How Enterprises Need to Think About Emergent Social Technologies Sponsored By: Sun Microsystems

W H I T E P A P E R

P r e p a r i n g f o r t h e 2 . 0 W o rld: How Enterprises Need to Think About Emergent Social Technologies Sponsored by: Sun Microsystems

Matthew Eastwood April 2009

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Social technologies, commonly called Web 2.0, were originally used to describe consumer technologies that enable groups to organize and share information and media. But enterprises quickly caught on to the value of these easy-to-use tools for capturing and sharing ad hoc information that may otherwise not be documented. This is having a profound impact on the tools that enterprise IT customers need to implement and support in order to meet the demands and needs of their users, such as collaboratively working across regions, knowledge capture, and community and brand building outside the firewall.

While this creates a new challenge for IT shops, it also represents a great opportunity to enhance their ability to support better communication within their enterprise and with other entities. Many tools and applications are available, and ample opportunity exists to use outsourcing as well. On the hardware side, IT can leverage existing infrastructure and/or outsource to obtain computing resources. Newer hardware technologies utilizing virtualization and a dense form factor with proven best practices from existing Web deployments will drive many of the new hardware purchases for these types of environments.

SITUATION OVERVIEW

Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) is here: 24% of enterprise employees use social networking tools to collaborate, 14% of Fortune 100 employees have a profile on LinkedIn, and 2% of enterprise employees use microblogging to collaborate. It is no longer a question of if or when enterprise employees will use Web 2.0 tools — the genie is out of the bottle. The questions now are:

What tools are customers, employees, and partners using?

What information are employees sharing and with whom?

Where is information that is shared in social media tools stored?

Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA P.508.872.8200 F.508.935.4015 www.idc.com F.508.935.4015 P.508.872.8200 01701 GlobalUSA Framingham, Street Headquarters:MA 5 Speen Who is talking online about your company, your products, your services, and your employees, and how is it changing over time?

How can you leverage these tools for internal employee collaboration and external brand building, community engagement, and R&D?

Enterprise 2.0

According to Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0 is "the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them." In common usage, Web 2.0 often refers to the evolution of the Web from static pages to dynamic and interactive tools. Effectively, Web 2.0 combines content, social relationships, and interaction to make the Internet channel an ever-changing ecosystem largely driven by the needs and interests of the users. Enterprise 2.0 then is the transference of this paradigm to the corporate environment. Specific features associated with this paradigm are blogs, tagging, comments, wikis, and social networks.

Drivers of Enterprise 2.0

Similar to consumer Web 2.0 trends, evolution in the enterprise environment is being driven by the user. The availability of consumer and SaaS solutions is giving employees access to tools that are cheap and easy to deploy. Frustrated by slow- moving and highly regulated IT processes as well as hard-to-use, unappealing enterprise-class applications, employees have taken matters into their own hands. For example, generally speaking, enterprise applications are designed from the top down and do not typically consider the value delivered to the user; rather, they consider only the value delivered to the enterprise. On the flip side, Web 2.0 applications are designed from the bottom up by users, who create solutions that provide value to themselves.

In order to ensure visibility, management, security, and compliance of enterprise information, IT must provide the tools that employees want to use or risk having enterprise information distributed and managed by services over which they have no control. At the same time, the cultural norms, policies, best practices, and management strategies regarding usage of social media tools within the enterprise take time to develop and emerge — and the user-driven, decentralized design ethos of Web 2.0 technologies conflicts with the top-down nature of most legacy enterprise applications. In addition, there is competitive pressure from enterprises that have aggressively embraced a "social" approach to their communications with customers, partners, and employees and are starting to reap huge rewards.

Employee demand for social media tools is driving much of the adoption of enterprise social media, but there are a number of other important drivers, including the following:

The imminent departure from the workforce of the baby boomers is creating demand for knowledge management, tacit knowledge capture solutions, training, and information access solutions.

The communication behaviors of new employees entering the workforce — 44% of 15- to 24-year-olds participate in online communities (IDC's Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast) — are leading to even more employee demand as new waves of hires enter companies.

2 #217811 ©2009 IDC Online content is exploding and will grow sixfold, from 161 exabytes in 2006 to 988 exabytes in 2010. Over 90% of the information in the digital universe is unstructured, and by 2010, about 70% of the information in the digital universe will be created by individuals. Social filtering is a critical tool for users to sort through and find relevant content. (IDC's study The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010)

As consumers — and therefore employees — increasingly tire of mass advertising and broadcasting and spend more time online, expectations regarding how they relate to the brands they buy and the employers they work for are changing. Individuals increasingly want to be recognized for their unique interests and not for their ability to conform to a defined box.

Enterprise social media applications address all of these issues in a lightweight and conversational way, making the tools accessible and appealing to employees.

Benefits of Enterprise 2.0

Because social media applications start with unstructured conversations between individuals, they also enable employees to self-organize into organic communities of shared interests. Organic communities — enabled by social media applications — can be leveraged in the following ways:

Reduce the cost of customer insight

Create more authentic and trusted corporate relationships

Become more responsive to customer, partner, and employee needs

Reduce the cost of marketing and capturing feedback by actively engaging customers

Increase corporate innovation by engaging employees, partners, suppliers, and influencers

Increase corporate productivity by increasing the leverage of corporate knowledge and reducing the cost of discovery

Increase productivity and morale by giving individuals an outlet for innovation, interests, and ideas

Increase training efficacy by enabling transparent conversations so junior employees can learn by following more senior employees in a noninvasive way

These benefits of social networks — those that connect people in relevant ways and filter information via a trusted network of individuals — have incredible power to increase the velocity of business. The most obvious area impacted may be the sales cycle, but in fact, every business objective is reached through listening and responding to information from trusted individuals. The credibility of individuals has a huge sway over whether others listen to them. While credibility is subjective, social networks allow individuals to find networks in which they are credible because of their interests, experience, or contributions, and networks of individuals are what move initiatives forward.

The Challenges of Managing an Enterprise 2.0

While social networks can enable a great deal of business value, they will threaten existing models of information transfer and individuals with vested interests in the status quo. Participatory communications applications like social networking and wikis create opportunities for more involvement, but at the expense of perceived control. Social networking and the management of organic communities require cultural readiness as well as fulfillment of required functionality. Whereas email, instant messaging, and Web conferencing essentially just made communication that was already happening via telephone calls and meetings faster and more cost-effective, social networking gives individuals more access to the conversations within an organization. It gives them the ability to contribute to those conversations regardless of their existing reporting responsibilities and sphere of influence. In other words, it flattens the established management hierarchy. The change in transparency and access will profoundly affect who contributes, who gets the most visibility and social capital, and how the organization manages decision making.

While social networking holds a great deal of promise for enterprises that embrace its requirements, its benefits can easily elude companies that deploy the technology and do not invest in the development of the associated communities, try to control the conversation of communities too tightly, or let those communities languish as an externality to the core business.

The potential benefits of social networking are tantalizing, particularly for companies and functions that are primarily knowledge and communication based. However, because social networking affects not only the cost and speed of communication but also the dynamics of groups, the implementation can be fraught with complexity. The requirements for social network adoption are predominantly cultural, and the success of social networking is predicated on factors that often cannot be implemented but rather can only be fostered. The following sections include questions and considerations to be addressed by enterprises contemplating the implementation of Enterprise 2.0.

Constituents Who Care

Will users participate? If your enterprise sells generic grocery products, a customer community will be difficult. If you are a retail company that pays workers by the hour and has a lot of employee turnover, a sales associate's network may never take off. Implement social networking in an environment where the users have something to say and are interested in engaging, such as quality products or services.

Realistic Scope

Is the company ready for an enterprisewide deployment, or is there one business process or functional group for which social networking is more appropriate?

Will social networking be applied to a functional organization, to a product or service line, or to internal affiliate communities (e.g., managers, new hires, working parents), customer communities, or partner communities?

Without compelling content that is regularly refreshed, participants have no reason to visit. Content — as in the consumer Web — can be either user generated or published by a sponsoring organization.

Within the enterprise, community content creation competes for time with all the other "official" responsibilities of community members. It is advisable to both provide content and encourage user-generated content through facilitation and explicit time allowances for participation.

Organizational Modesty

Social network success is predicated on everyone having a voice. If your organization is not prepared to listen and incorporate the feedback of the community, deploying social media applications may cause more harm than good to constituent relations.

Management Trust

Communities flourish when participants feel they have the ability to converse freely, change as the interests of the participants change, and execute on their ideas. As too much control will stifle communities, management trust in the community is imperative.

Resource Commitment

Communities rarely develop and flourish without good facilitation — whether sponsored facilitation or facilitation by members of the community. For enterprises to ensure that a social network takes hold and flourishes — and stays within the bounds of its stated purpose — good facilitation is absolutely necessary.

If participants are employees, they need to have the permission and time to participate in a meaningful way. Though this need not be a predefined percentage of time, it does need to be explicit.

Information Policies

Commercial enterprises exist to create value, and as such, it is appropriate for a social network to have policies that promote that goal. Other policies regarding the scope of the conversation topics, the participants, content that is not acceptable, and legal protections are all appropriate to employ for enterprise social networking.

While information policies should be stated clearly, it is imperative that the policies be reinforced with commentary and activity by a moderator so that the policies are consistent and clearly reinforced with members.

Employee awareness of information policies and expectations is critical in order to ensure clarity and consistency of communications, particularly in regard to technical information.

Various types of social media software exist and differ based on application and market. Features and functions should be determined by the size of the network, the participants, the level of activity and collaboration desired security requirements, cultural requirements, and integration needs.

General-purpose social networks for collaboration within an enterprise require a more robust set of features than consumer-oriented social networks that include administrative tools, roles, permissions, information access, business intelligence, integration with corporate directories, integration with communications and calendaring applications, integration with content management systems, and richer collaboration features like blogs and wikis.

Social networking software for marketing communities requires features that encourage engagement, which can range from rating, comments, and tagging to more engaging features like blogging and media posting. The customer base and its level of commitment will determine which end of the spectrum is most appropriate to deploy. In general, a low-investment feature like rating is a good place to start because rating makes it possible to gauge the customers' willingness to interact at all.

Social networking software for customer support communities requires more workflow, content organization (taxonomy) tools, and data mining capabilities. Because the purpose of customer support networks is to help customers answer specific problems, once the customer is satisfied, the results can be used again. Features for these networks include discussion boards, tagging, rating, search, escalation rules, editing/review workflow, and often permissions based on the type of customer.

Social networking software applied to specific business functions like partner and channel management needs specific functionality — in this case, joint pipeline management tools, RFP response tools, or integration with CRM applications. Other needs may include real-time communications tools like IM and microblogging.

Hardware

The hardware infrastructure used in the 2.0 world may be owned and operated by an individual company or owned and operated by a third party, or a hybrid of both. With that in mind, the hardware infrastructure can be placed into three general categories when talking about ownership and location: owned or leased and onsite, owned or leased and run or hosted on a third-party site, or rented from a third party and run or hosted on the third-party site.

The infrastructure needs of Enterprise 2.0 are similar to the application needs of the previous/existing Enterprise 1.0 with a major focus on networked applications. IT can leverage its existing infrastructure and/or outsource to obtain its computing resources. Newer hardware technologies utilizing virtualization and a dense form factor will drive many of the new hardware purchases for this environment. The trends of physical and logical consolidation lend themselves to supporting networked applications.

6 #217811 ©2009 IDC The five hardware trends expected to have the most impact relative to social technologies are virtualization, consolidation, power and cooling, server blades, and multicore/multisocket systems.

Virtualization. Virtualization relates to partitioning of resources such as subdividing a server or storage resources. This allows better utilization of those resources and flexibility in how they are used. Being able to subdivide fits well with the need to consolidate multiple applications/workloads onto a single device.

Consolidation. This trend involves consolidating multiple applications/workloads onto a single device. It may also be multiple copies of the same application.

Power and cooling. The power being used to run computing resources and cool them has become a cost and environmental issue. IT shops are very focused on ways to control these needs and their associated costs. More efficient use of resources is a key component of meeting those requirements.

Server blades. Server blades are the fastest-growing form factor in the server market. Their reduced footprint, lower power envelope, reduced cabling, reduced power connections, and ease of management are some of the reasons they have become so desirable.

Multicore/multisocket systems. Server processors have moved from single core to dual core and now to quad core or more. The increased number of cores per processor has effectively created multiprocessing systems on a chip. This offers a boost in performance and an increase in scalability in each system for applications capable of using this increased capability. The result is more scaling capabilities across servers of all socket counts. The impact on software vendors is the need for and opportunity to create applications that can leverage these additional capabilities.

Impact of Social Networking on the Enterprise

Social networking, implemented broadly, can dramatically change organizational structure and decision-making practices. Technology will allow for more participation in enterprise conversations, more self-resourcing on projects, and faster decision making — all with less management overhead. Social networking forms the connections that enable enterprise flexibility — whether that means more remote workers, more part-time workers, or dynamic solution packaging for an immediate market opportunity likely to allow corporations to move more quickly while maintaining cohesiveness and shared objectives. Because this will give enterprises that embrace social networking a competitive advantage, it is critical to engage with social networking at some level while giving your constituents time to experiment and play with the social networking construct in the context of current business practices.

Sun has long said "the network is the computer." This focus has positioned it well to provide solutions for the E2.0/Web 2.0 generation of computing. Sun's comprehensive line of products and services gives it the foundation to meet these new enterprise requirements.

One of the more interesting things about Sun for E2.0 is its ability to architect the entire Web stack for deployments using its open products and services — from the enterprise-ready Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems to the middleware stack of Web and application servers and the leading open source database, MySQL. Identity management is a critical piece in the successful deployment of any E2.0 application, and Sun's Identity Management Suite now supports MySQL to give Sun a tightly integrated solution. All of this runs on open or industry-standard compute and storage platforms.

The following is a brief overview of Sun's products and services designed to support IT and business in developing solutions to meet their individual needs. To illustrate and discuss the products and services, we break them into three major categories — hardware, software, and services.

Sun Hardware

Sun Servers That Support Enterprise 2.0

Sun has built families of both x86 and SPARC processor–based lines of servers. These systems offer end users a choice of operating system (Windows, Linux, or Solaris) on x86 processor–based systems and Solaris on SPARC processor–based systems, in either rack or blade form factor, and they support VMware, Sun xVM Server, and Microsoft Virtual Server virtualization technologies.

IDC end-user research shows that servers are used in a wide number of ways based on different usage models. For example, databases of different sizes and purposes run on every size system. Large complex databases typically run on large servers, but they could also run across a cluster of smaller systems. Sun has fully recognized the need for a family of servers to meet the various end-user requirements:

Blade servers. Sun's blade servers are designed to save time, power, and money by being efficient in terms of space, power, and cooling and by being operationally efficient and productive, highly serviceable and upgradeable, and available with multiprocessors and operating system support — UltraSPARC and industry- standard processors running together in a single chassis. Sun blade servers are targeted at eco-solutions, virtualization and consolidation, Web infrastructure, high-performance computing, and back-office applications (CRM, ERP, DIDW).

x64 servers. Sun's x64 servers are industry-standard processor-based servers, also known as x86-64 bit based systems running a choice of operating system: Solaris, Windows, Linux, and more. They are designed for grid computing, Web infrastructure, security and network services, application development, virtualization and consolidation, security, DNS, caching, firewall, and more.

8 #217811 ©2009 IDC CoolThreads technology servers. Sun's servers with CoolThreads technology are based on Sun's own UltraSPARC T1, T2, and T2 Plus processors running Solaris 10 and Linux. They are designed for high throughput with up to 256 simultaneous compute threads and 32 cores per processor. They are used for eco-conscious options, virtualization and consolidation, Web infrastructure, network applications, security, and more. They have built-in virtualization technology and deliver the flexibility of 256 virtual systems on a single server. They are able to deliver high performance as well as energy and space efficiency — all at a relatively low cost.

These systems offer a broad set of choices and capabilities in hardware and software, including support for multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies, all of which can be used to support Enterprise 2.0 applications, depending on specific customer requirements. Sun is adding solid state disk (SSD) drives that will have a dramatic impact by significantly increasing performance while also reducing power requirements. This is noteworthy for meeting E2.0 requirements of increasing amounts of data and data creation and manipulation.

Sun Storage Systems That Support Enterprise 2.0

Sun storage has three major components — Tape Storage, Disk Storage, and Open Storage. Of the three, Open Storage has the greatest potential to positively impact an E2.0 deployment.

Many IT managers are becoming alarmed with the growing costs related to management and scalability of proprietary storage in their Web infrastructures. Today's IT organizations are looking for new ways to lower the cost per Web user as well as the cost per GB of storage. They need cost-effective Web infrastructure storage solutions that scale efficiently and can help, rather than hinder, business agility.

Sun's StorageTek tape libraries, tape virtualization, tape drives, tape media, and tape device software provide a comprehensive suite of products across all major aspects of tape requirements for the enterprise.

Open storage refers to storage systems built with an architecture that utilizes industry-standard hardware and open source software. To create new economics for storage in the Web infrastructure, Sun combines high-performance general-purpose servers with sophisticated new storage management software. Sun Open Storage solutions for the Web provide a new approach to storage that offers:

Better Web storage economics compared with traditional storage solutions

Massive scalability to enable fast response to unpredictable Web data growth

Greater simplicity in deployment and ease of use

Improved service levels through real-time diagnostics, tuning, and real-time workload analysis

Greater business agility enabled by quickly reconfiguring systems to independently increase compute power, storage capacity, or performance

Some of the key components of Sun Open Storage include the following:

Sun™ Storage 7000 series is an attractive solution for fast-growing Web infrastructures, delivering higher performance than traditional file servers and network-attached storage architectures and at a dramatically lower cost (as low as $6 per GB compared with as much as $20 per GB for traditional solutions).

Sun™ Storage J4000 arrays offer aggressive pricing of as low as $1 per GB in combination with Sun's storage servers, thus providing an ideal building-block approach for cost-effective Web infrastructure storage.

Sun Fire™ X4540 storage server is ideal for Web content tagging and near- edge archiving. The system includes up to eight AMD Opteron™ CPU cores in a unique hybrid architecture that combines server and storage into a single platform at half the cost, half the power consumption, and three times the density of competing solutions.

Just as open source software has revolutionized the Web tier, open storage is poised to create a new economic revolution for Web infrastructure storage. The new approach of Sun Open Storage directly confronts some of the most challenging problems facing today's businesses. Sun Open Storage offers very good economics with solutions that can reduce Web infrastructure storage costs by as much as 90% and systems that utilize flash technology to deliver massive scalability and up to four times the performance of traditional storage solutions.

Sun Open Storage Software

Sun Open Storage Software is based on a foundation of OpenSolaris technology. OpenSolaris technology contains the OpenSolaris operating system, which includes the latest Solaris features and open source applications and is complemented by a complete open source storage software stack. Sun has developed a complete array of software components covering the storage protocol layer, the storage presentation layer, and the storage application layer. Sun Open Storage Software can have a significant positive impact on the costs of these storage-intensive solutions.

Some major components of Sun's open storage platform are:

The Solaris ZFS file system. Solaris ZFS can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage and handle a maximum file size of 16 exabytes.

The Solaris DTrace tool provides an advanced tracing framework and language that enables users to ask arbitrary diagnostic questions of the storage subsystem.

The Solaris Fault Management Architecture is a set of tools that provide automatic monitoring and diagnosis of I/O subsystems and hardware faults, facilitating a simpler and more effective experience for system administrators while reducing work and thereby resultant cost of ownership.

10 #217811 ©2009 IDC The Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software provides a collection of supporting software and utilities including open source remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy applications. The remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy software enables volumes and/or their snapshots to be replicated between physically separated servers.

Sun's Lustre file is an open source shared disk file system that is generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The Lustre file system is currently used frequently in high-performance computing (HPC). This high-capacity, high- performance file system is a natural fit for large, demanding E2.0 environments.

Sun Open Storage Services help organizations safely transition to an open storage infrastructure, optimizing existing investments while they realize the benefits of open storage. Sun Services professionals help address storage challenges by delivering integrated services and solutions that optimize and manage storage performance, including assessment, design, implementation, and migration services. Sun Services can help pinpoint opportunities to reduce costs, mitigate business risk, and better leverage information assets. These consulting and managed services address storage growth, resource management, and scalability challenges.

Sun Software

Sun's software portfolio includes a wide range of products and developer tools in the categories of operating systems, virtualization, databases, software infrastructure, systems management, developer tools, and communications and collaboration. All of these categories play a part in the E2.0 environment.

Operating Systems The open source Solaris operating system, the most widely deployed server Unix operating system, is known for its scalability and for being the origin of many innovative features such as DTrace and ZFS. Solaris supports SPARC-based and x86-based workstations and servers. Customers can choose between the Solaris operating system, for reliable, long-term deployments, and the OpenSolaris operating system, which includes the latest Solaris features and open source applications. Enterprise 2.0 applications can quickly become mission critical, and the reliability and scalability of Solaris, along with the open source support module, make it a leading operating system choice for E2.0.

Virtualization Sun's CMT systems offer the free and open LDOM virtualization for hardware positioning. Sun also offers Solaris Containers, which provides isolated virtual servers within a single operating system instance, reducing administration costs of managing separate operating systems. Sun xVM is a family of technologies that addresses both the virtualization of individual servers and the unified management of physical and virtual aspects of the datacenter, simplifying management of business applications and data in heterogeneous environments. Sun also supports the other major virtualization technologies from vendors such as VMware, Xen, and Microsoft (Hyper-V). Virtualization options are a key consideration when deploying an E2.0 strategy to control costs and server sprawl.

Sun acquired MySQL AB and is now the provider of MySQL, the world's most popular open source database and the de facto standard database for most Web-based applications. MySQL reduces the total cost of ownership of database software by reducing database licensing costs by over 90% and cutting systems downtime by 60%. At the same time, it lowers hardware expenditures by 70% and reduces administration, engineering, and support costs by up to 50%.

Beyond the database software, Sun offers a full range of subscription and professional services that help organizations design, optimize, scale, and manage not only MySQL but also the entire ecosystem in which it operates for Web-based services.

Other Databases

Sun offers and supports other multiplatform databases with a wide range of certified software, support, training, and consulting. These databases include:

PostgreSQL for Solaris, a database that is fully integrated into Solaris 10 and performance optimized and enhanced to take advantage of Solaris technologies

Java DB, Sun's supported distribution of the open source Apache Derby database designed for Java developers and applications

Software Infrastructure

Sun software infrastructure offerings provide the software and development tools needed to create, manage, and secure application infrastructure. These tools include Sun Identity Management, Sun Java System Application Platform, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server, Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite, and Java Enterprise System.

GlassFish Portfolio

The Sun GlassFish Portfolio provides the foundation to develop and deploy Web and enterprise applications and is a cost-effective way to acquire, manage, and maintain critical aspects of a Web platform. Sun GlassFish Portfolio offers a complete open source Web application platform, with enterprise-class features and support, high performance, and flexible subscription-based pricing for enterprises of all levels.

Key components are Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server, a full Java EE application server with support for dynamic languages that provides the foundation to develop and deploy next-generation applications and services; Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a core, standards-based integration platform for developing Web content and applications with integration to back-end Web or legacy data; Sun GlassFish Web Space Server, a new class of portal functionality for simplifying collaboration and the development of Web content; and Sun GlassFish Web Stack, an integrated stack of popular open source, Web-tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP, and Ruby optimized for the Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux platforms.

Sun offers a pragmatic approach for solving everyday identity management issues while positioning businesses for the growth challenges of tomorrow. In order to maintain security, mitigate risk, and reduce costs, organizations can build their secure, everyday enterprise with Sun's flexible, market-leading identity management solutions. Sun Identity Management streamlines and simplifies the process of managing user identities across a variety of applications in order to provide provisioning and secure access, ensure ongoing compliance, and enable federation for sharing beyond boundaries.

Java

Sun invented Java and has a complete Java software suite and toolset. Java technology is the foundation for many Web and networked services, applications, platform-independent desktops, robotics, and other embedded devices.

Some of the other latest Sun software innovations for Enterprise 2.0 include the following:

Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software provides a collection of supporting software and utilities including open source remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time- copy applications. The remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy software enables volumes and/or their snapshots to be replicated between physically separated servers.

Sun's Lustre file is an open source shared disk file system that is generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The Lustre file system is currently used frequently in HPC. This high-capacity, high-performance file system is a natural fit for large, demanding E2.0 environments.

Sun Java System Messaging Server is a messaging platform designed specifically to support large-scale service providers as well as enterprises requiring highly scalable, carrier-class communication services.

Sun Convergence is a rich Web client that integrates email, calendaring, address book, instant messaging, and presence inside a Web browser.

Sun Java System Calendar Server is a high-performance Internet calendar server for service providers and large enterprises.

The Sun Java System Connector for Microsoft Outlook is a plug-in that enables the use of Outlook as a desktop client with Sun Java System Messaging and Calendar Servers.

Sun Java System Instant Messaging provides a standards-based, secure instant messaging product for enterprises and service providers that features XMPP-based interoperability with other instant messaging systems.

Sun Java Mobile Communications is a standards-based carrier-grade solution that enables over-the-air (OTA) synchronization to virtually any SyncML-capable client and device.

Sun Connection, which is used to integrate and automate the management of thousands of heterogeneous systems as a single system

Sun N1 Service Provisioning System, which speeds application deployment across heterogeneous environments

Sun Management Center, which provides simplified administration with the in-depth monitoring and management capabilities for Sun enterprise servers

Sun xVM Ops Center, which offers discovery, update, provisioning, monitoring, and reporting technologies from both Sun Connection and N1 System Manager

Sun Services That Support Enterprise 2.0

Sun Professional Services provide a variety of options for both repeatable and custom engagements. This broad range of services, which is provided for servers, storage, and software, includes:

Architecture. Architectural services help organizations design a dynamic and scalable datacenter architecture that embodies open standards and heterogeneous solutions to deliver efficient and secure Web services.

Migration and implementation. These services reduce the risk of a Web technology refresh, leveraging best practices and experience based on thousands of datacenter implementations. Services include planning and project- managing platform transitions, avoiding disruptions that could cost time, money, and business. Installation and configuration assistance helps organizations move into production quickly, smoothly, and safely.

Installation. Enterprise Installation Services (EIS) provides comprehensive installation services for Sun Web products. EIS provides installation assistance and expertise required to achieve a smooth and successful start-up for a Sun system environment to ensure that systems are running at an optimal level right from the start.

Assessment. Assessment services provide organizations with datacenter experts who can offer innovative thinking around Web growth challenges and how to stretch datacenter dollars. These services identify IT inefficiencies and then optimize and tune performance to support new business objectives.

Infrastructure management. Sun Managed Services offers a dynamic portfolio of complex IT infrastructure capabilities to manage heterogeneous Web environments with ITIL-certified staff helping enhance the business value of IT investments through improved operational efficiency and service levels.

Sun offers core building block services and consultative services across various software specialty domains, including Identity Suite, MySQL, GlassFish, JavaCaps, and xVM. These services include:

An onsite Getting Started Workshop to identify and assess technical and business objectives and produce a subsequent workshop report that defines a phased road map and identifies potential project risks

14 #217811 ©2009 IDC A Quality and Architectural service to define quality requirements for an engagement, develop an architecture to meet those requirements, and build out a prototype in preparation for the deployment phase

An Implement and Deployment service to build out the architecture based on the blueprint provided in the architecture specifications and deploy the application into a production environment

Overall, this portfolio of services positions Sun to be able to meet the needs of its E2.0 customers from point solutions of hardware and software to complete solutions, including managed solutions.

CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES

Challenges

Customers face the following of challenges when considering the implementation of social networking applications to create an Enterprise 2.0:

Deploying the combination of features, content, and facilitation that will work most effectively to address functional goals and cultural requirements is essential to success.

Developing a timeline and measurements that are realistic for the size and scope of the community in question can be challenging, especially since large communities can take years, not months, to develop.

Implementations of Enterprise 2.0 need to appropriately define the amount of structure such that community members know how to participate and feel comfortable participating and the business can effectively track and react to conversations, which allows for innovation and serendipity.

Understanding and mitigating the effects of vested interests in an organization are key. In particular, managers and executives who feel empowered by their role in advancing information may feel threatened by an open information environment. Their interests and needs should be identified and addressed to ensure a successful deployment.

Cultural resistance is always the biggest hurdle when changing business operations. Organizations need to understand the cultural biases and develop useful applications — and then have the patience to allow them to work.

While Sun has the appropriate IT infrastructure offerings to support such deployments, it may face the challenge of customer requirements with the proper IT infrastructure to appropriately support the deployment and growth of social networking applications in the enterprise.

Opportunities

The opportunities for enterprises derived from the successful implementation of social networking applications to build out an Enterprise 2.0 are many:

©2009 IDC #217811 15 Enterprise 2.0 implementations can create the ability to capture, organize, analyze, and distribute appropriately the wealth of tacit knowledge — captured through conversations — in an organization.

By building useful tools, an effective Enterprise 2.0 implementation can ensure users have better ways to find, share, and filter information — all within a model based on the sources they trust.

The reduction of corporate risks through a better understanding of the concerns of customers, partners, and employees — and how they change over time — can arise out of interactions from an Enterprise 2.0 implementation. Using this new capability can better capture and organize the massive amount of unstructured data currently being lost as a business resource.

Enterprise 2.0 implementations can increase speed and agility by leveraging conversations across large groups and enabling members to opt in to conversations in which they have an interest — enabling contextual connections between individuals across the organization.

Enterprise 2.0 implementations can tie together the knowledge inherent in complex organizations and make it available to everyone who needs to have access (e.g., knowledge capture, support for geodispersed teams, and brand/community building with great facilities for R&D).

With the proper product set in place to support these opportunities for customers, Sun has its own opportunity to build out a specialization in assessing customer needs for building an Enterprise 2.0. Sun can take advantage of this opportunity by helping its customers match their social networking IT infrastructure needs with the proper product mix of Sun hardware and software to launch and sustain customer Enterprise 2.0 environments.

CONCLUSION

While social networking and user-generated content applications have rapidly changed consumers' use and perception of online technologies, it is becoming better understood how these technologies are affecting the enterprise environment and to what extent.

IDC expects that the significant adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in the enterprise will have a dramatic impact on how organizations capture, discuss, distribute, and protect their information. If companies are not already planning for this change, they will find themselves increasingly exposed and vulnerable.

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