This Is Not About Twitter

Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

Whether you use Twitter or not, it continues to gain business and consumer users at a rate that can’t be ignored. Austin, of course, deserves a wee bit of credit for helping Twitter take off, when it became the hit of SXSW Interactive 2007, winning the web award that year along with many an influential user.

Fast forward nearly two years, and twitter is everywhere:

• Sales and marketing: with hometown Fortune 500 fave Dell experimenting with rapid-turn discounts on product
• White collar crime: with fraud of the most insidious kind starting to pop up
• Mental health: with ‘Twitter remorse’ possibly being a new, mild form of Millenial depression
• Mainstream Info Tech: with that bastion publishing for the IT executive in the corner office – CIO Magazine – writing extensively on subjects like “Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don’ts“

And, these are dos and don’ts for businesses and working professionals – from X’ers to Boomers – with an eye towards helping them to understand the phenomenon and how to get their feet wet. It is this last example that is the segue for what we really want to talk about, which is not twitter.

How can you make twitter meet the security, integrity, and privacy needs of a modern, regulated, current (or aspiring) Global 2000 enterprise or similar-sized civic and academic institution? It’s a vexing problem, but at least one company in Austin has a gameplan. We spoke recently with the principals of Socialware and we liked what we heard and saw.

In a nutshell, they have built a solution that solves the middleware problem shown in the figure above, between those unruly social media apps and the enterprise application and database infrastructure. For indeed, this isn’t just a twitter problem – this a problem for how to reconcile enterprise demands for a whole new and rapidly growing category of social media applications. The solution, as it turns out, is diplomacy, i.e., sitting in the middle between two or more parties and mediating their interactions.

Hence the name Socialware – a clever play off of middleware, which was a huge step in evolving distributed application deployment in the 1990s and earlier this decade. No doubt the company principals would love for their solution to be a similar “next big thing” and to gain even a reasonable level of success that the middleware leaders, like BEA, realized.

However, first things first, the company is still in bootstrap and semi-stealth mode, aggressively building product and performing initial pilots with a very small group of large customers. You can get a little more of an inkling about the philosophy of the company on their blog. We had a look at the beta product recently and we like what we see. Our opinion is, just like certain rapidly expanding tech markets for consumers – like iPhone apps, which Austin developers have dived into – there is a big opportunity for enterprise solutions for exploiting the innovation in social media and other enterprise 2.0 apps.

And, hey, there are worse things than being acquired by Oracle for $8.5 billion.

Posted by Steve Guengerich http://www.guengerich.com Steve is managing director of BroadBrush Ventures and has more than 20 years of experience in information technology software and services companies. Steve is an accomplished public speaker and award-winning writer, with eight computer trade books and many articles to his credit in Computerworld, eWeek, and others. In addition to the occasional "Freshtech Friday," Steve provides personal observations on his blog "The BroadBrush Update." To read more posts click here.