Analysis on Go-JOT!-oogle

Good stuff from Zoli Erdos,  WSJ (not sure non-subscribers can read it though, Richard McManus, Venture Beat.  I’m sure there is more coming.  All the Enterprise Irregulars are busy trick-or-treating…

World of Wikis

An afterthought… I don’t think we’re ready for Wiki Wars yet, but having top drawer investors pays dividends in many ways. Consider JotSpot’s investors, Redpoint Ventures and The Mayfield Fund and SocialText’s Draper Fisher Jurvetson and SAP Ventures. You can be sure, these firms will be successful with all doors open, as investors are not ready to repeat web 1.0.

With this “Guild of Friends,” the success of these Wiki firms is nearly guaranteed.

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Riders Wanted

It’s Halloween, so my time is limited on what I can post today. Sorry.
Today’s leading news regarding JotSpot being acquired by Google is more validation of the sector. Tomorrow, I’ll post my interview with Kraus. You can read an excellent analysis of the acquisition here. I’m sure there will be more to come.

Lots of good indicators moving forward in the Enterprise 2.0 sector lately. In the past few weeks, several major vendors have made announcements regarding incorporating web 2.0 technologies into their platforms. According to Internet News,

“Software vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft are increasingly seeing the value of shifting their traditional portal and applications offerings to an integrated platform to reflect the trickle down of Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise.”

Yesterday, SocialText announced SocialPoint ™– a wiki solution for Microsoft’s Sharepoint. You can read Dan Farber’s take on it in his blog post yesterday. Boothby also provided a good analysis.

Also, yesterday, I was able to convince Computerworld, the “Voice of IT Management,” to let me write a freelance story on the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon. With these announcements and developments, it’s clear to me that Enterprise 2.0 is saddled up and ready to ride, but will this dark horse turn out to be a winning thoroughbred or a trojan horse? The pace of industry adoption is accelerating; yet how, when, and why users adopt these tools will make for interesting news… no doubt.

Atlass(t)ian! Why I luv’em.

I met Mike Cannon-Brookes at the Office 2.0 Enterprise Irregulars’ (EIs) dinner for the first time (Atlassian sponsored the dinner for the EIs). Joe Kraus (CEO, Jotspot) encouraged me to talk to him; Kraus said he had a great company, and I should meet him. I talked to Cannon-Brookes briefly that night, but took the initiative to follow up with him the next day.

I ambled over to the Atlassian station, and first started talking to Anthony Rethans, a biz dev guy responsible for OEM relationships. Rethans started telling me general info about the company. He said that the company had over 4500 customers and that about 2000 of those were Confluence customers (Atlassian’s Enterprise Wiki) and the remainder were Jira customers. Jira was Atlassian’s first product– bug-tracking software. He said half of the Fortune 100 were using an Atlassian product. That got my attention.

As I was talking to Rethans, Cannon-Brookes came by. I asked him to show me the product, and I kept asking questions. Cannon-Brookes started showing me Confluence, but the more questions I asked, the more I was more interested in the success of the business than the product itself.

Cannon-Brookes told me the firm has well over a hundred thousand users on the product, and they’re prepping to announce a “scalable” solution (Confluence Massive) that will boost the company’s capacity to handle large accounts. Even today, he said, “IBM has over 15,000 users on the product.”

The facts, according to Atlassian, on the company’s stellar growth are the following:

• At 22 years old, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, his college mate from University of New South Wales (Sydney) started the company with a credit-card investment. To date, the company has taken in no outside investment and all growth is wholly organic. Estimates on the company’s revenues after four years in business are $15 million.
• From the beginning, the company experienced over 40% growth every quarter, until the past year or so, but it’s still barrelling along at about 20% per quarter in keeping with its size.
• Although the company spends some money on marketing, i.e., online marketing and a modest event-marketing program, the company’s success has mostly been word-of-mouth.
• The company has no debt.
• The company asserts that, “We sell a LOT of software. Licenses, one at a time,” according to Cannon-Brookes. An estimated 98% of the company’s revenue comes from software, not service contracts.
• The split between Atlassian’s two products, Confluence and Jira is roughly 40/60, with Confluence growing faster.
• The company employs 65 employees (the majority are software engineers)– 50 in Sydney, 12 in San Francisco, and 6 in Malasia.
• Atlassian releases 4 major releases every year, and about a dozen minor ones.
• There are over 200 plug-ins for the product which are shared at the discretion of the customer to the Atlassian community.
• Atlassian’s pricing can be found on its web site. Although the product is not open source, customers receive the source code with the purchase of a license.

Why do I love this company? They’re the first real example of an Enterprise 2.0 company succeeding in every way– financially (profitable, with no backing); widespread user adoption; a simple, but effective business model; steady growth, and a unique corporate culture to boot. In addition, they’re NOT from Silicon Valley, they’re Australian.

As a matter of fact, some of the typical analyst-type questions I was firing at the management was received with a shrug. In essence, they didn’t care what the answer was, or they really didn’t know. I loved that! They weren’t rude or pretentious; they shrugged those questions off– because they could. The biggest obstacle Cannon-Brookes said he was facing currently was managing the growth of the business.

The rap on Atlassian surrounds the issue of whether or not they’re candid about their revenues and customers, whether they’re truly Enterprise 2.0 (as their solutions are not on-demand, but rather the old school model of download, install, and maintain), and that they have a network of relationships with resellers and systems integrators for service.

I did my own fact-checking, and I have not changed my mind. I think this company has tremendous potential and should be an inspiration to every vendor participating in the next wave of Enterprise software.

This year’s ITSinsider e2.0, “Rock Stars of the year” goes to the boys from Atlassian. If you have a success story (still in progress) that can trump this one– let me know. I’m interested.

Canada, eh?

I’m assuming last night’s event went well. Check out this slide show.

Vancouver and $35: a rare Enterprise 2.0 Treat

Just in time for Halloween– it’s no trick, but a treat from the founder of Dabble DB, Andrew Catton, “co-founder and co-CEO of Smallthought Systems Inc., the Vancouver firm behind Dabble DB, an innovative web-based data management tool.” This is an excellent opportunity for anyone in the Vancouver area to listen to VCs and CEOs discuss the latest in Enterprise 2.0. Check it out: Enterprise 2.0 How Business Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web

The seminar is tomorrow night, October 24,  at 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm in Vancouver at Science World, 1455 Quebec St.

At-lass(t)-ian!

© All rights reserved.

At Last!

My lonely days are over

And life is like a song.

Atlassian is my new fave pick in the Enterprise 2.0 sector. I’m delaying my post because I got some excellent “second opinion” insight that I have to take seriously. We’ll see if the due diligence changes my mind.

Stay tuned.

Also coming– a Q&A with “made guy” Joe Kraus of JotSpot.

OneDotOh Sucked for a Lot of Us; HOWEVER…

There I said it. Can we move on now? (I hope this blog isn’t getting streamed into the Crispy News aggregator yet. But blogging is kind of the HBO of published media, isn’t it? We can get away with the occasional bad word. IDG did let me write “bitch” once, though. I thought that was pretty brave.) I’m not one to use offensive language, but I’m done of bemoaning the web 1.0 crash and its band of thieves, especially in the B2B sector. The best quote I heard on the subject was Harley Manning from Forrester who said, “After irrational exuberance, there was irrational pessimism.”

I’m excited and not ashamed to admit it about web 2.0 and startup Enterprise 2.0 companies. I’m once again making stock deals with my clients. I’m thinking about the potential of a re-energized IPO market. Let’s hope second time is a charm for all of us that wiped out on the first killer wave.

What’s your take?

Dow tops 12,000

Just a bulletin to join in on the party. Call your broker– ask him if we’re headed for another bubble in tech…

Sapient Erupts

Taking a short break from Enterprise 2.0 coverage, I had to acknowledge the news on Sapient today. I received a flash alert from Sapient’s investor team that, “SAPIENT NAMES ALAN HERRICK PRESIDENT AND CEO.” The bulletin went on to explain that co-founder Jerry Greenberg had resigned. Stuart Moore, the other co-founder is still a board member, but gave up his position as co-chairman in order to allow for an independent chairman (now, Jeffrey M. Cunningham). The company also named Joseph S. Tibbetts Jr. as the new CFO, replacing Susan Cooke who was interim CFO and who also resigned today.

Reading the press release, it appears Sapient is in hot water over options-dating, I suppose. Is this the 2.0 crime du jour? Why, everybody’s doing it! Not just Silicon Valley hotshots, but now a company like Sapient, that heretofore, I believed was basically infallible.

Sheesh. I’m not sure I’m more disappointed this happened or if I didn’t know anything about it because I’ve taken my eye off the IT Services ball. Some ITSinsider! Well, the good news is Dan Farber agreed to give me a ZDNet blog on IT Services, so I hope I will be catching up fast.

I put out a number of calls on this Sapient news, and haven’t heard back from anyone yet. I talked to Sapient, but the PR woman really couldn’t tell me anything more than was in the release. The news troubles me. I once wrote a column about what makes an IT Services firm successful, and Sapient gets high marks for all my criteria. I’m sure the company will weather the storm, but when founder CEOs leave, it generally doesn’t go well. My guess is we’ll see a merger/acquisition on the horizon.

Incidentally, Jerry Greenberg is a Jersey boy. He grew up in a small town here in South Jersey not too far (or too dissimilar) from the town I live in today. He made it to Harvard out of there majoring in Economics, he then worked at Cambridge Technology Partners, and started Sapient with Stuart Moore in 1991. Moore was a Computer Science grad out of UC Berkeley. In the day, Moore led one of the first client/server implementations on Wall Street and managed one of the largest installations of Sybase.

I admired Sapient for many things… including the choice of naming Susan Cooke as interim CFO. Imagine that? A woman who can talk numbers and face the investment community.

So, we’ll see what happens. For me, it’s the end of an era.