Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Socialcast from VMware

Socialcast, started in 2005, creates and deploys social software to thousands of companies across industries. It was acquired by VMware in May 2011.
One of the major pain areas for companies is engaging employees and increasing productivity due to communication overload and knowledge silos. Socialcast creats a simple, data rich collaborative space where employees can find information from applications, systems and people across the enterprise. It creates an awareness on what everyone is doing, saying and thinking in the company.
It increases efficiency by opening new lines of communications and enables faster data flow between applications and various users and teams.  By allowing collaborations and discussions to happen on the site, it avoids unnecessary meeting and mail trails which improves productivity.
This enterprise social network creates a central hub for information sharing and knowledge does not remain in silos with each employee.  People can learn about the organization tree, access the executives, share their ideas and know what is happening in the company. 
In short, with Socialcast, companies can establish a open culture in the company, give them the experience of working together without being in the same room or location, improve the flow of information and ideas and benefit from these ideas which otherwise would have gone unheard.
For more information visit www.socialcast.com

Coud Discovey Workshop by HP

I had a chance to attend the Cloud Discovery Workshop organized by HP for one of our clients.
The format was a welcome change. The agenda, layout, discussion points were very different from normal workshops / seminars.  It is a full day slide free workshop, which lets you visualize all aspects around cloud computing, using cloud services or becoming a cloud service provider.
The HP Technology Services team, through their knowledge pool, interactions with customers globally, experience and industry best practices, has defined 9-10 key topics, on which discussion need to happen when an organization  embarks on a cloud journey.
The carefully selected topics cover a wide range, consisting of cloud computing trends, concepts, business value and ROI, technology needs, management and process capabilities, cloud enablement of applications, multi tenant security, compliance, change management , service governance and many more.
It is not a traditional sitting down format. Instead, the group gathers around a placard of each topic and discusses various aspects of each topic.  It is a highly interactive discussion, where the HP team acts more as a enabler / catalyst for the discussion and only interjects where some information is to be shared.  Each of these discussions helps to bring forth ideas, inhibitions, organizational readiness related to that topic.  These points are captured by the HP team.
Once each topic is covered, the group gathers around a planner and writes down the current and desired state of the company on each topic and the action points to reach the desired state.  A timeline is decided for each timeline.
At  the end of the workshop, based on the inputs captured though out the day and the final planner, HP gives a detailed report to the customer on its cloud awareness, readiness, and the roadmap to cloud.
The most unique thing about this workshop is that it is a purely consultative approach and nowhere in the discussion any HP product related to cloud is discussed.