For the last few years the Enterprise 2.0 conference has had a startup launchpad competition, which is unique for an enterprise focused conference. Part of the reason for that may be that Enterprise 2.0 has relied heavily on innovations from startups to help develop the industry as a whole since 2006. The Launchpad is always my favorite part of the conference.
There were four finalists this time, two of which were wikis, which surprised me a little bit in part because wikis were one of the first Enterprise 2.0 technologies, but they also remain some of the least social tools, remaining focused almost entirely on collaboration.
This winner this time was CubeTree, who had previously made a big splash with their launch in May 2009 and their SAP/Business Objects case study. CubeTree has maintained an impressive pace of development and they announced some pretty compelling new features which included collaboration capabilities for collaborating directly on individual cells inside a spreadsheet. There is obviously a fine line here between adding value and over-building the collaborative capabilities of the tool, but I am looking forward to watching CubeTree’s progress in the coming year. To date, CubeTree has raise $11.5million to build their business.
The Garland Group was the other finalist that really caught my eye. They have developed risk management and policy tools to help organizations provide manage ongoing risk compliance work using collaborative processes that engage employees directly and more evenly over time. By turning Risk Compliance in to an ongoing methodology, rather than an abrupt and occasional task, the overall costs of risk management to the organization will be lowered and predictable.
Twiki and xWiki were also finalists, Twiki in particular has been around for many years and continues to be one of the mainstays of the enterprise open source movement. Both Twiki and xWiki seem to be moving slowly towards being more of an enterprise application platform than simple wiki, which is a space that Mindtouch in particular has helped define.
It is important to point out that these weren’t the only four startups at the conference. There were many roaming the show floor and some exhibiting, including one interesting one called PartnerPedia. PartnerPedia has developed a trio of web-based tools for managing and engaging networks of partners.
Enterprise 2.0 startups are typically horizontal solutions focused on providing a wide array of content collaboration or communication tools, with some sort of social networking layer. My hope is that we will start to see more startups focused on leveraging existing social platforms and infrastructure that is becoming increasingly available inside the enterprise and which leverages other existing enterprise assets, rather than trying to re-create the wheel. For example, startups focused on leveraging Lotus Notes, Microsoft Sharepoint or any of SAPs platforms are extremely rare, yet there are huge opportunities to unlock value just in those 3 ecosystems.
I would be curious to hear who you think the most promising enterprise startups are right now.
(Cross-posted @ Dachis Group :: Collaboratory)
Not sure about that. One year ago trademark holders have kicked out all core devs from the open source project which since then continue on http://foswiki.org That’s where all the TWiki experts are now.
Clarification on “Both Twiki and xWiki seem to be moving slowly towards being more of an enterprise application platform than simple wiki, which is a space that Mindtouch in particular has helped define.”
I started TWiki 11 years ago as a wiki based application platform. The initial application was a knowledge base for customer support. Many other apps followed, created in grassroots by thousands of companies. TWiki is used by more than half of the Fortune 500 and leading Government agencies with more than 60,000 installations in 130 countries and 14 languages. Other software projects have been inspired by TWiki, such as JotSpot (RIP apps feature), XWiki, MindTouch, and even some forks.
TWiki is a commercial open source project similar to RedHat. The open source community at twiki.org has an inviting code of conduct and governance model based on the successful Ubuntu project. Twiki Inc is the leading provider of enterprise agility solutions.
Clarification to Peter Thoeny’s clarification:
Peter forked TWiki from JOSwiki in 1998. A thriving community developed
over the intervening period — by the mid 00′s Peter was no longer the chief
coder and others had essentially rearchitected the platform. As it became
a compelling solution, it also held great temptations for monetization. Peter
had registered the trademark during his original fork and was the sole
holder of it. Tensions later arose because of this. Ultimately, a community
governance committee sought to negotiate with Peter and his new backers
about joint ownership of the name. An agreement had been tentatively
agreed to, at least so the community thought, when Peter locked out all
developers from the servers (“benevolently” run by his company) one minute
before one of the joint weekly org meetups. They would only be readmitted
upon accepting his numerous terms, among others declaring him dictator
of the project. Can you guess what happened?
TWiki’s open source “community” now consists of Peter, the marketing droids at
his company, and a contract programmer working for them. Everyone else was
kicked out. No one yet seems willing to swallow the “inviting code of conduct”, and
since he doesn’t have the hundreds of millions that Shuttleworth uses to fund his community, he can’t buy a pod of programmers. So you can hear the crickets
chirping over there on the core codebase.
Meanwhile, Foswiki is where the action is: same quality code (they wrote it!) but
actually maintained.
Hundreds of bugfixes relative to the “trademarked commercial platform”. A real
community with constant banter on their freenode #foswiki channel, where many
people get help daily. An accelerated pace of development. Yahoo, which runs
the world’s largest TWiki, is migrating. (they’re hiring a fulltime Foswiki developer
to help drive customization in directions which benefit them). Many other large
installs have followed — many more plan to during the course of their regular
upgrade cycle.