Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Iron Mountain announced yesterday that it had acquired Mimosa Systems, Inc., an enterprise-class content archiving solutions provider, for approximately $112 million in cash. (see press release via Iron Mountain or coverage on TechCrunch)

Colliding the Cloud and Premise

Iron Mountain is a curious company with a very large installed base from it’s traditional business of storing physical items for “safe, offsite, long-term storage.” Given the nature of most people in businesses as information hoarders, their traditional business has been remarkably robust, even giving the flailing economy.

What many people do not realize is the growing and significant impact of digital content that is “under management” by Iron Mountain. The split-personality of their physical and digital businesses not-withstanding (they reportedly have issues with the sales teams on either side of the virtual fences of the business not proactively selling across departmental or business unit lines), the digital business is booming as well, due in large part to concerns around rapid (and as low-cost as possible) response to eDiscovery issues.

Cloud 1st, Premise 2nd – Reverse of the Norm?

Back in 2007 (see Carl’s coverage of the acquistion of Stratify by Iron Mountain), Iron Mountain made one of it’s first explicit moves to directly address eDiscovery concerns with it’s acquisition of Stratify, a cloud-based offering used to outsource discovery activities with dedicated processes, semantic intelligence, etc..

Intrestingly, even though Iron Mountain’s longest line of business has been in the physical world, the Stratify acquisition jumped the straight past the traditional “legacy world” of on-premise solutions (to an extent) and straight to the cutting edge.

With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain rounds out the portfolio for eDiscovery (integration and post-acquisition pains not withstanding) by specifically pulling in a solution that focuses on content where it lives in the largest typical buckets – those being email (as much as my fellow 2.0 pundits like to tout that email is dead, I can assure you it is not, and won’t be any time soon), SharePoint (that slow-moving content platform that is raising all boats), and for those still unmanaged files on desktops, file servers, etc., they can tap into the unmanaged areas as well.

The Theory Is…

If you’ll pardon the pun, Iron Mountain’s strategy appears to be (and which I largely agree with) if you can’t move the (content) mountain into active management, bring the mountain into passive management, so that in case of emergency, you stand a chance of actively managing your way out of costly, and expensive legal proceedings.

While you cannot anticipate every emergency, contingency, nor accurately forecast risk, by setting up both a proactive information architecture for your normal 80% of daily content concerns, being able to embrace solutions like what Iron Mountain is aiming for with this acquisition (we’ll see how long it takes to connect the vision to a seamles customer experience), allows you to break down both your normal legacy content walls, and burst up and out to cloud-based offerings to get the best bang for the buck. While I did not use this exact example in a recent webinar on Collaboration (see slides), I believe the graphic is still useful nonetheless.

The next time you’re looking at an overhaul, installation, or minor tweak to your own information architecture, enterprise content management or eDiscovery capabilities, take a look at this graphic and see if you have spent enough time, money and effort to cover your bases adequately.

Destroy and Converge

This general movement of destroying silos or at least virtualizing and providing access across multiple silos of information is a continuing theme (well past it’s time to come to broader light), that we also covered in a past IAM Alert on Present.ly and SharePoint, and which is being covered in a Cloud/SharePoint webinar today, by my colleague Carl Frappaolo (stay tuned for link to the archive).

Expect more on the cloud and virtualization front as enterprises finally take to heart what software startups (and the US Government) has known for many years now. High costs and barriers to the flow of information = bad business, and not just bad legal outcomes.

Are You Embracing Hybrid Strategies?

Weigh in with your success or failure stories, and let’s keep pushing the boundaries. We have a long way to go, but there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in these areas.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Intridea announced today a new open source, free Web Part (an add-on for SharePoint) to embed Present.ly (Intridea’s enterprise microblogging offering) within SharePoint. (see press release and Intridea site)

Enter Microblogging

With the rise of Twitter in the consumer-facing world, has come the enterprise-facing versions of microblogging, with solutions such as dedicated offerings from Yammer and Present.ly, to the embedded capabilities within larger suites/platforms.

It seems clear that entirely stand-alone enterprise microblogging is not a “market” in and of itself, and the real trick, from a usability and adoption/change management standpoint, that microblogging, as with other forms of collaboration, need to be embedded within the flow of normal work, NOT as a separate interface.

Integrate to Disintegrate (Silos)

With this release of an integration point into the “elephant in the room” of Enterprise 2.0 – Microsoft SharePoint (which surprisingly does not currently have microblogging, nor, based on research we had done earlier in 2009, a usable wiki nor blogging capabilities), the power of an ecosystem around a major player in the market is helping to integrate and raise awareness ACROSS the market, as to the benefit of features and the overall system.

The benefits of light-weight communications (ala microblogging, streams) are tremendous, and in embracing the 2.0 methods of microcommunications (transparent, widely spread) vs. the siloed communications of traditional microcommunications (private IM conversations on specific platforms, such as LiveMeeting, etc.) is beginning to gain momentum, driven by the “twitter effect” (for those who see value in Twitter, of course). But it is still fairly early days for this capability, and the need to provide multiple ways to consume and use microblogging, whether stand-alone, integrated into a general platform (SharePoint) or a purpose-built Enterprise 2.0 platform (PBWorks, Thought Farmer, SocialText, Open Text, etc.), is key to getting microblogging/microsharing off the ground and into a sustainable mode.

Whether there is a market for microblogging per se, I would expect that purely stand-alone microblogging is going to disappear, as it is more of a feature than a “product.”

Where does your organization stand on microblogging/microsharing? Are you using Present.ly and similar microblogging tools, integrated suites WITH microblogging inside, Twitter (and damn the consequences), or none at all.

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Google has been resting on it’s laurels (simple/streamlined search) and primary revenue stream (AdWords) for far too long, it would seem.

Introduced last week at the Google I/O developer’s conference is their latest entree the “Google Wave” offering (see preview announcement of Google Wave at Google). (Note: This offering is currently only available as a developer preview – meaning it is a “closed door” preview at this point.)

The Evolution of a Wave

From the team in Australia that brought out Google Maps functionality as an independent company (Where2), acquired by Google in 2004, has been hard at work for the last several years in rolling out what is being called “Google Wave.”

As I mention frequently, technological innovations take time to disperse, and the “overnight success” takes somewhere around 10 years to finally find a home. Credit this thinking with Geoffrey Moore of “Crossing the Chasm” fame, Everett Rogers from his 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations, and others.

In this case, as an old hand in the enterprise portal world (I had worked at Delphi Group for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007), having been involved in the earliest days of the enterprise portal movement and evolution across a series of portal seminars and conferences, research and consulting work from 1996 to 2002, I have to say, on the one hand, I am happy to see Google more directly embracing the portal metaphor.

On the other hand…

Congratulations Google, you’ve invented the real-time portals that CoreChange (later acquired by OpenText) among others had pioneered roughly 9 years ago. Why not simply acquire rather than re-invent this capability?

What is a wave?

From Google’s description:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Don’t we have these pieces already?

Live/real-time communications already exist in the form of IM, microblogging (ala Twitter), video chat, etc.. – or from the Google universe, via Google Talk and Google Chat.

Document-based sharing is already available as well, via Zoho, Microsoft Live, and of course Google Docs (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations).

And by distinction of being “web-based” – all of these are already shareable on a common platform – the browser.

So what’s new?

Back to the Future

As with many things Googley, the “great Google” sky tends to approach new technologies from the consumer-oriented point of view, which is a much easier market to address, and allows for faster and larger scale experimentation. The prior portal players, with the exception of Yahoo! and Excite (which was sadly gutted and destroyed many years ago), the “typical” portal platform was created up front with an internally focused “enterprise view.”

To that end, some are touting Google Wave as an “all in one” killer – aimed at Twitter (created at the hands of many ex-Google employees – any animosity?), at IM (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!), and even at e-mail (take your pick).

The primary purpose of a portal (in the past or now), is to bring together the separate islands of functionality or underlying systems into a single dashboard, view or, that’s right, portal.

If you recall the early days of Google, they specifically built a search interface that was the anti-Yahoo!, Excite et al. Sparse, simple, streamlined for search and search results.

As happens with many software companies, when you do not currently have a solution or capability (whether due to focus, laziness, or inability to compete), the obvious play is to deny it’s importance.

In 2005, Google launched iGoogle which is of course a personal portal, complete with Google Gadgets (also known as widgets, portlets, and various terminology from other portal offerings). It would appear that the portal metaphor has legs, and Google is finally aligning it’s offerings to continue on the evolutionary trail already well established by other companies.

Time to Unify the Google

What appears to be happening with Google, and is a trend I’m seeing over and over again, is that there an increasing amount of simple but very specific tools being created (the vast majority of both the Web 2.0 and Enteprise 2.0 solutions),  which stirs up competition and innovation with tools that quite simply, get things done.

On the other hand, and the other extreme, more pointedly, is the desire of some companies to get the “all in one” solution, such as, witness the billion dollar market for Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS2007/SharePoint 2007), and the acquisition sprees of OpenText, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and the “large enterprise” players.

The Mashup Middle Ground

Re-enter the portal play – while it’s quite easy to argue that Google Wave is nothing new, and perhaps misses the pros and cons of earlier portal offerings, there is no doubt that this is part of a re-birth of portal technologies.

Which is perfect timing for a shaky economy – as we say in nearly every consulting engagement… You probably do not need MORE technology in your organization. You just need to make your existing investment work much more effectively, which is exactly what a portal “meta layer” will allow you to do.

Standards are more broadly adopted and understood at this stage in the market, and there is a far greater chance that portal implementations in 2009 and beyond will happen in weeks to months versus the 6-18 months of days past.

Will Google Wave be the Portal Saviour?

It seems unlikely that, early buzz aside, Google Wave will “own” the portal space any time soon, but if nothing else, it may cause Microsoft to realize once again that they have some turf to defend – after all, SharePoint initially came to be known as a portal framework, although it has rapidly come to be known primarily as more light-weight filesharing and search platform.

It will be interesting to see who rallies around Google Wave as a platform for development ON TOP of this infrastructure, as has happened with Salesforce.com, Amazon’s cloud services, and Apple’s iTunes Music Store (among others), and otherwise, exactly how much market share Google itself takes directly via Google Wave.

What’s YOUR Take?

Does Google Wave has a place in your portal or collaboration strategy? Replacing existing systems? Supplementing? Have never had such capabilities?

Let us know – this will be an interesting fight to watch.

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