Kung Fu Apps

Attensa Reads Enterprise Inflection

Enterprises will be slow to adopt RSS on large scales in my opinion, but it will happen. Adoption of email wasn’t overnight. Plenty of businesses still use mainframe computers if you can believe that. Switching costs become very high once business users become reliant on systems.

More and more vendors are beginning to offer private RSS output from their applications. But I know of at least two software vendors who feel slightly threatened by the adoption of RSS because of its disintermediation. RSS disintermediates in the sense that some functionality may shift the end-user’s primary user interface to an aggregator of feeds such as one offered by Attensa. Change is on the horizon and rather than taking a defensive posture with an “enterprise walled garden,” developers of business applications could even create and license an RSS module for private, authenticated output. In other words, software vendors should view RSS as an opportunity to differentiate themselves rather than continue the Enterprise 1.0 mentality of proprietary silos.

The predominant use of RSS for knowledge workers will be related to process in my opinion. Getting notification that an order has been received, an invoice needs approval, or that parties have reached agreement on a contract is more important than an RSS feed of a persistent search using Google or Technorati for the company’s ticker symbol. As valuable as it might be to follow news stories about a company, it doesn’t necessarily improve their business processes and thus doesn’t really matter to the knowledge worker.

Attensa2Attensa gets this. And they understand the value of tracking “attention data,” a fancy term indicating that a user’s behavior in reference to feeds is tracked for purposes of reporting. What feeds users pay attention to can translate into “which projects are getting attention from a particular group of users.” But extend this concept one step further by considering that a report can be generated based upon the attention stream of a given set of users to see metrics on ALL the systems that have RSS output. One could essentially make correlations between systems that are otherwise not integrated by using the attention data. That’s a difficult, if not impossible, metric to track when email is the messaging medium.

Attensa4There’s a standard set of functionality that’s required of any application that attempts to serve the enterprise market and Attensa seems to have a good grip on this. They have integration with LDAP and they supply a management interface to make default subscriptions easier to deploy. They also have an Outlook plug-in and web client in addition to an optional hook into Microsoft Exchange.

Besides the attention data, what sets Attensa apart is their architecture. Attensa is built on the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/Python) stack and ships as an appliance using Dell hardware. Newsgator, their nearest competitor who recently updated their enterprise offering, uses Microsoft .NET. Most customers have their own preference depending on whether they consider themselves a “Microsoft shop” or not. I have visited plenty of organizations that refuse to implement IIS, colleges and universities in particular. But then many small-to-medium businesses will hesistate from anything *NIX related because of perceived administrative difficulty. Choice of architecture is especially important to very large enterprises who typically prefer non-Windows based server deployments.

The appliance delivery method allows Attensa to hide the complexity of the underlying support infrastructure in terms of the operating system and database without sacrificing performance. Shipping a virtual machine appliance would also be beneficial (I think it’s the future) for customers who would prefer to run VMWare ESX or XenSource.

Attensa is currently selling the product directly, but I think that their product is perfect for reseller and channel distribution. It doesn’t appear to be entirely complicated, has integration into existing directory providers, and provides users with a familiar experience when using their Outlook plug-in. Best of all, users will see value in the product very soon after deployment and that’s key to success with any business application.