company started by ex-CODA people back in 2000.  I suggested to Dennis to give an added “wow” factor, the company would need to have announced a strategic partnership with somebody like Salesforce.com.  I’ve just read CODA’s site and Dennis’s ZDNet blog post a short while ago, and that is exactly what CODA have just done.

CODA’s press release from Friday said:

“CODA has committed to deliver a true ’on demand‘ application suite delivered using the Software as a Service (SaaS) method. This will become a core finance application, offered in addition to CODA’s established ‘Financials’ and ‘Dream’ products.”

Dennis’s post  a short while ago explains that Jeremy Roche, the CODA CEO, has been on stage at DreamForce explaining the proposed new product, dubbed “2go”, and the partnership with SFdC, to become their chosen financials.  Dennis says:

“According to Dave Turner, CODA’s group marketing director, the company is planning to roll out business processes in similar fashion to Workday, with an order-to-cash module available sometime around Q2, 2008. The next step will be to flesh out core financials followed by procure-to-pay. Direction on analytics is unclear though Turner said CODA expects to take advantage of SFdC’s existing analytics capabilities. Given the company is developing directly for SFdC style CRM integration, that’s a no brainer.”

From CODA’s own release today:

“CODA’s on-demand financial system showcases the power of the Force.com platform for building and delivering any kind of application on-demand,” said George Hu, Chief Marketing Officer, salesforce.com. “We share a common vision with CODA to enable customers to manage and share all of their business information entirely on-demand.”

Apart from Salesforce’s own applications, I believe this will be the first time the Apex platform, now called Force.com, has been used to develop a complete application suite in this way.  In addition to a change from traditional software to the SaaS delivery model, this will be the first completely new development that CODA have done in over 10 years, so the there are significant risks involved with a green field development using this style of technology and the Salesforce platform.   However, I do believe that this is one of the best strategic moves the company has made since their e-Finance move in the Baan era back in the late 90s.  I have thought that they should partnering with this kind of company to provide a more complete solution for a long while.

The other factor that Dennis highlights is that none of the other major accounting players in the UK have an on-demand offering, so this should be a disruptive step for the UK accounting market.  I know my friends at Twinfield, who have been delivering SaaS accounting for seven years, will see this as a welcome move, as it adds legitimacy to the European online accounting market.

Disclosure:  As mentioned in the article, I worked for CODA for 5 years, and my consulting company is the UK partner for Twinfield.  

Company Index: CODA

Blogtronix, the enterprise web 2.0 company headquartered  in America, but with their main development and support organisation based in Bulgaria, have just started to deliver version 2.0 of the product.  It’s on show at the Office 2.0 Conference.  Blogtronix is a web publishing platform designed for corporate collaboration which covers blogs, wikis, document management, social networking and RSS feed aggregation.  The product is built on “CIO friendly” technology in that it is architected using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server, making use of Active Directory and LDAP, rather than open source components like PHP or MySQL. 

Version 2.0 of the product was first delivered to Reuters to support ReutersInteractive, the public community site they first showcased back in June.  Anybody can sign up and use ReutersInteractive, which provides information and resources for investors interested in Clean Technology and green investments, and their service will  give you a good idea of the capabilities of the Blogtronix platform.  The blogtronix environment allows a completely flexible structure with private or public groups that can be organized in overlapping networks, and/or with as deep or wide a hierarchical structure as required.  You only create a user ID once, and the system’s profile server then allows you to be a member of other groups on other customer or partners systems, with security rights carefully controlled by the administrator of each group.  Once you get your head around this part of the Blogtronix concept, you can see the power of the platform for collaboration.

The standard look of a Blogtronix community site is a 3 column blog style, but version two allows more flexibility to use the product as a Content Management System (CMS) - with a little design help from the team you could create a customer  facing site like Red Herring’s, which is completely driven by Blogtronix. 

Other features new features in version 2 include:

• More choice on the layout, and options on post style, which could be summary, whole post,  a list of post headings, or a forum view.
• Completely new social networking with easy browse and profiling of members within groups.
• The ability to create RSS feeds based on a content category or a search key word.
• My saved posts - the user can now pin down one or more posts and generate a newsletter.
• The newsletter can either contains links back to the posts, or alternatively the actual content text, in line images, and any documents as attachments.
• Ability to make an anonymous post, although the administrators can see who did what.

And a whole host of other enhancements.  It’s a big release, extending the capability, flexibility and ease of management. 

Our friends over at TechCrunch have done a very good comparison chart of 35 products that you might use to create your community site or social network.  Take a look at the chart and you can see the breadth of functionality covered by Blogtronix compared to the others reviewed.  Companies considering community building and enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools should take a serious look at Blogtronix. 

Disclosure:  My consulting company is the Blogtronix partner for the UK and Northern Europe, and I’m also a member of their advisory board.  From that you can tell I’m a big fan of the product, so I’ve tried to just cover the facts, as well as pointing to the alternatives.  

Company Index: Blogtronix

Because of a variety of commitments I’ve not gone to Ismael’s Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this year, but it’s in full swing, and I’m trying to follow it vicariously through our “on the spot” blognation coverage, my fellow Enterprise Irregulars and other friends that are there, as well as catching some of the live feeds from the sessions.  I’ve not been too impressed by some of the panel sessions I’ve listened to, but there certainly seems to be a lot of smart people there.  I asked Andy McLoughlin, one of the founders of Huddle, who are over pitching their excellent project collaboration solution, to keep me up to date and give me a UK perspective of what is going on.

Like me he thinks the iPhone giveaway sounds great, but isn’t much use to non-US attendees, unless you feel like bothering with an AT&T contract.  He’s keeping his in the packaging to enhance its value on eBay, although that’s already down a bit after yesterday’s Apple announcements of the price reduction and the iPod touch - slightly bad timing for the conference, but “this is life in the technology lane“, as Mr. Jobs says in his open letter to the iPhone early adopters.

Andy’s pleased that Huddle, as a relative newcomer to the collaboration space, is getting good airtime with the analysts whilst jockeying for position with the more established players like Google, Zoho or Thinkfree.  The British contingent includes Anish Kapoor of Yuuguu , along with Ikordo, and they seemed to have hooked up with PlanHQ.com from New Zealand to prove they can stay out late, drinking longer than the Americans.  Andy’s award for worst web 2.0 product name at the show goes to  ‘Docgle‘ - say that again? I was also pleased when he told me:

“Yet again, Sam’s blognation army are out in force and the buzz around the UK’s ‘techcrunch killer’ is considerable”

He thinks the OpenSAM alliance is definitely making waves, and people are excited about a best-of-breed partnership between tools like EditGrid, Preezo, iNetWord and Huddle that would give the big guys a real run for their money.  I can agree with that (disclosure: I partner with EditGrid here in the UK).  Andy is also convinced that Google are going to make a big announcement about Jot - the Google Wiki.  At last year’s conference Joe Kraus the founder was looking relaxed and smug, and a few days later the acquisition by Google was announced, but in the intervening year there has been a terrible silence.  It’s about time, so I hope Andy is right. He finished off with a summary saying:

“I’m over the moon to be out here amongst our peers at the Office 2.0 conference.  The feedback we’ve had on the stuff coming out of London in general and Huddle in particular part from everyone has been incredibly positive.  We’re proud to be flying the flag.”

And just to help out with a bit of a plug for Huddle, they have a special offer during the conference - you get their £9.99 package for £4.99 forever.  Sounds good to me.  I’ll be watching the feeds this evening with interest.   

Company Index: Huddle, YuuGuu
 

Last Thursday I arrived at London’s OpenCoffee Club at the stroke of 10:00 to see an empty 5th View Bar, and immediately worried that maybe the momentum for this particular meetup of VCs, angel investors, start-ups and software companies was on the wane.   I shouldn’t have worried.  By 10:30 it was business as usual, and must have reached around 60 attendees at some point.  Last week we were discussing the ingredients of why Saul Klein’s networking event is such a success, and one of the factors is the timing.  Being from 10:00 to 12:00 increases the likelihood that attendees are senior people and decision makers who have the authority to take time out of the working day to come along.  At a typical breakfast or evening event you get a different audience, whereas OCC has a real buzz about it, with people who are looking to make connections, do deals, and share their experience in a remarkably open way.

There is a hard core of regulars, but every week there is an influx of new people coming to OCC for the first time.   Last week I met Colin Edwards of Magpar LLP, who gets involved to help and advise early stage and pre-funding companies.  Colin’s background was in advertising, and working with creative consultancy “What If?”, so I’ll be talking to him again about education and the CreativeCoffee Club.  Within a few minutes of meeting Colin I met a “newbie” with a business idea at an early stage, who I could pass on as an ideal candidate for his kind of advice (the guy didn’t have a card, but I hope his initiative works out).   I had a fascinating conversation with Jof Walters about RFID based merchant payment systems in Japan.  I met Gil Summers, over from Israel, with a company providing personal development training, including Tony Robbins products.  I met Nick Halstead, one of the founders of Assembleron,  who is launching a service call fav.or.it, which will let you read, tag and comment on your favourite blog content, but all in one place.  George Black came to find me, because I’ve just become a user of his collaboration system Phuser.  Phuser is a kind of combined collaboration and social networking site that you could use for business, or to organize your next party.  You can share only what you need to with who you need to, and use SMS to keep everyone up to date - I’ll be writing a follow on article to explain more.  I met Geoffrey McCaleb of Bedl.am and Rod Geoghegan of Metropolis.  I also met Michael O’Shea, a veteran of the early days of online retail.  His latest idea is Wicked Uncle.  This is a site specifically designed for the uncle (or the godfather, or friend) who doesn’t have much of a clue what to buy for their nephews and nieces or other small people.  The site gives you cool ideas for presents, and helps you seem like the best uncle by reminding you to do the same next  year.  

Later the same day I was invited to celebrate London Girl Geek Dinner’s 2nd anniversary with Sarah Blow, Nicole Mathison and about 100 others at Skype’s London HQ.  Amanda has covered the evening elsewhere, but as always the discussions were great, and it was so refreshing to be one of less than 10% of the male attendees.  Unfortunately this a complete reversal of the norm at OCC or my London Wiki Wednesday, which is often well below 10% female - exactly what GGD is trying to address by promoting women in technology. 

All of these networking events highlight what a vibrant and thriving technology and startup scene we have here in London.

London Wiki Wednesday is a “technology meetup” event that I took on the organisation of coming in to 2007.   Wiki Wednesdays are held (mostly) on the evening of the first Wednesday of each month, and were originally started in Palo Alto by SocialText, one of the enterprise wiki companies.  They have spread to various cities around the world, generally organized by someone in the local community.   People get together to chat, learn about wikis, share ideas, find jobs, talk deals and socialise.  Our London event has moved from once every two months, to once a month, and we often get 50 to 60 attendees - business people, accountants, project managers, consultants, people involved in community projects - the common thread is an interest in using wiki technology for collaboration or community publishing.  Each month we find a sponsor who will provide a venue, beer, wine and food in return for a little publicity and link love. (By the way, we need a venue and sponsor for September - contact me if you are interested!) 

 
  
I’m finally getting round to writing about the last London Wiki Wednesday, kindly hosted by Alek Lotoczko and NYK Line.  NYK Line is a Japanese shipping line, and it’s quite a stretch for their marketing department to use some of their budget for us.  They actually put on a really great spread of food, beer and wine.  It’s notable that the standard has steadily increased at each event - if the trend continues maybe it will be Black Tie by Christmas?  Their offices, on the 17th floor of CityPoint, an office block near Moorgate, has a pretty stunning view across the City of London, and highlights the amount of construction going on. 

We had somewhere between 35 and 40 attending this time, and everyone I’ve spoken to since tells me they really enjoyed the mix of people, the discussions, and the presentations, despite a few technical hitches with the projector.   We definitely missed Lars Ploughman’s presence - he’s a consultant at Headshift, and usually provides us with one of his  Mindmaps of the event.   

We started with a discussion around Jakob Nielsen’s Participation Inequality Rule:

“In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.”

The original intention was to discuss how you might raise those metrics, and put things in place to improve on those ratios, and try and get towards 20% of the community contributing.  We were challenged over whether this is actually a problem in any case, and that in the case of a corporate wiki for collaboration, wouldn’t the majority of community be motivated to contribute? Other issues discussed  included:
 ○ Two Gods - author and reader
 ○ Bottom up adoption versus command and control hierarchy
 ○ Facebook and banning private use of social networking tools (like the phone and email before it)
 ○ Business doesn’t give a s*%t if it’s effective
 ○ Everyone as an author
 ○ What’s in it for me and recognition
 ○ Spontaneity versus expectation
 ○ Barriers, influence and the ROI of wikis and social networking
 ○ The fact that many, many authors collaborating on the last chapter of Wikinomics hadn’t really worked.
It was a very healthy debate.  I would suggest people take a look at Wikipatterns for more on the topic.

Alek Lotoczko, the intranet manager at NYK Line, showed us some screenshots briefly illustrating his Lotus Domino and Confluence wiki deployment.
Roman Nosov showed us a MediaWiki extension called BlameMap, for highlighting different contributions in different colours.
Mark Charmer talked about Akvo.org which he has co-founded.  This is an initiative working with the water development community to deploy a global water and sanitation wiki.
Philip Woodgate demonstrated his use of Terapad for running (and allowing simple administration) of a church community website.
Alan Wood gave us a sneak preview of ‘rel3′, a new type of collaboration system which Folknology are piloting in the coming months.  Read Phil Jones interpretation of Al’s session.

The group definitely want to have a meeting in September, and (as I mentioned earlier) we are currently hunting for both a venue and a sponsor to provide the food, beer and wine.  If you want to volunteer your organisation, or have any suggestions, then please mail me.  Overall, it was very good session, and I’m delighted we are keeping the momentum going. 

If you want more information, we have a Facebook group, a Ning network and the here are the SocialText event pages.

Links and other blogs of the evening:
My Flickr photos
Zbigniew Lukasiak 
Phil Jones
Links and Anchors