Stephen did his usual excellent job of explaining the the VMware Zimbra acquisition with a Q&A. Seriously – read the analysis. I already fed some of my thoughts into his post, but there are a couple of other things I wanted to mention.

Zimbra’s awesomesauce

Zimbra remains probably the single best implementation I have seen of real plasticity in a GUI, where information pops in context, without needing to move to a new screen or click through. Addresses turn into Google Maps, or sit up and beg to become Contacts. Zimbra was designed to be a plastic front end – not just for email, but any kind of back end web service.

RedMonk actually ran on Zimbra for collaboration for a while but the performance of the system was disappointing. This was because of the third party host we were using, rather than the Zimbra architecture itself. I know for example that Headshift ran its own server, and it was blazing fast. Another reason performance may have disappointed was that this was before the browser performance war really started heating up, driven by competition from the awesomely speedy Chrome browser.

On Premise Good?

As I just mentioned, Zimbra was never designed for cloud only deployment- on the contrary it can work just fine as an on premise open source email, messaging and collaboration server. Oh yeah- works well with Outlook too! Yahoo never seems to have decided one way or another what to do with its acquisition. VMWare has a much clearer view: Zimbra will fit neatly into a hybrid cloud play, potentially with an associated storage play for parent company of the parent company EMC.

Channels

Just before the VMware deal was announced I met a UK Zimbra reseller called In-Tuition. I was pretty skeptical about making a play to compete with Microsoft Exchange with a piece of software owned by Yahoo, which is not exactly renowned for its enterprise chops.  But they must have known something we all didn’t…

Suffice to say Zimbra is and always was designed for enterprise class deployments. Its very much a business tool.

Summing Up

The collaboration market is in play again – customers are fundamentally reassessing strategies defined in the 1990s. Lotus is back. Google is making headway. Microsoft is not going to give up without a fight. And now VMware has a play. Different buyers? Perhaps. But the same people that make virtualisation decisions also make Microsoft infrastructure decisions. VMware CEO Paul Maritz wanted a pushback if customers decided to can VMware in favour of Windows Virtual Services. Now it seems he has one.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Zimbra meets SpringSource (another recent VMware acquisition): That could be back end to front end goodness, and a growing set of Java APIs for VMware to steward and grow a community around.

For an enterprise looking for a mail server – Zimbra can definitely do a solid job. But its where it goes from there that’s more interesting. Java and Javascript is increasingly common as a skillset and programming approach. Zimbra was architected to the pattern.

As I said in a recent post

Products like IBM WebSphere Portal and SAP Netweaver Portal were supposed to bring much improved user interaction models to enterprise IT, but unfortunately traditional systems-focused IT departments, rather than user interaction specialists and their web brethren, did the work. People like Josh Porter generally weren’t invited to the party. Portals were built to support IT systems and data, rather than users

Its not just email that’s up for grabs. The 1990s portal is also looking tired. I wouldn’t be surprised to see VMware make a plasticity play.

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The idea of a cloud drive or folder in the sky is obviously a good one. We’ve been waiting for how long for the fabled gDrive? As a Google Enterprise customer I am glad to know I can now upload any kind of file, up to 250MB, into my account. Very handy. But the use case on the Official Google Enterprise blog post announcing the news reads like, well, its like the cloud never happened.

Let’s say you’re about to make a very important presentation to a prospective client on the other side of the country. Before you depart on your business trip, you download all of your presentation materials and InDesign® hand-outs onto your trusty thumbdrive. Just in case, you also email the files to yourself.

But while you’re in the air, your colleagues back at the office are making last minute edits to the files and your copies are now out of date. Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.

Sound familiar? The good news is that things are about to become a whole lot easier.

What? No that really doesn’t sound familiar. RedMonk uses Google Docs so we don’t worry about this kind of thing. As my coworker James Stewart commented:

“Its like their own products never happened“.

Replacing the Thumb Drive? The cloud already did that.

“Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.” AINT GONNA HAPPEN. Road warriors have laptops. Its what they do. Failing that they have iPhones, or, dare I say it… Android Phones. Really, who leaves for a business trip carrying nothing but a USB stick?

I can only assume the Google Enterprise team is so tightly ensconced in the GooglePlex that they aren’t used to the workaday scenarios the rest of us are. The post certainly made me chuckle this morning.

Tools for automatic file migration and syncing between multiple folders and devices? Now *that* is a use case. See DropBox, Evernote, Mozy, SugarSync etc. I want Google to offer me the Synchronised Web, not a USB stick replacement.

Google is not a client.

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Has to go to the folks behind Google Android.

A couple of months ago when my Nokia N95 suddenly turned into a brick the inestimable James Whatley aka whatleydude was kind enough to loan me an HTC Magic running the new mobile OS from Google. I played with the device for about five minutes before proclaiming: For now, Nokia, you’re dead to me.

A couple of Christmases ago Stephen O’Grady had a similar experience with the iPhone, but I was never quite ready to join Apple’s Permission-based Web.

The Magic though, has changed my living and working practices for the better. Its as simple as that. Its not as good a phone or digital camera as I am used to, but its aeons ahead as a web friendly device. Series 60 is hobbled for the web. This year the hobble turned into a wobble, and now Nokia is finally acknowledging that Symbian is a problem.

To my mind it wasn’t the iPhone that really brought home the problem to Nokia, it was Android. The thought of all those Asian manufacturers bringing Android devices to a European market with a ready made business model through the carriers should concentrate the mind.

That’s the thing – so far at least Android isn’t a phone, its an ecosystem.

Which brings me to 2010 and a big question mark. Is Google about to kill the golden goose? Releasing its own Android phone onto the general market, as rumours clearly indicate, is not exactly a great way to instill confidence in partners. The temptation internally to favor the Nexus in APIs and so on is going to be too hard to resist. Android has has a few knocks already for its kinda, sorta open source approach, and I expect the volume of criticism to grow pretty significantly.Google seems to think it needs to own the entire stack to have a truly great user experience, but isn’t it possible hardware competition would have delivered just that?

Funnily enough, for example, I prefer the HTC Magic to the Droid. It may be underpowered compared to the black monolith Verizon is selling, but it has better hand feel as far as I am concerned.

Android as a trojan horse for Google’s apps ambitions makes perfect sense.  Part of what makes the Android experience so great for me at least, is that I use Google Apps. All the syncing is done in the background for me. As a Google client it “just works” – beautifully.

But Google is entering the hardware business now. I suspect competitors are breathing a sigh of relief. Except Apple perhaps -we can surely expect an Android “Slate killer” tablet sooner rather than later. But where does it all end? Will Google sell its own car navigation hardware? What about ChromeOS netbooks?

I am looking forward to seeing if my team of 2009 can prove me wrong in 2010 by keeping the ecosystem happy and growing as it competes with hardware makers.

This year the winner just screamed out at me, when I started considering it, so no runner up. Last year I chose a team that I know personally, the IBM Eight Bar crew from Hursley Labs. This year I chose a team I can’t name a single member of, but they had a notable impact on me, and more importantly, an entire industry or two.

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Today I came across a splendid post about corporate communications at last week’s SAP Influencer Summit by Barbara French, of SWAY blog. Barbara is a really smart thinker on new influencer models for business to business communications. The post should be essential reading for anyone that runs events for influencers – whether they be financial or industry analysts, bloggers, customers, software developers or folks with a 100k twitter followers. So I asked Barbara if I could replicate it in full here…  she graciously agreed. My recommendation? Read this post and subscribe to SWAY. You might also check out this companion post from SAP’s own Timo Elliott. And this one from @gapingvoid, which is as relevant as it ever was.

Oh yeah: one last point from me. Don’t have anything under NDA unless it needs to be. Identifying your trade secrets before the event will help sharpen up your messages. Blanket NDAs prevent useful feedback.

Barbara Says

The SAP Influencer Summit dominated tech media and Twitter backchannel conversations about SAP all week. The event offers a good example of real time influencer relations management. If you’re planning an influencer summit for 2010, consider these 3 points:

1. Open discourse. Several tech providers nixed live blogging and live micro-blogging (Twitter) during their influencer events this year. SAP set an important precedent by keeping all social media channels open and participating in conversations in real time. Live sessions were blogged, reported, tweeted and debated by people in attendance and by virtual attendees around the world. Follow SAP’s example: Limit NDAs to the situations where they make sense, such as the strategy development work leading up to an event like this. When the content doesn’t mandate an NDA, don’t curb use of social media.

2. Employee engagement. Many SAP employees expanded on speaker and audience comments via Twitter. Creating a wider circle of employee commentators makes perfect sense. And you know what? The press, analysts and consultants were likely to contact their “unofficial” employee sources anyway. It’s a much better idea to involve more employees by design, than to pretend that exchanges are limited to the featured spokespeople and handlers in the room.

3. Diverse attendees. SAP invited a diverse group of influencers to participate. Among tech industry influencers, big brand analysts and media dialogued side by side with solo opinion leaders and every size in between as well as customers and bloggers. Gathering diverse opinion leaders together to share the same information at the same time at a flagship event is smart on several counts. One, it’s efficient. Two, it sets up diverse, multiple touch points with marketplaces. It also helps build enough momentum to flow directly to offline conversations. In other words, no single point of failure and lot of juice.

For more on the SAP Influencer Summit, check out:

• Timo Elliott, an evangelist for SAP. He offers light commentary on what was going on behind the scenes here.  He also links to a PDF document of Twitter feed from #sapsummit.
• Jonathan Becher, SVP marketing at SAP and official SAP blogger for the event, posted here.
• R Ray Wang, an analyst with Altimeter Group, offers one analyst’s summary of the event themes and SAP’s performance here.

Update December 14th: Adding 2 more links to analyst reactions. Please feel free to add more attendee links in the comments. – B

• Jon Reed, a fellow with PAC , weighs in on the experience and resulting expectations among attendees here
• James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, gives a candid analyst viewpoint that was widely accepted among other analysts here

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I have little if any insider insight into Oracle’s plans for Java once the Sun acquisition goes through, which has looked increasingly likely since the database and applications giant stopped acting tough and started talking to the EU.

Today though I read a post by Clive Birnie that made me think – If In Doubt Act Like a Receiver. For those unfamiliar with British terminology, calling in the receivers essentially means going bankrupt – they manage insolvency.  Clive has been through the process. He says:

The Receiver doesn’t mess about.

He gets on with his job. No sentiment. No procrastination. No “well Janis has been with us a long time…” or “we need to get this low margin delivery out on time they are a long standing customer”. It is black and white to The Receiver. He deals in quantum and maths.

The clue is in the name. He does not come to give but to receive.

In a time of crisis, turnaround and survival it is worth remembering his role and doing his work before he has to come and do it for you.

Every piece of resource that is not focused 100% on turning inventory and debtors into cash is resource you don’t need in a crisis. Harsh but true.

OK. He has the advantage that all contracts are broken so he has more freedom of movement than you but my point is the principle. Stop giving. Stop spending. Focus on generating and receiving cash.

Everything on your premises is inventory. Anything not in current use can be sold. Even things that are in use can be sold.

I once said, paraphrasing Churchill, that “the Java Community Process is not the the worst form of governance except all the other ones that have been tried.”

Increasingly I believe I was wrong. You see- managing Java has been debilitating for Sun Microsystems. Too much of the company’s precious resources have been spent on managing Java, for too little benefit. I don’t want to pile on just as a new chapter is about to begin, but I can’t help thinking Oracle might well be good for Java. It will have no sentimentality about the community and technology. It won’t have people on the team that made a fortune, and a powerful role within Sun, on the back of Java.

Earlier this year at JavaOne Sun ran a funny video about the history of Java – in one particularly memorable scene it had James Gosling come into Scott McNealy’s office asking for funding for Oak, and leaving with two huge bags full of cash. Well Java was the gift that kept on taking. When Sun couldn’t build enough Solaris servers to meet demand throwing money at Java looked like a good investment. When Linux started beating Solaris up, not so much. Once again I want to stress that I don’t believe Java was a bad thing for Sun, but it was more all encompassing than it should have been.

But clear, cold eyes are coming. Sharks aren’t sentimental. and Oracle definitely can’t stop moving…

Its even possible, though I seriously doubt it, that Oracle will spin Java out. I think its far more likely Oracle will accelerate a trend that began far too late at Sun- that is, converging implementation and specification. Historically Sun was among the last enterprise Java suppliers to support the latest versions of its own specs. I expect Oracle to be the first among equals.

The recent announcement of the Gemini Project, an Oracle SpringSource initiative under the auspices of the Eclipse Runtime project, is a pointer to a possible future. Oracle supporting OSGi is not new. Working directly with SpringSource on the other hand, is. What is OSGi and why do we need a new reference implementation? The answer is the delivery of a Stackless Stack, a more modular Java, and the delivery of code, rather than specs.

All that said, Oracle will have an awful lot of runtimes to manage and support. From its own J2EE Application Server to WebLogic, to Gemini and Sun’s Glassfish (and other legacy bits and pieces). Glassfish is a real wildcard, because its an excellent piece of code – implemented from the ground up with modern modular Java in mind, it is fast and embeddable. Sun was creating real channel momentum before the Oracle deal was announced. Oracle could play Glassfish as its lead Java platform for ISVs and VARs. From an antitrust perspective, the strange thing about the EU scrutiny of MySQL, is that Oracle’s multibillion dollar WebLogic business had more to immediately fear from Glassfish than Oracle database did from MySQL. Its almost like Larry persuaded Monty to lead the EU on a goose chase.

IBM has thus far been intensely relaxed about Java’s new stewardship. SAP far less so.

But putting Java on a sound commercial footing is surely going to be one of the first jobs Oracle takes on. I said earlier this year, “you can rest assured JavaOne will be a very different event.”  The same can surely be said for the Java ecosystem at large.

While commentators have been focusing on MySQL and financial losses at Sun, if I was Oracle I’d be getting a little antsy about Java and the mobile space. Apple and Google are going from strength to strength, Java not so much.

I don’t have the answers, but it is my suspicion that 2010 could actually be a good year for Java. Why shouldn’t the renaissance be under new ownership? I would advise Java community members to stay put. Doubly so for enterprise customers- there are no immediate risk factors, other than the ongoing contractual wrangling single vendor dominance creates. Java is in surprisingly rude health, especially given the health of its Steward.

Is there a case for small governance in Java? Absolutely. I expect Oracle to make it, and drive it through.

Oracle is a client. Sun, IBM and SAP are as well. I totally stole the photo above from an Oracle blog, and its clearly copyright CNet. If they contact me I will of course remove it.

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