Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

The best part of visiting HP Labs late last week was the presentation by Hewlett-Packard's chief strategist. If you want to know where HP is heading and why, watch or listen to these 9 minutes of Shane Robison explaining the trends and strategy of HP.

This is one of the most lucid accounts of HP's strategy that I've come across.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2bFUkocthY

Also please see: HP Labs Reboot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVGdklaASIU

Additional Information on Shane Robison:

I'm hearing from a reliable source that Salesforce.com has approached Oracle to gauge if there is any interest in a sale at $75 a share. That would be almost a 50 per cent premium over Friday's close of $50.87.

The deal would make sense:

-It would provide Oracle with a strong brand in online apps and a strong transition road map to cloud computing and a software as a service business model.

-Salesforce would benefit from Oracle's dominant position in enterprise IT markets, which would help in convincing corporations that Salesforce is a scalable and viable enterprise solution.

-Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce would make a good successor to replace 63 year old Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, when he retires says Matthew Greeley, CEO of BrightIdea.com. Mr Benioff is used to work at Oracle. When he left Oracle in 1999, Mr Ellison provided seed funding for Salesforce and also served on its board of directors.

-Mr Benioff needs a new challenge, he appears to be losing interest in Salesforce, or at least reducing his financial interest in his company at a rapid daily rate. He has been selling 10,000 Salesforce shares every single day since 21 August 2007. Before then, he sold 20,000 shares every day since 14 November 2006. Prior to that date, Mr Benioff sold thousands of shares every day in variable amounts since 31 July 2006.

[Please see: Insider Trades - Marc Benioff - Yahoo! Finance.]

-An Oracle acquisition of Salesforce would strengthen its strategic position against SAP, the top enterprise application software company. SAP has been slow in figuring out its online strategy, even naming its initiative has been challenging to the company.

UPDATED: Larry Ellison will have to buy Salesforce at some point anyway. Netsuite cannot be scaled to the size of Salesforce in this decade, maybe in the next. The two businesses could be easily integrated, that's the beauty of online software, it's all standards based.

Buying CRM now at a 50 per cent premium would be a good deal for ORCL. MSFT is going to have to cough up much more than the 62 per cent premium it initially offered for YHOO...

And Salesforce is to Oracle, as Yahoo is to Microsoft, in terms of future direction and strategic positioning.

Sunday evening I'm at the Four Seasons in San Francisco for the Sand Hill Group's Holiday dinner as a guest of the tireless M.R Rangaswami, "the swami of enterprise software" as I called him because of his excellent Software conferences.

I used to think enterprise software was dead and boring but M.R convincingly changed my opinion through his conferences and a great online magazine Sandhill.com. [Check out Peter Sobiloff's article: Ready for a Downturn?]

Sunday evening felt the same as a year ago at Sand Hill's holiday celebrations, it seemed as if I was here just a month ago. Again, I'm sitting next to Eric Faurot, who is always good company.

Mr Faurot is a senior executive at CMP, which purchased M.R's Software conference. [CMP buys Sand Hill Group's Software conference for up to $9m] BTW, look out for another acquisition to be announced soon.

The Software 2008 conference is moving from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas which marks a turning point for what has been a quintessential Silicon Valley conference with great turnout from local VCs, startups and top software executives. The conference will be a lot different in Las Vegas but then again the software as a service market, which had been a prime source of content for the conference, has now gone mainstream, so the conference can potentially attract a larger, more mainstream audience too.

It is good to see other familiar faces: Terry Garnett of Garnett & Helfrich Capital--the venture buyout firm; Shannon Latta, partner in the Horn Group [Please see the latest post on Horn Group blog: Evolving PR-Ryan Block, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Tom Foremski on Social Media and PR]. Also, Carleen Hawn, editor of FoundRead from GigaOmniMedia.

It was a very pleasant evening but I wish it hadn't come around so soon. The experience of time in Silicon Valley is definitely accelerating (and it's not just me!)

- - -

Please see 2006:

Sand Hill Group celebrates a good year

Lunch with the Swami of the enterprise software sector...

Technorati Tags: sand hill group

Autonomy said Tuesday that it had integrated its recent acquisition of Zantaz into its product line. The move strengthens

Autonomy's position in the enterprise search market against Google, FAST Search and Transfer, and other companies offering ways to structure large amounts of corporate documents and emails.

Zantaz, based in California, was acquired in July 2007 for $375m. It's technology helps companies administer document policies and comply with legal and regulatory requests for documents. Legal cases can sometimes require companies to find and turn over millions of documents. Earlier this year Intel ran into a problem complying with a deadline to turn over millions of documents as part of a lawsuit brought by Advanced Micro Devices.

The Zantaz technology can also identify potential legal risks in a company's operations, offering a proactive benefit. This field is known as Information Risk Management.

Autonomy has combined its technology with that of Zantaz. "It's now on steroids," said Chief Marketing Officer Nicole Eagan.

Zantaz gives Autonomy an important beachhead in the US with its large customer base. It can leverage that community through offering a family of search products including the ability to search and index video data.

The Autonomy technology can search for the meaning within documents based on a Bayesian approach which uses statistical analysis. This allows it to work with any language because "meaning" is defined by the statistical similarity of text within documents. The system has to be trained but once that is done it can quickly process large numbers of documents.

- - -

Autonomy Zantaz announcements.

Please also see: Autonomy Says Tags Don't Work

Technorati Tags: Autonomy, Zantaz

I popped into the recent LinuxWorld:

Linux Increasingly Mobile

Motorola is moving towards widespread deployment of its mobile Linux on its cell phones. It is moving the OS further and further up the stack towards enterprise class handsets.

I spoke with Christy Wyatt, VP of Ecosystem and Market Development at Motorola, about recruiting developers to Motorola's Linux platform.

Mobile Software Giant

Access is one of the largest software companies that nobody has heard of, is how Diedier Diaz, senior vp of product strategy at Access describes the company.

It is a leader in mobile applications, and virtually everyone with a cell phone has used one of the company's apps. This is especially true since the acquisition of PalmSource in late 2005, the developer of the Palm OS.

Enterprise Open Source Applications

Combining open source software to create powerful enterprise-class applications suites is what SpikeSource does. But how do you make sure dozens of constantly changing open source software components will work together, and not break each other?

Kim Polese is the CEO of SpikeSource and the former chief evangelist for Java. She says the secret is in the automated testing of the suites of open source software.

By Tom Foremski
In a bold move, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday grabbed the lead from rivals Intel and IBM with the introduction of the fastest server microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T2.

It also said that it was reorganizing its business units so that they individually have to compete in the open market in a bid to become a provider of chips, software, and systems to partners, which could include rival Hewlett-Packard.

The speed of the UltraSPARC T2 surprised analysts. It was achieved with an innovative 8 core design with each core capable of 8 threads. This is equivalent to a 64-way server system with a total of 89.6 GHz of computing power (64 times 1.4 GHz).

This computing power provides the chip with the fastest integer and floating point performance on the market, allowing it to be used in specialist scientific computing and general purpose business IT systems.

Opening up Sun

Jonathan Swartz, CEO of Sun, told Silicon Valley Watcher that Sun's business groups are being "decoupled" from each other so that they can compete in the open market against rivals on their own merits. Previously, Sun's business units were considered part of a whole, in which only Sun technologies would be combined into systems.

The new arrangement would allow partners to use the new chips with technologies from other companies. Mr Swartz said HP and IBM could become a Sun partner, for example.

Nathan Brookwood, chief analyst at Insight64, said:"Sun has achieved something remarkable. They used to be criticised for focusing on multi-threaded architectures, but now it has paid off for them and they are ahead of the competition."

Greener IT

The multicore, multi-threaded architecture also brings other benefits, it dramatically reduces electric power consumption allowing Sun to claim the lead in processing power per watt of electricity consumed.

Low power consumption saves greenhouse gases but more importantly for data centers, it allows more computing to be concentraed in centers where there are constraints on electric power.

Mr Brookwood added that the investment Sun makes in microprocesor development helps drive a $5bn server business.

The new chip also integrates ten security standards for faster processing, and it also has high data throughput allowing it to be used in network and data storage equipment.

Clay Ryder, chief analyst at the Sageza Group, said that the chip was impressive. "It potentially puts Sun into new markets but it will have to educate potential customers about the chip and why they would need it. In today's web services world there are many factors to consider in equipping data centers."

Data center and consumer devices

The chip is made for Sun by Texas Instruments and is priced at $1000, inexpensive for a high performance server microprocessor. Sun said it wants to enter into consumer markets too, and it will produce less expensive chips for those applications.

Mr Brookwood said that entering consumer markets where the embedded microprocessors have prices of $30 to $40 would be challenging because the qualities that make it excellent for server applications are not the same for embedded applications.

Highlights:

- High-throughput processing - Eight cores and eight threads per core accelerate throughput as shown by two world-record, single-chip SPEC CPU scores, based on tests that delivered 78.3 est. SPECint_rate2006 and a 62.3 est. SPECfp_rate2006.

The UltraSPARC T2 processor has twice the thread count of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processor, which recently set a world record on ten Sun Blade T6300 Server Modules delivering 8253.21 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard*

- Networking - Dual, virtualizable, multithreaded 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports with built-in packet classification ensure fast access to networks and server-to-server communications

- Security - Eight cryptographic acceleration units and a total of 10 independent functions address ever-heightening security needs, including NSA-approved algorithms, without a performance penalty

- Computation - Eight floating point units extend the benefits of CMT to high-performance computing workloads for scientific applications; world record single-chip SPECfp_rate2006 and world-record single-chip SPECompM2001 scores

Input/Output - Eight lanes of industry-standard PCI Express I/O speed applications like streaming media, database read/write and data back-up

- Memory access - Quad memory controllers deliver more than 50 Gigabytes-per-second of memory access

- Software support - The massively threaded Solaris OS takes excellent advantage of the highly threaded processors and enables open and cost-effective virtualization

_____________

Please see:

Sun Microsystems Enters Commercial Silicon Market With World's Fastest Commodity Microprocessor

UltraSPARC T2 Processor - Overview

Nathan Brookwood - Insight 64 -

The Sageza Group, Inc.

I popped into the Churchill Club's CIO Agenda. You can read about it here:

  Churchill Club: CIOs say budgets are up, hiring is up, outsourcing is up

Dave Margulius, an IT analyst at Enterprise Insight moderated the panel.

The Churchill Club, 7-23-07
Doug Merrill, VP Engineering, Google
Doug Schwinn, CIO, Hasbro
David Bergen, CIO, Levi Strauss
Randy Spratt, CIO, McKesson

Content-lite

Mr Margulius does a good job putting together this type of CIO panel but disappoints by being very light on the questions. 

It was my first experience seeing Doug Merrill, VP of Engineering at Google speak. He is flamboyant in dress and mannerisms compared with his fellow panelists, wearing a maroon sports coat, tan slacks, Italian shoes, long hair and an earring. He speaks very passionately with great delivery.

However, he seems to be saying nothing much at all. It was quite extraordinary. I double checked with some other people at the event, and they had the same experience. I have some video of the event I'll be posting later this week...

- - -

Please also see SVW:

Three funerals and a wedding described mood of Churchill Club CIO panel

With the iPhone hitting the stores this past weekend, the post-PC on-demand era entered into warp speed - marked by an appropriately frenzied atmosphere in front of Apple's Palo Alto store. Bill Atkinson, designer of the hypercard (and a member of the Apple Macintosh development team), was amongst the many eager consumers lined up the night before.

Link to: http://www.podtech.net/home/3494/techone-episode-1-iphonomics

Tags: iPhone, on-demand, Apple, Palo Alto, Bill Atkinson

Bookmarks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

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[Intel is a sponsor of SVW}

On Wednesday I went to Intel's launch of its latest Centrino chipset for notebooks. Everything, of course, is a lot faster, but what caught my eye was a new technology embedded in the chips which, although aimed squarely at business users, would be a god-send for consumers.

Take a look:

Intel® vPro™ processor technology. IT departments will be able to reliably manage both desktops and notebooks and deal with what plagues them most – security threats, cost of ownership, resource allocation, and asset management – and do so wirelessly.

One of the key innovations designed in Intel Centrino Pro – Intel® Active Management Technology – provides business-class notebook PCs with wireless PC management, protection and remote repair work thereby increasing productivity, IT savings and uptime.

For example, if a virus or other type of malware gets into the notebook, the Intel technology will shut it off from the network, and the IT department is notified, downloads software to get rid of the problem and repair any damaged files. It's all done in a minute or two.

This technique can be used for other things too, installing software across hundreds of clients etc, etc.

At first glance it sounds like many other remote management software applications/utilities that provide similar capabilities, what's new here?

It turns out there is a microcontroller (a separate chip) that creates a wireless back channel to a central location. This back-channel remains unaffected and is used to deliver new software and repairs--even if the notebook is disconnected from its main network and has been completely taken over by hordes of malware!

This Active Management Technology is inside every one of the new Centrino chipsets, but it is only used in business-class notebooks. It allows the notebook vendors to charge corporations a premium. However, it is there in the consumer notebooks too, it is just not turned on.

But it could be turned on with the right software and it could become a platform to deliver repair and maintenance services to millions of consumers! It's potentially a massive business for some future companies. Who will be the first to do this?

Best Buy and its fleet of Geek Squads running out to people's homes to fix their machines might soon become a thing of the past...

---

Multitude Of Innovations Boost New Intel–Based Laptops›
NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 9, 2007 – Faster processors and chipsets. Great-looking video and graphics. Stronger and faster wireless signals. Better security and manageability. Designed for energy efficiency to enable great battery life.

Two dueling conferences this week, Software 2007 and Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference. Software 2007 was the clear choice and that's where most of the local hacks could be found.

I had once written:

The enterprise software market is dead, dead, dead....

I was wrong. Enterprise software markets are not dead boring. They're just plain dead.

But that was before I started going to MR Rangaswami's Software 2005 conference. And I've become a big fan of MR "the swami of enterprise software" as I've called him, because he has made the this space interesting again. And because he has created one of the best conferences in Silicon Valley.

Every year it gets better and this year it featured keynotes from top stars of the sector: Steve Ballmer Microsoft; Hasso Plattner, SAP; Shane Robison
Hewlett-Packard, and of course local royalty, Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com.

- Software 2007 Powered by Innovation

The Old Guard Turn Up

It was interesting to see the old guard of the enterprise software sector, Microsoft, SAP, EMC, etc, because the show is very focused on software as a service (SAAS). And there is little love lost between these two very different camps.

Even though the software giants continually announce SAAS ventures, the SAAS business model is disruptively different. With SAAS, customers pay for exactly what they use, rather than pay a big lump fee for an enterprise  license and then 20 percent in annual maintenance fees

"When your customers are on a monthly service plan, you have to continually deliver value and innovation. It is not about just selling a license and disappearing till the next time. You have to be continually on your toes," says Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo, a leading talent management service company.

Software Startup Investments Magnified By Offshoring 

MR is a tireless promoter of the enterprise software industry: "There are billions of dollars being invested  BY VCs in enterprise software startups. And if you think about the use of off-shoring some of the development, the use of open source software, and other technologies, you actually are getting a factor of four or five greater than the dollar amount suggests." This is going to produce tremendous amounts of innovation, he says.

Late last year MR sold the conference to CMP, the trade media and events company. - CMP buys Sand Hill Group's Software conference for up to $9m

I have met with Eric Faurot, CMP's savvy chief strategist, who led the deal. He said he wanted to take MR's Software 2000 conference and roll it into CMP's Interop show in Las Vegas to recreate a type of Comdex--which used to be the mammoth show. MR told me that he thinks his Software conference could become bigger than Interop. He could be right.

Media Matters

On Tuesday morning I was on a fun panel moderated by Sabrina Horn, head of the Horn Group. Here is a write up from Martha Feingold from the Horn Group:

Media - Who Matters Most?

Martha Feingold

The provocative title of this post is the subject we sought to tackle at our breakout session at Software 2007 today.  Our CEO Sabrina Horn put together an interesting mix of media and enterprise software executives- Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, Forbes' Victoria Barret , Ben Smith of Merchant Circle, Helen Donnelly of EnterpriseDB and Sam Whitmore from MediaSurvey.

 Horn Group Weblog

We got some excellent feedback from the audience, which is always very satisfying.

I'm off to moderate a panel on film financing, more Software 2007 notes are on their way...

- - -

Please see SVW:

Notes from Software 2005: Lunch with the Swami of the enterprise software sector...

The Swami of enterprise software

The enterprise software market is dead, dead, dead....

I was wrong. Enterprise software markets are not dead boring. They're just plain dead.

Posted by Tom Foremski on September 13, 2005 2:46 AM

Enterprise software might not be dead after all. . . at least not in early April

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 7, 2006 11:00 AM

I really should spend more time with my sponsors. I spent most of Tuesday at Tibco's user conference, catching up with the the company's business strategy team and having some great conversations, and thinking I really should spend more time with my sponsors.

Tibco, Infineon Systems, Intel, Edelman and Cohn & Wolfe are part of a small, courageous band of of SVW sponsors. Tibco in particular, has been vital to this venture. 

Vivek Ranadive, the CEO and founder of Tibco is one of Silicon Valley's key players and one of its quintessential figures. He "got" what I was trying to do with Silicon Valley Watcher earlier than anybody else, when it was just a gleam in my eye.

Conversely, I feel that I "get" what Tibco is trying to do, as it forges ahead into new territory. And it is a complex new territory that goes beyond information technology as we've known it.

Tibco's focus is on enabling large corporations to move into the next phase of business automation, into the automation of the deployment of business processes.

This is not about enterprise applications, ERP, CRM, etc. and the dozens of acronyms and terms that became common in the lexicon of enterprise IT for the past 2 decades.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com talks all the time about "the end of software" and he is dead right. Except that he doesn't really mean it. What Salesforce is trying to say is "the end of software-on-your-server."

Tibco really is about "the end of software." The leading edge in the enterprise IT space is not about applications--server-based or delivered as a service--it is about the meta level above that layer. It is in the "wrapper" above where application companies such as Salesforce operate.

Tibco's focus is on automating and managing business processes, and building the service oriented architecture (SOA) that businesses need to quickly respond to a changing world. It's a changing world of competition, and also literally a changing world--rising temperatures, sea levels, and energy costs.

SOA is about reprogramming an entire business on-the-fly, it is about predictive intelligence, it is how large businesses will differentiate themselves from each other.

SOA makes IT strategic again because in a world where everyone has the same enterprise applications, the competitive differentiator becomes the automated business process and how quickly it can be deployed and combined.

The SOA world is a complex one because to get to that level means that a company's IT systems have to be integrated, real-time, and built on an incredibly flexible infrastructure. In the context of SOA, IT really does matter.

- - -

Some recent Tibco news:

FAST Search and Transfer, the leading European search firm, introduced a search based business platform for media companies and said that search traffic from its customers has surpassed Yahoo! and will overtake Google in 2 years.

The Norwegian based company said its FASTMedia software platform is the first to match content to individual users, in addition to supporting all types of online advertising models. The suite of applications is designed specifically for media companies and enables them to run their own ad networks.

FAST said that its top 35 media customers already generate search traffic that exceeds that of Yahoo!.

The market research firm IDC estimates that 70 per cent of search queries do not come from search engines.

Instead, people are choosing to bypass search engines and are going
directly to their preferred information sources, retailers, and other
websites and searching there.

FAST recently completed a survey of its top 35 media customers:

Together this "FAST Media Network" is generating as much search traffic as Yahoo!, with search traffic growing more than twice as quickly.  At the current pace, searches within the "FAST Media Network" collectively will surpass Google in two years...

FAST wants media companies to "turn search from the disrupter of their worlds"  and use the technology to grow their businesses.

For example, newspaper publishers have stood by and watched Google and Yahoo sell massive amounts of advertising based on their content without any direct benefit--unless a reader clicks through to their news site, and then happens to click on a Google or Yahoo text ad.

FAST wants to cut out the middle-men by selling search-based business software to media companies to run within their own data centers and operate their own adverting businesses.

Global Media Warming

The battle for media markets is heating up.  Google recently acquired DoubleClick for $3.1bn and today Yahoo! acquired Right Media for $680m, to beef up their advertising services.

The competition is for a very lucrative business--running massive advertising networks for global media companies. The search giants keep about 20 per cent of total advertising revenues.

But this revenue share is skewed towards a handful of large media companies with the clout to negotiate better deals. Most publishers receive far less, between 60 and 40 per cent of ad revenues.

The FASTMedia software supports pay-per-click, contextual, classifieds and all other types of online advertising services, plus self-service, and unique features. It's  "Featured Content" technology matches content on-the-fly with online users' searches. Publishers can use this for targeted premium content services.

FAST Search and Transfer has suddenly popped into my sphere of attention and I mean really popped. I got to spend some time at FAST's user conference at the end of last week, and it was an educational experience that got me interested in search again.

This Norwegian based enterprise software search company has made the subject of search compelling again. For too long GOOG has made it appear as if it had already won the search wars--anything better would be an incremental improvement.

Yet enterprise search--which is where FAST has staked its expertise--is a much more interesting subject than I imagined, and much more interesting than consumer search. Enterprise search is much more difficult problem, and one of the most challenging problems in IT.

Consumer search can be vague and still be successful. It can bring up a list of nearly relevant sites or documents, and usually that is all that is needed. But in the enterprise, search is usually needed to find something very specific, a contract, a purchase order, a memo. 

And there are all sorts of conditions associated with access to data, some security based, others are regulatory. Search quickly becomes quite a complex process and one that can lead to other things.

Enterprises use a lot of structured data, but there is also a massive amount of unstructured data too. Search in the enterprise could potentially bring the two data world's together.

You might even be able to create enterprise applications by using modified search algorithms.

This type of scenario gets very interesting: enterprise applications by algorithm. This is already happening in business intelligence, I wonder how far, in theory, such an approach could be taken. Could you create CRM applications through search algorithms?

I'll be writing more about this subject, and FAST, over the next few days.

David Boloker CTO of Emerging Technologies at IBM came into town to speak at Ajax World. I caught up with him Wednesday morning and we talked about Ajax and Web 2.0, and a new early alpha initiative IBM calls QEDwiki that can provide the framework for integrating information and applications within enterprises:

David Boloker is very interested in Ajax and very interested in making sure that there aren't dozens of nuances of Ajax. He and Scott Dietzen, CTO at Zimbra, one of the earliest Ajax apps companies, founded the Open Ajax Alliance.

"Every Ajax toolset was following its own nuance of Ajax and the problem was that each toolset wanted to 'own' the whole page. This created many conflicts and made it difficult to pull together different components," said Mr Boloker. "We did not want to create a standards body but to create agreement on some basic things such as naming JavaScript objects."

Is an Ajax application the same as a Web 2.0 application? "No, a Web 2.0 application has to include the social dimension, how it implements tagging, for example, and sharing, and all the other community oriented aspects that are important," said Mr Boloker.

For IBM, Ajax and Web 2.0 represent new generations of  applications that use the web as a platform. And they have characteristics that enable users to create their own "my web" experience by mashing/pulling  together Ajax components from many different sources.

A key to that approach is to be able to provide the framework that enables that type of integration. And that is the OpenAjax Hub an open source project.

But with everyone having access to this framework, where is the value-add? Mr Boloker says it will be in two places. One is in the value of the data or content. The databases of content will have value to organizations and users, such as Reuters feeds, or databases of chemical data for example.

The second place will be in the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) layer which is all about services. And IBM is a services oriented company.

"The focus for us is on the business professional, not the IT department. All you need to do is operate a mouse and know how to drag and drop."

That's the basis for IBM's alpha project called QEDwiki (Quickly and Easily Done wiki), which is being tested by 20 large corporations. This is IBM's version of what Jotspot, SocialText, and others are offering, a way to enable business people to mashup sources, feeds and applications, by what I call drag and drop share or not (DADSON), depending on user access rights.

But mashing up feeds and data means trust in the source. I pointed out that Google News recently was carrying a news headline that had been hacked, it carried an anti-US anti-Israel message. In that case, Google had not verified the content, it was corrupted, and that corrupted trust in Google.

In the brave new world of web applications and mashups, verifying that content comes from where it says it does will be absolutely critical. But how will that be done?

Mr Boloker said that feeds could be signed with security certificates but he also acknowledged that even Microsoft has had problems with security certificates.

Trust will come from long standing relations, contracts, and also using security technologies, said Mr Boloker. "It will come from your relationships with your vendors and an established history of trust. You will assign different levels of trust to a feed. And trust will be offered as yet another service."

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Additional resources and links:

On Tuesday, I spoke with Greg Gianforte, founder and chief executive of RightNow Technologies and the fruits of a $25m two-year technology development project, the RightNow 8 enterprise suite.  This is what will carry it into the big leagues.

The big leagues means breaking into that $1bn annual revenue level, about ten times current revenues. That's also where Salesforce.com wants to be, the leading software-as-a-service company.

Mr Gianforte likes to point out that there is a big difference between RightNow and Salesforce. "We are enterprise class, we compete with SAP, Oracle in the enterprise. Salesforce is aimed at smaller companies. And now with RightNow 8 this will take us to the next level in the enterpsice spoftware market."

An investment of $25m is huge for this young company, which went public in 2003. It's a bet-the-company investment and so the strategy had better be right.

Mr Gianforte believes the opportunity is in helping to automate the improvement of the customer experience.

"Businesses are constantly being challenged by lower cost business models and that means they have to focus on their customers," he says. "In mature markets customer retention becomes the new form of customer acquisition. This means that improving the customer experience is very important."

RightNow recently commissioned a study that found that nearly one-third of a sample of 1006 people had experienced anger strong enough to make them shake, or to break something--because of a bad customer experience. That's a large number of chances to lose a customer.

RightNow 8 is an enterprise application platform that builds on the company's core Customer Relationship Management application, with modules for different industry sectors providing ways to improve customer experience. Third parties/partners will fill in the gaps in producing modules for various smaller verticals.

SVW take: RightNow isn't a web 2.0 company by any stretch of the this short-lived definition. It's a fast growing enterprise software company positioned to profit from the corporate move towards a mix of hosted software services and in-house IT.

Also, corporations have done a ton of cost cutting in their IT departments, and now are looking at ways to use IT to build revenues.

RightNow certainly has a shot at grabbing more business because of its lower pricing and fast deployment. It's challenge with RightNow 8 will be in distinguishing its approach from several competing enterprise application platforms.

Here is AMR Research on private equity firms buying up smaller software companies to create large firms capable of competing with an SAP or