Futurewatch: Enterprise

That said, the enterprise is not going to embrace streaming media technology any more aggressively in 2008 than it did in 2007. Therefore, the challenge for content managers within the walled garden of an enterprise will be to bring the value of streaming media into focus as a necessary point of integration and a budget item, while forging alliances within their organizations to target areas where the technology can be shared—not just in the implementation but in the budget split as well. This will create allowances in IT infrastructure that will support streaming media as a shared technology, and it takes pressure off of individual owners who fear change or risk.

A Risky Road
The chatter drones on with fanciful notions of how MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media applications will revolutionize the enterprise.

A CTO at a well-known content delivery network (CDN) confided to me that he has experienced browser-injected malware from behind a fully patched firewall and literally had to pull the plug to disengage the infestation, this courtesy of an innocent click on a MySpace page.

Media players will not be upgraded (nor should they be) for at least another 2 years—ports that invite interaction into the enterprise from these players should not be left open. New exploits are being discovered every day.

The minds of the malicious are just too clever to stop targeting the enterprise—let alone to resist attacking when offered the opportunity. Community sites have no place in the enterprise, and in order to mitigate risk, the enterprise should cut off access to all of them. Internal websites and applications should freeze at the static personal webpage level with no "post a comment" opportunities. In the enterprise, everything will continue to be moderated and nothing will go public if the organization has good risk management in place.

When business heads respond negatively to this static approach, IT will tell them to look at their Facebook pages from home.

Of course, that won’t work. A high-strung EVP will bring in his laptop, and something very infectious will travel onto his company network and shut down at least a segment, if not bring the organization to its knees. This will happen at least three times over the next year, and nothing will be sufficiently explained; we will have outages and unexplained rollbacks that will last 24 to 36 hours at a time and no one will take a fall.

The Big Winners in Partnership
Accordent Technologies was the clear application and partner winner in the enterprise space in 2007, and this certainly gives them an edge in 2008. The ability to leverage existing technology in an enterprise and to bring existing media generated by other vendors’ systems into a logical and useful whole is the key to success in the enterprise—once procurement aligns with internal IT management decision makers in 2008 and beyond.

Media Publisher ran a close second with a series of partnerships, including with IBM, that will aid in entry into new spaces. IBM is a leader in the world of partnership—every job I ever had was touched in some way by a relationship with IBM.

In another instance of partnership, Starbak announced in December 2007 that it had partnered with IBM Global to deploy streaming media solutions to the Dow Chemical Company’s 130 locations. Looking back to 2004, Dow selected IBM to manage its worldwide IT infrastructure. This particular relationship was forged by Starbak COO James Strahle, who served as a senior consultant with IBM Global Services.