Make social networking work for you

Make Social Networking Work for You
Extend the Value of Enterprise Collaboration With iWay
CEP Enable

A White Paper

by Vincent Lam

Vincent Lam Vincent Lam is the product marketing director responsible for marketing
iWay Software’s entire product line.

Mr. Lam has a diverse background in the technology sector and has helped
position iWay Software’s products as best-of-breed in the competitive
marketplace. Earlier in his career at the company, Mr. Lam was a strategic
product manager. He introduced new strategic and innovative products
to the marketplace such as WebFOCUS Magnify, the world’s first real-time
transactional enterprise search solution. Mr. Lam’s background includes
innovation at Wall St. firms, technology firms, and entrepreneurship.

Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary

2 Where Social Networking and the Enterprise Meet

3 Key Enterprise Collaboration Challenges

4 How Companies Are Reaping the Benefits

5 Maximizing the Value of Social Collaboration

i6 iWay CEP Enable: Extend the Value of Social Collaboration

9 Conclusion

Executive Summary

The rise of social networking at the professional level is a clear indication that companies of all
sizes and across all industries need faster and more effective ways to communicate – internally
as well as to customers, vendors, and other partners. While organizations are increasingly
implementing enterprise collaboration platforms to enhance the way people work together
and share information, the full potential of such solutions is not necessarily being realized.

For these platforms to deliver optimal value, they have to work with all the information systems
from across an organization. They also must be extended with advanced capabilities, such as
complex event processing (CEP), business intelligence (BI), and analytics.

In this white paper, we will discuss how the same concepts that have transformed personal
communication are now being applied to enhance enterprise collaboration. We will also cover
the benefits and challenges associated with implementing enterprise collaboration technologies,
and highlight iWay CEP Enable, a powerful solution that can extend the value of enterprise
collaboration platforms with broad-reaching integration capabilities as well as CEP functionality.

1 Information Builders

Where Social Networking and the Enterprise Meet

As web technologies have advanced, users have become more empowered to interact and share
information with each other in different ways. Web users connect in real time and at any time with
friends, coworkers, and family members.

The amount of people who participate in social networking forums is astonishing. For instance,
Facebook has more than 600 million registered accounts. The number of people who use e-mail
pales in comparison – Yahoo has approximately 257 million users, and Windows Live about 360
million active accounts.1

As Facebook and other social media have gained popularity, it has become obvious that the
same principals can be used in enterprise environments. Applications such as Salesforce Chatter,
SAP StreamWork, and Oracle Fusion streams are emerging to foster real-time collaboration and
information sharing between business users.

These platforms provide substantial advantages over solutions such as e-mail and instant
messaging, which is why experts anticipate their rapid adoption in the near future. Forrester found
that almost one-quarter of large enterprises are currently implementing or piloting programs
using a community platform, and more than 30 percent plan to do so in the next year.2 The U.S.
Online Community Software Forecast 2009-2013 from IDC predicts that the industry will reach a
whopping $1.6 billion by 2013.3 Leaders at Cisco believe that enterprise social collaboration could
eventually become a $34 billon market.4

While the basic concepts are the same, collaboration is much different in the enterprise than it is
in people’s personal lives. The very sensitive and confidential nature of certain types of corporate
information demands greater privacy and manageability. More rigid user administration is also a
must because only certain stakeholders should be privy to certain types of discussions.

1
Brownlow, Mark. “E-mail and Webmail Statistics,” www.email-marketing-reports.com, 2011.
2
Parrish, Melissa. “The Forrester Wave Community Platforms 2010 Report,” Forrester Research, 2010.
3
“IDC Forecasts $1.6 Billion Online Community Software Market by 2013: Strong Growth Despite Recession – Corporate Culture Remains
Inhibitor,” IDC, 2009.
4
“Cisco Targets $34B Market With New Collaboration Portfolio,” Cisco, 2008.

2 Make Social Networking Work for You

Key Enterprise Collaboration Challenges

Deploying an enterprise collaboration framework brings with it a host of concerns and issues. For
example, encouraging users to adopt it can be tricky, and an unpopular collaboration platform
will be hard-pressed to be successful. Many of today’s most popular tools also have inherent
drawbacks that may prevent users from completely jumping on board, including:
■■ Gaps in the information that is shared and distributed, since most social collaboration platforms
limit communication to people (not systems)
■■ Social collaboration tools never truly become an integral part of day-to-day operations because
companies rarely take the time to integrate them into the existing workflows
■■ Incomplete collaboration tools do not recognize other assets, such as enterprise resource
planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, and limit the types
of interactions that users can rely on the platform to conduct
■■ Leveraging multiple tools to facilitate many types of communication, such as instant alerts and
order approvals, can be time-consuming and cumbersome, prompting users to bypass the
collaboration tool

On the other hand, when enterprise social collaboration platforms are fully integrated with
all enterprise systems, they enable users to easily interact with them in a unified way. Instead
of toggling back and forth between different screens and applications, they can get to all
information, people, and processes in a consistent, real-time manner via a single, centralized
solution. This ease and convenience can play a significant role in encouraging users to adopt the
new enterprise collaboration environment.


How Companies Are Reaping the Benefits

Enterprise social collaboration software is an ideal real-time communication medium that is,
in many cases, becoming the preferred venue for many organizations. It not only facilitates
information sharing among the different people in an organization – it encourages it.
Implemented and managed properly, these social collaboration portals can become central hubs
for communication.

Users are able to share unstructured and ad hoc information and are encouraged to
help each other, decreasing the time it takes to solve problems. For example, enterprise
networking platforms allow for deeper remote collaboration than e-mail, instant messaging, or
teleconferencing. In many cases, they can facilitate the same type of interaction that takes place
in face-to-face meetings, minimizing travel costs. By enabling more rapid dissemination of critical
information to employees, partners, and customers electronically, they can also eliminate the
printing costs associated with distributing the same content via interoffice memos.

Advanced use of such tools – for example, deploying shared workspaces for brainstorming,
authoring documents, and more – can help organizations realize the true potential of enterprise
collaboration in the form of faster time-to-market, greater product innovation, and improved
partner relationships. However, a poll conducted by Forrester finds that two-thirds of organizations
believe they are not getting enough benefit out of their enterprise collaboration tools. The analyst
firm recommends fixing this problem by leveraging these platforms in a way that meets the
widest possible range of business needs, and ensuring that the requirements of end users are
effectively satisfied.5

5
Keitt, TJ. “The State of Collaboration Software Implementations: 2011,” Forrester Research, 2011.


Maximizing the Value of Social Collaboration

In light of Forrester’s findings, organizations are seeking new and innovative ways to boost the
return on their enterprise collaboration tool investments. One of the best ways to accomplish this
is to integrate the collaboration framework directly into processes and applications. By making
applications and automated workflows fully aware of the enterprise collaboration platform – a
concept known as event stream brokering – companies can derive added value.

For instance, a VP of sales can opt to be notified in real time whenever orders over a certain dollar
amount are received in the ERP system. She can preview the purchase order and either approve
or reject it – directly from the collaboration tool, and can include her colleagues in the event if she
has questions or needs more information.

This type of CEP functionality can extend the platform by adding the ability to detect certain
behaviors and notify key stakeholders, without the need for explicit rules. It changes the way that
people interact, with one another and the business processes on which they rely. It consolidates
multiple tools, phones, and, e-mails into a common place where everybody is quite literally on the
same page.

Social networks also generate a lot of data, and while the immediate real-time nature of these
networks is vital, archiving these messages is equally important. There is so much insight to be
gleaned from them.

Just as companies do with information in data warehouses, they need to consider applying things
like BI and analytics to social network data. As these platforms become the conduits between
people and processes, there emerges a terrific opportunity to see what’s happening in the
enterprise. Insight into trends, usage, resource allocation, personnel, sales, marketing, and more
can be obtained from this data. For instance, the concept of using “trending hashtags” in Twitter
(e.g., #trending or #sales) to organize and track content is similar to what could be obtained from
this data.


iWay CEP Enable: Extending the Value of Social Collaboration

As more organizations implement enterprise collaboration tools, automated event management
must become a key strategic component. This can be best accomplished by making real-time
problem detection and notification an integral yet noninvasive part of the environment. This
requires the ability to rapidly and efficiently generate rich and intuitive applications for CEP,
seamlessly integrating them into the collaboration platform.

With iWay CEP Enable, companies can make every enterprise system part of its collaboration
solution, regardless of its source or location. iWay CEP Enable brings together the power of
information integration and dynamic complex event processing, allowing real-time collaboration
with Salesforce Chatter and enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft.

As a result, they can build comprehensive environments that provide instantaneous, unhindered
visibility into automated events. Users can immediately uncover and alert stakeholders to critical
operational activities, such as breakdowns or inefficiencies in core business workflows or technical
problems that may negatively impact automated processes. Interaction and communication
on correcting those problems and issues can then be effectively facilitated directly through the
collaboration environment.

iWay CEP Enable is a robust and full-featured solution that provides:

Unparalleled Integration With Popular Platforms
With support for online, real-time, and batch integration of more than 300 information assets,
organizations can seamlessly link their collaboration tool to any enterprise system, on any
platform, and in any location. This provides organization-wide visibility into all data as well as
automated events and workflows.

Powerful Event Processing
Real-time, noninvasive, end-to-end CEP capabilities can be rapidly developed using an intuitive,
integrated development environment (as well as graphical widgets), and then embedded into any
collaboration platform through REST services, or via CEP Enable’s exclusive composite application-
style web API.

External technical events can be captured from systems such as ERP applications, mainframe
transactions, databases, files, messages, B2B transactions, and third-party data sources. They are
then correlated and aggregated into business events using iWay’s suite of more than 300 pre-
packaged integration components. Users have complete visibility into any and all automated
workflows and can perform advanced functions such as monitoring, reporting, recording, and
filtering, as well as state-of-the-art visualizations, such as gauges and charts.

iWay CEP Enable also offers the industry’s most innovative event-processing capabilities, including
the ability to define implicit and explicit relationships between events, and an intuitive index
that makes it easy to search and locate specific events and their details. This allows the engine to
detect important activity and alert users without the need for a large number of fixed rules.


Users can also leverage the engine to define and dynamically trigger subsequent and follow-up
actions. For example, event details can be automatically posted on Twitter, or sent to specified
e-mail addresses.

Unhindered Data Interaction
Users will be able to interact with any information, from any source inside or outside the enterprise
– including data generated during the execution of automated processes – directly from within
the collaboration platform.

APIs for Custom Coding
Advanced developers can leverage APIs to create and incorporate highly sophisticated Flex
applications, custom interactions between components, or specifically tailored functionality into
their collaboration environments.

Backward and Forward Compatibility
iWay CEP Enable is fully compatible with existing and future versions of all iWay integration
solutions, including pre-packaged integration components, business-to-business solutions, and
enterprise information management (EIM) products.

How It Works
Let’s look at how iWay CEP Enable functions in a real-world scenario. (See Figure 1).

Company XYZ has recently deployed Salesforce Chatter to improve the efficiency and
effectiveness of interactions across the enterprise. It also maintains multiple ERP systems to
manage a variety of back-office functions. iWay CEP Enable seamlessly brings the two together.

Figure 1. The Collaboration Flow: iWay CEP Enable and the Salesforce Chatter environment working
together.


One day, someone in the company opens a purchase order (PO) for $60,000, which is entered into
the organization’s SAP accounting system. CEP Enable dynamically captures the event, translates
it into a custom Chatter object, and instantly notifies appropriate Chatter users based on business
rules defined by the environment administrator (See Figure 2).

Figure 2. In the Chatter environment, users are notified of events based on their roles and access.

Stakeholders, such as supervisors, can then review, approve, or reject the PO directly from within
Chatter. The underlying SAP system would then be updated in real time to reflect the new
information and PO status (See Figure 3).

Figure 3. CEP Enable and Chatter allow events to be reviewed before they move forward for
processing.


Conclusion

Social networking has become an integral part of people’s daily lives – both at home and at work.
In recent years, organizations have been applying the principles made popular by sites such as
Facebook to their own operations using a variety of enterprise collaboration tools.

Although there are many advantages to using these solutions, organizations are, for the most part,
disappointed with the results of their efforts. The truth is that enterprise collaboration tools alone
may not be enough to achieve the desired results. To provide real, tangible, measureable value,
these platforms must be extended with innovative, state-of-the-art capabilities.

iWay CEP Enable is a robust solution that allows companies to integrate any enterprise system
into today’s most popular collaboration platforms. As a result, information access and sharing
is significantly enhanced. Additionally, by unifying collaboration tools with applications and
processes, iWay CEP Enable can facilitate unhindered visibility into automated events, enabling
users to efficiently collaborate on solutions.


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Make social networking work for you

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