Microsoft Office 2010: The Odyssey Continues

by Sheri McLeish

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year.  The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office.  Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries.  The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

Calculating The Fully Loaded Costs Of Corporate Email: It's Bigger Than You Think

by Ted Schadler

Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email on-premises or in the cloud), we have had dozens of discussions with our clients accompanied by detailed cost analyses of the true cost of running email on-premises versus running it in the cloud.

While the cloud-based cost of email is pretty transparent (many providers, including Microsoft and Google, publish their per-user per-month costs), the cost of running email on-premises is often a big mystery to everyone, including most CIOs. The big challenge is that the costs are spread throughout the budget: some in the hardware budget, some in the software budget, some in the storage budget, some in the cost of capital budget, some in the staffing budgets, and so on.

After dozens of these discussions and after a survey of 53 information & knowledge management professionals to ask about the cost of email, it is abundantly clear that few firms know their true cost of running email on-premises. And this matters if you're considering a move to cloud-based email.

But it an accurate calculation of on-premises email also matters if you are contemplating upgrading your email to a more current version that might support cheaper storage, higher automation, or reduced email database size due to eliminating redundant copies of attachments. You can compare your current costs against the fully loaded costs of the new system with its higher efficiencies.

So we spent four months building and vetting a detailed cost model to help our clients and the industry at large understand how to calculate their cost of running email on-premises. Here's a clue: It's more than you think.

    

When you factor in servers, storage, server software, software maintanence, hardware and software administration, power, archiving, message filtering, mobile costs, even financing, you find out that the cost of email for 15,000-person organizations can be as high as $40 per user per month, and even for a normal information worker without mobile email, it can cost more than $27 per user per month. Of course, you can and should segment your workforce into different tiers — for example, mobile executives, information workers, and occasional users — and provision them with different size mailboxes, email clients, and mobile email.

 

With all of that as input, you can calculate the fully loaded cost of email for each workforce segment.

   

The same data, presented as a table looks like this:

  

Of course, the prices come down for larger organizations and not everybody needs all these services. And sure, we can talk about higher automation levels, cheaper storage, more efficient message filtering, and the lots more, but at the end of the day, you have to factor in all the costs of running email on-premises if you are going to make a decision about upgrading or moving email to the cloud.

Have other thoughts? Want to discuss them? Please comment.

BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

By James Kobielus

In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”

Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.

Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.

Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding-edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.

No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):

• Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.                                                                
• Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or  power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
• Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
• Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject  matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.

As I said, it will take a few years before we see a substantial number of enterprise case studies that implement the pinnacle of collaborative mashup with tight governance. Nevertheless, when you follow the evolution of next-generation solution portfolios from leading BI vendors such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and others, it’s clear that self-service user-centric mashup, to varying degrees, is a core theme.

BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.

Google Wave: Surfing The Future Of Collaboration

by Ted Schadler

Google is a remarkable company. Need proof? Just consider how reliant we are on Google Maps to find our way around the world. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because Google empowered a couple of brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, to open up the developer APIs to the mapping engine.

These same two brothers announced yesterday at Google I/O developer conference a new technology for communication and collaboration. This new collaboration engine unites email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis into a single hosted conversation. Check out the demo here and the announcement here.

These conversations or "Waves" take place inside Safari, Firefox, or Chrome and look like email on steroids. (Lars said that they took the 40-year old model of email and redesigned it for today's Web-based world.) But it's way more than that. With Google Wave, Google has:

• Opened a new path to reinvent how we collaborate. You have to see it to understand, but why would you need four products when one Wave will do? It's a new conversational metaphor that will also easily support document-based collaboration.

• Put the code base into open source to attract investment. Google will attract the best and brightest developers and development with this move.

• Published developer APIs to allow others to embed "conversations" anywhere.In a hope to replicate the success of Google Maps, these APIs will make Google's hosted conversations a convenient way for anybody to offer these features to customers, members, employees, etc.

• Re-asserted its interest in hosting the world's conversations.Google will host these conversations. And that means Google will be curator of more and more of the world's conversations. An awesome responsibility for sure, and one that regulators should pay attention to. But someone has to do it. Why not a company with a founding culture of "do no evil?"

Now this will happen only slowly. The product will go into official beta later this year and be evolving for the next 2 or 3 years. But the path is clear, and the implications are coming into focus. For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals and for the industry, this is what it means.

• What it means (WIM) #1: Don't get too stuck on installed email clients -- they can't evolve fast enough. Notes and Outlook are fabulous tools. But they are installed software sold under a perpetual license model. And that means they can only evolve as fast as you are willing to buy licenses and deal with installation and change management. And that's too slow to keep up.

• WIM #2: Google Apps Premier Edition is worth keeping a close eye on. It's a guarantee that Google Wave will appear in the Google Apps sometime soon, so keep an eye on what it might mean if you want to switch providers.

• WIM #3: Microsoft will have yet another innovation hill to climb (and it will). Redmond will have to digest this advance, but it will shortly ramp up its own conversation-oriented online engine. It will have to make this kind of conversational advance part of its BPOS strategy at some point.

• WIM #4: IBM's approach to collaboration is looking pretty visionary. Lotus has been quietly reinventing itself over the past few years, and if you haven't looked at Notes or Sametime lately, you need to. And with lead architect Alistair Rennie now at the vision helm, these products with their REST-ful APIs, redesigned interfaces, and Web-centric design metaphors are looking good.

Friend and colleague Jeremiah Owyang brings a nice Web 2.0 angle into this analysis. It's about combining real-time, social, asynch, and multi-media/multi-device into one place.

Disagree? Have comments? Please share.

Making iPhone Work In The Enterprise

by Ted Schadler

If you had asked me three years ago whether the mobile industry would become a free-for-all of innovation and opportunity, I would have been forced to sigh and say, "can't see how -- the carriers don't seem interested in unlocking that potential."

I would certainly have been wrong as Apple has so impressively shown with its iPhone strategy (with first AT&T's and now 100s of carrier's support).

After 21 months in market, it's quite clear that Apple is redefining its third industry: first the computer industry, next the music industry, and now the mobile industry. With 25,000 applications (yes, mostly consumer applications today) available on Apple's private store and a reported 800,000,000 downloads, the iPhone has become a new platform for innovation.

At least one major enterprise vendor -- Cisco -- now treats the iPhone ahead of BlackBerry devices as a tier one device, at least as demonstrated by its WebEx and Cisco Call Manager applications.

But enterprises have been slow to adopt the product because of legitimate security and manageability concerns. Perhaps no longer. We found three enterprises willing to talk about their support of iPhone:

1. Kraft Foods uses iPhone support to signal new suipport for employee culture change. Adding 400 more iPhones a month, on track for 4,000 iPhones by year end.

2. Oracle Corporation responds to employee demand for iPhones. 4,000 iPhones globally and counting.

3. An IT senior director at a California-based pharmaceutical company makes iPhone a priority. January 2009 launch, adding 100+ iPhones a month.

There are issues to be sure, but none that they haven't been able to overcome, and with third-party support from companies like Cisco, IBM Lotus, Salesforce.com, and Oracle, the future of mobile collaboration on iPhone looks rosy. While BlackBerry devices continue to be gold standard for messaging and calendars, iPhones are rapidly establishing dominance for browser applications and native applications for content, data, and Web applications.

The capper is that Apple is not standing still. Apple is among other things a software company, and it has embraced the ethoses of developer APIs, rapid improvement, open source, and a simple path to market, the hallmarks of the PC and Internet industries. For example, unlike other mobile device manufacturers, Apple makes it easier to upgrade the software on existing devices. For example, with iPhone 2.0 software, Apple added ActiveSync support to allow iPhones to work with Exchange servers (as well as standards support for other email systems).  

And with iPhone 3.0 software, now in beta and free of charge for iPhone owners, Apple has made it easier for enterprises to support iPhones with:

• Better VPN security, including the ability to force a log-in every time.

• Better calendar and calendar synchronization support, including CalDAV and better ActiveSync support.

• Policies for locking down devices, for example to turn off the camera.

• Encrypted configuration files to protect stolen devices or PCs with iTunes from prying eyes.

What does this mean for Information & Knowledge Management professionals?

• WIM #1: Put iPhone on a list of devices to support. Apple has demonstrated enough support to merit a hard look by your CISO and infrastructure & operations group. The apps keep rolling in. For example, Web conferencing is already shown  to be an important collaboration application on iPhone. Training, access to team sites, and an inside-the-firewall access to corporate apps means.

• WIM #2: Smartphones will join laptops as a must-support device for mobile applications. Our consumer data is quite shocking here: While 53% of all smartphone owners brings a laptop home from work regularly, only 38% of iPhone owners do.
  

• WIM #3: Expect that individual employees will be okay buying and supporting their own devices. iPhone is but one more example of consumer IT being better than business IT. This consumerization or Technology Populism trend is with us forever. IT groups should harness this energy and ask their employees to step up and bring in the tools they need to get their jobs done.

Disagree? Agree? Have a success or horror story to share? Please comment.

The Web At 20: What It Means For Collaboration

by Ted Schadler

A wander through history today with apologies to those looking for punchy bullets.

The Web turns 20 today. Frickin' amazing if you ask me. My 10-year old wonders out loud what we all did before the Internet (by which he means the browser-based world of Club Penguin, Google, Yahoo!, and YouTube). And for the life of me, I can't remember, either.

How did we collaborate? Well, I remember that I wrote lots of letters to friends to stay in touch and was thrilled when someone wrote back (it was too expensive to make long-distance phone calls). My 7th grade buddies and I also wrote away to Pennzoil and STP to ask for stickers to put on our notebooks. I also spent a lot of time in the library (any library anywhere) and in book stores looking for books, magazines, research papers, whatever.

And for sharing information? Copies, copies, copies. I was an early and big fan of the mimeograph machine, stinky beast though it was. We used to sneak into the Physics office in college to get extra blanks in case we messed up when making copies for a seminar. And you had to get there early on seminar day to command a slot in the mimeograph line. (It was a blessed breakthrough when the Xerox machine was installed -- and only a dime a copy!)

And for creating, editing, co-authoring? It was typewriters, paper, and purple pens, folks. And pen and ink for graphics. Ugly stuff, but amazingly it worked. It took days or weeks do a turnaround, though.

Now, after a PC revolution and a Web transformation, it definitely feels like the olden days that my grandparents lived in. Today we blog, post, twitter, comment, Google, IM, Web conference, share screens, capture group chats, you know the drill. Turnarounds in minutes. Real presence. Global distribution. Shared authoring in real-time if you want.

But what about the next five years?

I don't think we have to look very far to find what lies ahead in the next five years because it's already here in nascent form. It's partner-friendly IM, VoIP, desktop and telepresence video conferencing, real-time co-authoring, Web-centric productivity and collab tools, much better search across company information and data, virtual world meeting spaces, unified conferencing, remote team members as connected to you as those one floor away, meeting-centric collaboration platforms, content-derived expertise identification, tag clouds at the heart of semantically-drive search, social graphs at the heart of expertise location, and of course all services available from a mobile Internet device.

So what about the next 10 years?

Certainly most if not all the things above. But also semantically-defined information workspaces that better reflect your past and present behavior, 3D interactions with information, credibly realistic versions of you in virtual meeting rooms, much better audio experiences that capture three dimensions in comfortable earphones, much more civilized online experiences that better reflect our culture and social norms, and many more "intelligent" information services that knit together disparate but dumb information sources in ways that meet my specific needs (this is my view of the semantic Web).

What do you see for collaboration and content on the Web in the next 10 years? Please comment.

paper and pen

Telecommuting Will Rise To Include 43% Of US Workers By 2016

by Ted Schadler

It was shocking to me anyway that we already have 34 million Americans working at least occasionally from home today. And that's with broadband to only 56% of US homes. But that's what the data say. And with our Consumer Technographics survey of 61,033 US and Canadian consumers, you can be confident that the numbers are accurate.

But it's even more surprising to run the numbers forward to 2016 and see how many Americans will work from home then: 63 million! We just published our US Telecommuting forecast that shows how an additional 29 million telecommuters will enter the remote workforce. What's going on?

• First, broadband pipes to the home, work laptops, and secure VPNs bring the tools that most information workers need right to the kitchen table or bedroom office. And collaboration tools like instant messaging, Web conferencing, team sites, and desktop video conferencing make it ever-easier to stay in touch and contribute to the project.
• Second, employees rightfully point out that they will save time in commuting and can get more done for their employers with that time. The benefits of work flexibility and leaving gas in the tank are also real.
• Third, most telecommuters work from home only occasionally. The number of full time telecommuters today is small compared with "regular telecommuters" (1-4 days per week) and "occasional telecommuters" (less than 1 day a week -- think snow days and Friday's before long weekends).
• Fourth, it's actually managers and other high-influence employees that are most likely to work from home regularly or occasionally. And that means their growing comfort with the ability to monitor and manage employee productivity will spill over into their support for a telecommuting workforce.

As an enlightened Information & Knowledge Management Professional, what does this mean for you?

• What it means (WIM) #1: You should get on top of who in the workforce is already working from home and who would like to. That means surveying your workforce to determine how best to provision and support them. Note that this workforce provisioning analysis is something that we're seeing more of every day, and we're engaged already in projects with clients to do it.
• WIM #2: It's time to look at your policies in support or in conflict with telecommuting. Do they reflect today's broadband-enabled home? You should call a meeting with HR to find out more.
• WIM #3: Check out your remote workforce toolkit. Does the VPN work well? How about the laptop provisioning guidelines? Is Instant Messaging a priority for your firm? Have you tried desktop video conferencing? Are your teamsite tools ready to support the remote workforce?
• WIM #4: Find the pockets of telecommuting support in your organization and create a collaboration environment for managers to support each other. There are real issues for a remote workforce around onboarding new employees, managing a younger workforce, establishing clear key performance indicators, learning how to manage by objective, and the like. The experienced managers in your organization can help each other with collaboration like wikis, training, and portal resources.

How's the remote workforce progressing in your company? Please let me know.

Google Tests An Offline Email Client

by Ted Schadler

This has been long rumored by Google Apps watchers, but we get confirmation today: Google is testing an offline email client. This is a Google Gmail Labs feature, which means that it's really test code for the brave. In fact, the Gmail Labs site helpfully warns that "there's an escape hatch" if a feature breaks.

That said, this is a big deal for Google. (Caveat: I haven't tested it yet, so I'll have to report back once I do). Here's what it means:

• WIM #1: Google is accelerating its push into the enterprise. No IKM professional can in good conscience switch to an online-only email solution for the majority of their iWorkers. But if Google offers and supports an offline email and calendar client, then that objection will be off the table, and more firms should consider Google Apps, at least for their occasional users. (Other legitimate concerns to switching to Google Apps will remain, of course, including a disruptive shift in experience and the lack of good integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint.)
• WIM #2: Cloud doesn't mean no client software. Instead, it means richer experiences with more client software. This is already IBM Lotus's client strategy. According to Lotus VP of Development, Alistair Rennie, Lotus offers a steady progression of functionality that begins with an open browser, extends to browser plug-ins, and culminates in installed software. With this move, Google demonstrates that it understands this strategy: Services + User Experience Software.
• WIM #3: Gmail Labs is a place to monitor for the future of email. Google has permission to experiment publicly. It's a "this road is officially closed, proceed at your own risk" strategy. Gmail Labs has a lot of odd stuff on it, but it also has a collection of intriguing features. Today, for example, I found an "Email Addict" blocker that forces a person to take a break and an "Add any Gadget by URL" feature that makes it easier to add gadgets to the left navigation bar.

Comments, suggestion, improvement? Please comment.

Google Apps Shows Some Commercial Clout With A Reseller Program

by Ted Schadler

I spoke recently with Stephen Cho, the product manager for the new Google Apps Reseller Program. It's quite clear that Google has learned from its Postini reseller program, from partners like Appirio and Cap Gemini, and from Microsoft's Exchange Online reseller program.

First, the details:

• Resellers own the customer. That means billing, first line support, the works.This is in distinct contrast to Microsoft's program for Exchange Online, where partners can sell and benefit from the business, but the Exchange customer would write checks to Redmond.
• Resellers get 20% margin. That's in the US, anyway. That means $10/user/year. Period. Have you ever seen such price transparency (and low points) in any reseller program? I haven't. The entire term sheet would fit on a 1/3rd of a page.
• Enterprises can't be their own reseller. They have to sell to at least someone other than themselves. Otherwise, this would be a simple way for a enterprise to whack 20% off the already low $50/user/year cost.
• Google will provide technical admin support if requested. They won't provide end user support. though. That's one of the value-added services that a VAR can provide.
• Google won't shut of a reseller's customers, even if the reseller goes belly up. This just makes sense. Google would rather carry the contract and convert the customer rather than see the customer get cut off.
• The program is specific to Google Apps. It doesn't include other Google products, at least not at this time.
• The free version of Google Apps is no longer available to companies larger than 50 people. This pivot makes sense, but is yet another indicator that Google is serious about selling email, IM, sites, video, and docs.

What this means for information and knowledge management professionals:

• WIM #1: Google is serious about making money with Google Apps Premier Edition. It still has a mountain to climb to earn enterprise credibility, but customers like Genentech, Avago Technologies, and a slew of universities can't all be wrong.
• WIM #2: Google can make money at $40/user/year, which bodes well for the future. If Google were just scraping by at that price, they wouldn't be scrambling a battalion of resellers to meet demand. They can clearly make money at $40/user/year. Take note, email administrators, CIOs, information and knowledge management professionals, and the competition.
• WIM #3: The Google Apps portfolio will just get stronger. How? Because these are value-added resellers. They have to be 'cuz nobody can live off of $10/user/year. To survive, they will have to extend the application and integrate Sites, Docs, Video, Talk,Gmail, and whatever else Google Gmail Labs dreams up into their own cloud-delivered products. Ipso facto: the ecosystem will invest; the product portfolio will improve.

Disagree? Please comment.

WebEx Goes Mobile On iPhone; Notes 8.5 Ships On Macs

by Ted Schadler

MacWorld held two important announcements for collaboration professionals, especially those interested in multidevice future:

1. Lotus announced that Notes 8.5 is shipping on Macintoshes, specifically on the new Leopard version of OS X. And its open source office productivity suite, Symphony will be available in a few months. Why does this matter? It matters because Lotus has a clear, vigorous multidevice strategy for the tools that make information workers productive. See Ed Brill's post for the IBM point of view.

2. Cisco announced that WebEx Meeting Center is available on iPhones. In fact, you can download it today to your iPhone. While I haven't yet had the chance to put it through its paces, this announcement signals Cisco's commitment to supporting multiple devices. I expect them to continue to roll unified communications apps on mobile phones of every flavor.

Here are some details:

• The native iPhone application is freely available at the Apple AppStore or at iTunes.
• It doesn't cost any more to attend a meeting over an iPhone. (But the hoster does have to be running the most current version of the WebEx software.)
• Attendees can get a callback to their device to listen in, or use a third-party conferencing service.
• The application includes chat.
• Cisco has its VPN and digital certificate technology already built into iPhone 2.x, so security is not really an issue.
• Attending a Web conference on an iPhone does use battery life. (Duh.) (But this is an issue of using the phone for more than just the occasional email. Still, it does argue that battery life must get a whole lot better on these mobile devices.)
• Cisco's been testing this application internally (read: Cisco's IT department is comfortable supporting iPhones as an enterprise mobile device).
• WebEx Meeting Center is just the beginning of Cisco's iPhone application support.

This idea of smartphones as mobile collaboration platforms is catching hold in organizations that have a mobile or remote workforce, that are looking to cram ever-more productive hours into a day, and give their peripatetic employees the tools they need to be productive away from their desks.

One more thing: In December, RIM bought Chalk Media, a company with a solid technology for pushing training materials and video to BlackBerrys. So RIM clearly gets the "mobile collaboration platform" thing.

Should be a fun 2009!

Comments, thoughts, improvements, corrections? Please comment.