We’ve been working very hard on creating a way for people to experience first hand how businesses can benefit when devices are a core part of their collaboration environment.  The results of that effort are now available.  Please register for our public Collaborative Device Community, complete with real devices that are contributing and available for interaction.  Sign up at http://www.palantirisystems.com/register.html

Everyone seems to be talking about how they need to have more collaboration in their business.  Quite often they become enamored with the latest  trends – social this, portal that, and twitter the other thing, often with little or no results.

I propose we first take a step back and understand what it means to collaborate in a business sense in today’s world.  The dictionary defines collaborate as “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort”.  This brings us to two of the three Cs mentioned in above.  In order to work together you need to have someone with a mutual interest to work together with – a Community.  Secondly, you must have the means to effect that “working together”.  In today’s flat world it is quite likely that the members of your community are not in the same building as you, possibly not even on the same continent.  For manufacturers and users of intelligent equipment, they may not even be human. That is where Connectivity comes in to play.  Complex business problems are not quickly solved simply by picking up the phone or exchanging a few emails.  Connectivity is required to exchange thoughts and information in real-time, to posit diagnostic questions and receive real-time replies.  That is why tools like Instant Messaging, document libraries, wikis, and discussion groups have become so important in the business world.  And it is why something like Google Wave has garnered so much interest – it is a real-time stream of interaction and knowledge exchange.

So far, so good, but what about the third C?  From a business standpoint the third C is probably the most critical.  The third C is Context.   Not being able to put information and interaction into a proper context can have negative results for a business.  Yes, a service engineer and a customer can collaborate with a remote device to solve a problem in real-time, but if that customer is off warranty and doesn’t have a valid service contract is that the right thing to do?  Context comes from many places and is often changing rapidly.   Your business systems, your customers’ and partners’ business systems, your remote devices in the field, and even external entities all supply important contextual information that needs to be merged and processed to effect value generating business collaboration.  More importantly, context changes all the time and the rate of change seems to be increasing daily.  Businesses need to operate at the speed of the Internet, its not just enough to collaborate today – you need to collaborate in real-time.

So there you have it – the three C’s of Collaboration:

Collaboration = Community + Connectivity + Context

Are you using all three Cs in your business collaboration?

Our friends at Tenrehte Technologies are showing their Picowatt smart plug at CES this week. The Picowatt allows you to monitor home energy usage without the need for smart meters.  The CES demo uses Palantiri technology to make Picowatt information available to applications outside of the home network, such as the Palantiri designed Facebook application mentioned in the article.

There has been a lot of talk recently about “connecting the dots” when it comes to identifying and acting upon information.  Silos of information, whether they be among people or enterprise applications, often inhibit necessary, time-sensitive actions.   While the stakes are not quite so high we see the same issues in business today. Adding new standalone enterprise applications, such as remote monitoring  “solutions”, or “customer communities” simply compound the problem by adding more data but often without context.  An environment that enables collaboration, but with real-time communication and business focused context is the key to solving this problem.  Information is important but without context or access to expertise and experience it can simply be overwhelming.  More on this in some future posts…

Microsoft announced today that they have released a new XMPP Gateway for their Office Communications Server.  This will allow organizations running Communications Server to federate with public and private XMPP networks – and it is free.  In the video they discuss how XMPP has become one of the three primary Enterprise messaging platforms along with Sametime and Communications Server, and how interoperability between the three is critical.

Palantiri Systems, along with our friends at Harbor Research, were recently highlighted in an article on M2M Magazine’s website. They gave some great examples from Harbor’s latest white paper of how social collaboration can be combined with real time device connectivity to deliver higher value services to users.

What do Google Wave, FaceBook Chat, Yahoo FireEagle, IBM Blue Spruce, Palm Pre, Google Android, Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0, and Palantiri Systems’ Collaborative Device Community platform have in common?  They are all examples products  utilizing XMPP as a real-time connection mechanism to change the rules of how people and devices communicate and collaborate.

So what you might say…  All of this underlying technology doesn’t do anyone any good if there isn’t some business value to go along with it.  We agree completely.  That is why it is very encouraging to see preeminent analysts such as Harbor Research examining and understanding the real business value created by the Palantiri Systems Collaborative Device Community platform.  We believe that this is just the first of a wave of business validations coming as folks are becoming more and more aware of the impact that a true collaborative environment can have on the level of engagement and interaction they share with their customers.

Last week at the Google I/O Conference, Google revealed a new communication and collaboration tool called Google Wave. The brainchild of brothers Lars and Yen Rasmussen (the guys behind Google Maps), this tool has some early indications of really changing the model for how people collaborate online. For us, it’s only logical to extend this model and consider “things” as active participants within a wave, and it’s consistent with what our platform offers today. Putting all this together, this announcement by Google certainly validates our belief that online collaboration is changing, especially when you consider the following:

• Real-time collaboration via XMPP – underlying architecture for both Google Wave and the Palantiri platform.
• Google stresses the speed, extensibility, and secure nature of Wave in their preview video – these are all important attributes of XMPP and it just validates what we’ve been saying (and building into our platform) all along.
• More importantly, Google is creating more of an API with their wave tool, allowing “robots” and “things” as well as people to participate in online waves. This perfectly aligns with Palantiri’s platform, where we enable machines and devices to communicate, interact and otherwise contribute via XMPP.

Needless to say, we are excited about the possibilities!

Last week Palantiri Systems had the privilege to attend and present at IQPC’s 3rd Annual Remote Service Implementation conference.   Our Monday afternoon presentation focused on the scalability of remote services systems and the benefits of using open standards in your implementation – a topic that is becoming more and more relevant as deployments grow in size.  We had a great group in the workshop with a lot of thought provoking questions.

It has been very exciting to watch the Remote Services space mature over the last couple of years.  More and more companies are beginning to view Remote Service as being less about service, and more about a new a way of doing business.  There has been a real shift from the break-fix mentality of the past to a new customer focused view. Organizations are looking for ways to engage their customers in more meaningful ways, drive growth, and innovate.

Some of the deployment numbers that companies mentioned further demonstrate the maturing of the space.  It is no longer uncommon to hear of deployments consisting of 10,000+ connected devices.  Clearly scalability has become a critical issue.

During last year’s IQPC conference in June, Mark Vigoroso mentioned how it may be one of the last years that the conference will be primarily attended by early adopters.  It looks like his prediction was correct.  In one of the opening presentations, Jennifer Love,  a Remote Network Services Manager at Honeywell, asked how many people in the room were just beginning a remote service implementation and only one person raised their hand.   As the market matures we expect to see a continued focus on the customer, a desire to utilize device information in new and innovative ways, and an increased reliance on remote services systems.

No matter what your political stripe, it is always fascinating to see how the United States transitions from one presidency to another.  Aside from the occasional missing W’s on some keyboards, these transitions typically go relatively smoothly.  There are a couple of keys to this: (a) the fact that there is going to be a transition is well known and the date is cast in stone and (b) there are larges teams of people putting in a tremendous amount of time and money to ensure things go according to plan.  I believe it is the character of most Americans, no matter their political ideology, to see this as a proud and hopeful time.  Hopeful that the transition does not just bring more of the same old thing but that it brings with it some new energy and new ideas that will serve us well into the future.

We should be so lucky in the technology world.  Transitions are often thrust upon us by forces outside our control and often at the most inopportune time, creating the potential for rash decisions that we might come to regret.  Changes in the vendor landscape for our critical technologies often bring about the need for near or mid-term transitions, which implies the spending of a lot of time, energy, and money.

It is important to see such events as an opportunity to move forward.  Technology moves at a very rapid pace today.  Spending a lot of time and effort just to wind up with essentially the same capabilities you started with makes no sense.  That doesn’t mean you should throw everything you have done out and start all over again, that is neither politically or economically feasible.  The key is creating an effective transition strategy that allows you to adopt and move forward with the newer, more advanced approach, while preserving the investment you have already made.  In the enterprise software space, anyone that has been involved in the switchover to a new CRM or ERP system can attest – its not just a matter of pointing your browser to a new web page.  There are user training, data migration, and enterprise application integration issues that take significant wherewithal to overcome.  This is especially true in the device networking space, where there also may be a large installed base of devices with older technology in the field.

Many of you may find yourself in such a position at some point in time in the future.  When thrust into such a scenario, the single most helpful piece of advice I can think of comes from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – “Don’t Panic!”.  Take the time to think about the future.  Think about your existing system – what works and what doesn’t.  Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years – will replacing an 8 year old technology with technology of the same vintage get you there?  Now is the time to enhance the things that work and improve on the things that don’t.  Most importantly, think positively and look at it as an opportunity to move forward, not just to tread water.

Here’s hoping our new administration looks at things the same way.