More Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0: Cool Technologies to WatchMore Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0: Cool Technologies to Watch

While I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, I got to take a close look at a number of technologies, many of which impressed me quite a bit. Here, a quick look at four of them:

Altus Learning Systems has a very elegant video/content recording and transcription service, which the conference itself took advantage of. The idea is to give viewers searchable access to all the content in a presentation: the video, certainly, but also synchronized PowerPoint slides and (and this is the most useful part) a searchable transcript of what the speaker said. Lots of potential uses here for enterprises, especially in sales and marketing and HR/training, not to mention for professional services organizations (like my own) that do a lot of presentations internally and for clients. The service also shows that not all Enterprise 2.0 technologies are super high-tech; Altus relies on actual people to transcribe the presentations, since voice-recognition software does such a poor job of it and therefore takes more time to edit than to just do it manually the first time around.

I also spent some time with folks from Cisco and WebEx, two companies that appear to be operating relatively separately for now—but I expect that to change soon enough. I got to experience the Cisco Telepresence 1000 up close and personal, and while the system looks great, I’m not convinced it warrants its $79,000 list price tag. Most companies will be perfectly happy to spend a third of that on a high-definition system that delivers terrific picture and sound quality. The 1000 is a single screen that doesn’t, in my opinion, really fit the bill for true telepresence (Cisco’s Telepresence 3000 is on the money there, but speaking of money, it lists for $250,000.)

What’s strange is that while Cisco used the conference to showcase its telepresence technology, it didn’t take the opportunity to talk about its unified communications applications—notable because the vendor has touted UC for the past year as redefining the company, and the industry. The good news, I suppose, it that Cisco’s silence left plenty of room for WebEx, its recent acquisition, to tout WebEx Connect—which is better UC technology than what the parent company has developed on its own (Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and Cisco Unified Presence). The WebEx Connect product is mature and inclusive, containing all the necessary components—and it looks really sweet. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cisco quietly lets WebEx Connect replace Personal Communicator downstream.

Finally, I really liked some of the plug-ins IBM demo’d during the UC Tutorial I moderated on Monday afternoon, including the ones that use geographic location data to show where people are, literally, at any given time. This lets a user see who on his or her buddy list is where, so, for instance, if I’m traveling to a conference in Boston, I can see who else is in the area while I’m there, as well as who might be back in my home territory to meet with clients in my stead. It made me realize just how cool UC mash-ups will be going forward—and that they will make the applications even more valuable than we thought they would be.