... is to invent it (to borrow from an Alan Kay quote)

Given that my 2007 and 2008 predictions were too dependent on other people or organizations (don't follow those links. It was painful enough for me to re-read them ), I'm taking a different approach this year and simply "predicting" what's going to happen in 2009 based on variables within our control.

"Year of the Cloud"
I like to think small businesses are a leading indicator of the broader economy, and if that's the case, then 2009 will be a strong year for cloud computing as small businesses move to both produce and consume cloud based services. Future Fortune 500 companies will start in 2009 with SaaS and cloud computing baked into their DNA.

"CRM 2.0 = Community Relationship Management"
"Web 2.0" features, such as democratization, user-generated content, tagging, and rating will find their way into B2B portals and websites. "Social networking" will be a feature of web content management systems, instead of a silo application.

Customers will increasingly want go online and manage the relationship with their suppliers/vendors through their portals.

The job title of "Community Manager" will become common. They'll need tools like the Community Graph to gauge customer demands and needs.

"Browser Is the New IDE"
Web development will increasingly be done with lighter weight tools, such as Firefox and FireBug, allowing for a completely browser-based integrated development environment. Developers will have the agility to access and modify their applications from anywhere in the world using netbooks.

Websites will no longer be seen as being discrete deliverable projects. Instead, websites will become fluid entities that morph and adapt to the clients and organization's needs. The browser IDE will enable this agility.

Visual Studio .NET and Eclipse will remain powerful, essential, yet "old school" tools. The inherent conflict of interest between SaaS and traditional IDE's will result in more browser IDE adoption.

"Useful Metrics"
Online solutions will break away from the legacy of "Business Intelligence" and "Marketing Analytics" and provide real-time metrics that are pragmatic, useful, and actionable.

"Gaming As A Metaphor"
CRM and call center workers will adopt line of business applications much more readily if the user experience is aligned with video game design elements. Responsive, real-time, and graphical UI's will be favored over forms-based applications.

Employees will prefer to "interact" with their customers online in much the same way they interact online in PVP games. Learning curves will be reduced and adoption will increase.

Company goals and missions can be more easily visualized and real-time feedback provided through rich game-like interfaces.

"Collaborative Development"
An extension of the IDE will give web developers direct access to an online repository of pre-built scripts and cloud connectors, from Google Charts and Maps, to Salesforce web to lead forms, and StrikeIron tax services.

Principles of open source and Creative Commons will encourage this "remix" and mash-up of web services to produce new and unique solutions.

"Dynamic Languages"
More than half of all new web development projects will choose to use a dynamic languages, such as Python, Ruby, PHP, or Perl. Browser-based IDEs will accelerate this adoption. Javascript and JQuery will become essential tools for building responsive and interactive web applications.

"Domain Specific Languages (DSL)"
New languages will continue to emerge that are suited for specific tasks and domains. Our own language, Dialogue, will enable web developers and business users to think abstractly about their website/portal/community and easily interact with their online constituents.

"Amazon EC2 Will Rock"
The ease of provisioning an operating system and storage through Amazon and paying for resources based on usage will make EC2 the status quo platform for cloud developers.

"3rd Party Google Apps Get Serious"
Google Apps are at the threshold of being adopted by several organizations, large and small. The only obstacle being industry specific configuration, monitoring, and auditing. 3rd party partner apps will start to move in to help verticalize Google Apps and replace existing email/calendar productivity applications.

It's been several years since I last put together a recording studio, but my project for this holiday has been to cobble, re-purpose, and generally upgrade my setup.

The wife has incrementally reclaimed the home office previously used for home recording, so this is an opportunity to move all the gear into a proper environment and re-build from the ground up (I'm using some space at our business office for this project).

I would like this setup to allow spontaneous recording sessions by just having everything wired and ready to go. This will enable the agile composition and recording process I'm hoping to achieve.

What's decidedly different about the new setup is the availability of cloud storage. Digital recording consumes massive amounts of disk storage, and recording engineers tend to be packrats, hanging on to lots of tracks "just in case" they're needed for future re-mixes.

Amazon S3 now frees my mind and allows the audio packrat in me to infinitely scale archive storage without purchasing more external USB drives.

This setup has 3 levels of storage:
Local: Real-time recording and mixing
External: Samples, loops, sound libraries
Cloud: Deep storage and archiving

Adopting SaaS and cloud computing does not have to be such a grievous process, yet I witness so many people going through the stages below that it makes me wonder how applicable the Kübler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief model may be to this process?

Denial

• "Cloud computing is a re-invention of what we've been doing for years on mainframes"
• "SaaS is just a fad"
• "Host our data offsite? No way! That's not secure. We can manage our data better than anyone else"
• "We've done it this way for years. I see no point in changing now"
  

Anger

• "Why are you singling out my project for replacement by SaaS?"
• "I can install/configure a better [software solution] in-house!"
• "Why is my budget being slashed? That's not fair!"
  

Bargaining

• "Just let me add a couple more hard disks to the Exchange server. That will increase everyone's inbox storage to 2GB per person"
• "We purchased this software on a 5 year ROI plan. Let's just ride it out and wait for the next upgrade. Vendor X says our needs will be met in the next release"
• "Let's just outsource the ongoing maintenance of our datacenter to offshore resources and focus on strategic initiatives in-house"
• "There's an open source solution I'd like to try installing and maintaining in-house"
  

Depression

• "What's the point? Business managers will subscribe to any service they find on the Internet"
• "The whole economy is in the tank. If it's bad for me, it must be bad for everyone"
• "The company is going to die. Why doesn't someone just let me go?"
  

Acceptance

• "I suppose SaaS vendor X really can do this job faster, better, cheaper since that is all they focus on"
• "I can retrain and get certified for SaaS solution X"
• "Technology goes obsolete all the time. This is just the next evolutionary cycle"

Am I missing any other common comments?

A core tenet of i-Dialogue 9 is that all website entities inherit the following social interfaces and behaviors:

• Comment
• Rating
• Tag

Objects integrated with other systems, such as Salesforce.com, automatically inherit these social extensions.

Once a community becomes active on a website, how does this information become actionable for a Product or Marketing Manager? How do you visualize a plethora of comments, ratings, and tags on a website? i-Dialogue 9 solves this problem by providing a graphical analytics application for visualizing the online community.

The community graph is interactive and supports high-level visualization of the community and the ability to zoom in on any entity. Graph nodes are color coded to indicate increased activity or negative ratings.

Graph nodes may be modified or removed (for community moderation).

Graph nodes may be ordered by time (most recent at top), rating (highest rated top to bottom), comments (most commented at top) or tags (most tagged at top).

Internal employees may assign a Task to any entity for follow-up.

Default Social Entities:

• Knowledge Base Article
• Trouble Ticket (aka Case or Issue)
• Discussion Forum / Topics / Post
• Document
• Article (Blog or Webpage)
• User
• Chat

Alerts:
Any user may initiate a 'Watch' anywhere within the object graph hierarchy. A watch results in email notification when any child entity is updated.

Product Roadmap Notes
Technology: Silverlight
Anticipated Release Date(s)
Social entity behaviors= Winter 2009
Community Graph=Spring 2009

• New - Added support for Microsoft AJAX client library
• New - Added Jquery support (requires update to ASPX page templates)
• New - Added JSON support
• New - Added XOSQL (eXtensible Object Store Query Language) support for use in AJAX apps (returns JSON array)
• New - Added 'db' interface to client-side Javascript API for use in AJAX applications
• New - Added 'Find' feature to CMS Toolbar (Searches page meta tags and content)
• New - Added 'Localize' feature to CMS Toolbar
• New - Salesforce ETL Map "Auto-Generate Map" dynamically determines storage type (Text or Image) based on XOS value setting
• New - Added 'Date Picker' control to Dialogue Script library
• New - Dialogue Script editor uses client-side Preview and Asynchronous Save (no server postbacks)
• New - Portal Registry Key 'Scripting.DefaultEditor' for using FCK or plain textarea editor

• Changed - Outbound emails set Return-Path to i-Dialogue NDR processing service. Reply-To set to email sender (previously Reply-To set to NDR service).
• Changed - Index optimizations to object store. Enforced use of BLOB storage for strings > 450 characters
• Changed - Disabled late-bound cache invalidation during Salesforce ETL and OM handler (was beta release. Withdrawn and deferred to Jan '09)

• Fixed - Improved caching of generic object collections. Thread safety changes.
• Fixed - Resolved issue preventing Live Chat ETL process to execute when Web Event custom object is not installed in Salesforce
• Fixed - Resolved ETL Map Local Object display issue (one-off index for certain object types)
• Fixed - Improved exception handling in Contact ETL when Account or Account Type not available (related to cascading role inheritance feature)

Salesforce.com announced support for Google Apps Engine (GAE), which is a cloud-based platform for developing websites and portals using Python.

Between GAE, Dialogue Script, and the Salesforce/Plone project, there certainly is a lot of love going around for creating sites with Python.

I'll admit to being somewhat envious when companies announce their positioning in an industry analyst report, but then reality settles in and I get back to focusing on the true objective influencers in todays market; You (the reader), existing customers, Google SEO, and now (even more so) Twitter and Facebook.

I'm not really sure what it takes to get on the radar of some analysts (someone once told me "$10K per millimeter"). Some complex IT procurements are best served by having this information in hand.

But purchasing decisions can get really cloudy if a vendor is mis-categorized, or simply not understood by the analyst. That's why I got a kick out of this suggestion to create a "Magic Quadrant" for Analysts.

Microsoft's Gen4 data center architecture involves trucks pulling up to an open air park and plugging right in to the Internet. No roof. Looks a little like an electrical utility transformer station.

Check out the video.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision">Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision</a>

If you can manage to run your business entirely in the cloud, then you'll enjoy the reward of using Good Operating System on a $199 netbook.

Recent articles and events have been making waves about the integration of CRM and social networking. I personally don't see the "sales mining" approach being a very good idea. In fact, it could outright backfire.

So how does an organization effectively leverage social networking? The answer is.... (drum roll please... are you ready?) ... "socialize".

5 things you can do right now

1) Read the ClueTrain Manifesto
It all started with this. "Markets are conversations".

If your corporate culture is not conducive to a majority of the 95 ClueTrain Theses (it's not entirely palatable), then social networking may not be a good fit. But it could also indicate your organization is on a path to extinction.

2) Own your brand
If a company is going to get into social networking, then ideally several employees will belong to that network. However, if it's possible to register your organization's name as a username, go ahead and reserve that account (or someone else will).

3) Be Informative
Break news for your company on social networks. Keep micro-messages informative by always linking to relevant pages and articles.

If people ask questions, point them in the right direction (don't respond if you don't have an answer).

4) Be Personal
You'll very quickly figure out that http://twitter.com/dlog is just me, tweeting on-behalf-of our service. Most days, I'm sharing links relevant to our service or industry. But if my dog dies and I'm having a bad day, I may share that too.

Upload a personal picture, even though you're representing a branded profile.

5) Manage Your Twitter SNR
Potential followers only have your last 20 tweets as a basis for your signal-to-noise ratio (Twitter SNR), so you need a reasonable balance of information-to-socializing.

I find myself intrigued lately with the possibility of using OpenID in B2B marketing campaigns and portals.

The idea is simple. Let your customers/partners use their existing Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, or AOL account to login to your website.

For a consumer website, this is a no-brainer. I would not be surprised if I could click on a Yahoo! banner ad and log into a sponsors website using my Yahoo! username.

But does this necessarily apply to a B2B website? I'm sure Marketers managing a complex sales process will continue to want to own the relationship end-to-end and collect as much information as possible upfront. But if a Marketer is willing to collect a minimum amount of information upfront and invest in cultivating the lead to incrementally collect more information over time, then this might work.

Less complex sales cycles might actually have quite a bit to gain by letting leads self-identify with an existing identity, given they're "in the hunt" and scanning 5+ competing site at one time. The site offering the path of least resistance is most likely to win.

RPX has a freemium service that supports OpenID (RPX is also an Oregon-bred company, so it must be good ). I'm going to experiment with the free version of this service and play with integrating it with i-Dialogue membership management (and by proxy, CRM Lead/Contact management). 

So what do you think? Would you support OpenID on your website? Why or why not?