BlueKiwi was created in 2006, and is already the leading European provider of enterprise social software, with an on-demand platform that allows organizations to create secured social networks among employees, partners, and customers, integrating all the standard Web 2.0 services such as wikis, blogs, forums, and tags.

Dassault Systems is one of France’s largest independent software company, and a worldwide leader in product lifecycle management and 3D software (notably CATIA used by Boeing and Airbus to create their airplanes).

The presentation by Carlos Diaz, CEO of blueKiwi, explained that enterprise social software is the fastest-growing software market (24.4% growth according to Gartner), but that alignment with business process is essential for Enterprise 2.0 success:

“Enterprise 2.0 only works if it is part of a business process. It’s great to work in new ways, but it’s not enough. To make it real, it has to be very practical.”

To enable this, the partners are creating a social-enabled, “PLM 2.0” product to help enhance the product innovation cycle:

“Social enterprise software helps the conversations that are an essential part of product innovation. There’s a virtuous circle: a conversation turns into an idea; an idea turns into a product; and when products are used, they start new conversations, that lead to new innovation and new products.”

Dassault CEO Bernard Charlès explained that Dassault will be distributing the product through their sales force worldwide, and is entering into the capital of blueKiwi.

“We’re a satisfied customer of blueKiwi. We have 1,000 users today, and this will be rising to 8 to 10,000 by the end of the year. It’s much more than a tool – the conversation approach has changed the way our salesforce and partners work together”

“We also want to help French startups to be successful, and do everything we can to help them have a worldwide presence.”

In part to help support the new relationship, Diaz also announced that blueKiwi will be opening two offices in the US, in San Francisco, and next to Dassault’s US headquarters in Boston.

The two companies emphasized that blueKiwi would maintain its existing relationships with companies like Microsoft, providing focused social enterprise functionality that can easily be embedded and integrated with other solutions.

What This Means to the Bigger Market

Up until now, the markets for traditional business applications and enterprise 2.0 software have remained largely separate. But if enterprise 2.0 initiatives have to be aligned with business process to be successful, we can expect to see tighter integration and market interaction between existing business application platforms such as SAP’s Netweaver and the vendors of enterprise social software.

Google has posted videos of all the sessions at the recent Google I/O 2009 developer’s conference.

SAP attended as part of the session on “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”). Overall, the session was a little disorganized and meandering, but it did end up giving an overview of what companies like IBM, Oracle, SalesForce.com, and Atlassian are doing to leverage social networking technologies such as OpenSocial within organizations:

• Mark Weitzel gave a demo of the IBM Mashup Center proof of concept, allowing you to create mashup pages, using messaging between different sources (based on OpenAjax, but can integrate with OpenSocial) (link directly to this demo)
• Rich Manalang from Oracle gave a demonstration of Oracle’s internal collaboration system, called “Oracle Connect”. (link directly to this demo)
• Dave Carroll of Salesforce.com showed how they have been working with customers to add collaboration to the CRM experience (link directly to this demo)
• Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian showed how OpenSocial could be used to link enterprise applications, and between applications and gmail. For more, see http://atlassian.com/opensocial (link directly to this demo)

The highlight of the session (OK, so I’m biased) was a demonstration by John Mayerhofer, VP, Standards Strategy Group of SAP, showing the Social Network Analyzer technology (see below, or link directly to this demo)

Unfortunately, not much time was left for Q&A session. The most interesting question was about “What are the barriers to social systems in the enterprise?” and the answers included a mix of technical and social concerns:

• Security and identity were mentioned as special problems.
• There was some frustration than social networking APIs don’t take into account enterprise needs.
• Exposure to the consumer social networks actually leaves a negative impression, people fear that it’s just about socializing, rather than collaborating.
• Everybody agreed that it was early days
• The session ended with a hopelessly vague question/comment about needing to “liberate users” rather “concentrating on the enterprise”.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center has just unveiled a prototype of some great new Web 2.0 technology called Social Network Analyzer (SNA). It aggregates existing enterprise data to display and discover organizational relationships. It provides the missing link between social networking platforms and enterprise information systems, by letting organizations leveraging data available in corporate information systems.

SNA helps jump-start social networking within the organization by letting you import and aggregate all the corporate relationships between people that are already recorded in your business applications, such as:

• Management hierarchies from your human resources system
• Data on who worked on which deals from your sales force automation system
• Partner, customer, and partner supplier contacts along your supply chain
• People who work on similar transactions within your operational systems

If appropriate, this data could then be supplemented with other opt-in relationship data, such as instant messenger contacts, twitter contacts, etc. It’s a great step towards bringing Enterprise 2.0 into reality.

How Does it Work?

SNA can accept relationship information from any system, using a simple, open format (e.g. name of object 1, name object 2, type of relationship, category data) and stores it in a relationship-centric database structure. Once the information is stored, it can be used to filter and browse the connections between people. There are three main tabs available in the interface:

The “Refine” Tab

You start analyzing the network by filtering using on any criteria available in the underlying data base, such as geography, role, project, or company. SNA automatically aggregates and displays data about the chosen group. For example, you could filter using the name of a customer account. SNA would then display all the people who had some connection with that account, and a breakdown of their profile (by job title, for example). Groups of people (such as regular committees or existing cross-functional project teams) can also be represented and included in the network. When you click on an individual, you can see details collected from multiple systems.

The “Explore” Tab

By clicking on any individual, you can view the relationships they are part of. By changing the drop-down menus you can switch between different types of relationship (“reports to”, “worked on project with”, etc.), and choose different types of representation (standard organization chart, ego-centric view, etc.)

The “Connect” Tab

The “connect” tab lets you determine the shortest number of relationship steps between various individuals, across the various different types of relationships available in the system.

At any time, you can collect people in the “clipboard” area by right-clicking their names. You can then email these people or export their names (and other relevant details) to any other system.

What Are the Benefits?

SNA augments and extends any existing enterprise 2.0 or social media strategies: helping locate experts in the organization, build communities, manage employee talent, or reorganize business processes. It’s ideal for collecting people to work on cross-functional teams or analyzing relationships with your customers or suppliers across the whole organization.

SNA can be embedded into other applications. Providing this type of enterprise social networking and collaboration functionality is a key part of the next generation of “business user” applications that use technology to help transform the daily processes of business people just as ERP systems have transformed transactional  processes.

Next Step: Try it Yourself!

SNA is a prototype today, and is covered by the standard licensing terms of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center. Your feedback is strongly encouraged: what functionality needs to be added? What are the key areas where this technology could be the most useful? You can access and use the software yourself, using the SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at sna-demo.ondemand.com.

Please send your comments directly to SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.