Social Analysis: Gartner PCC 2008 Baltimore

We've wrapped up the second day of the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration conference here in Baltimore, where open source software was highlighted as one of the five "disruptive" forces in the technology market.


Social computing topics dominated the conference, which makes sense because portals, content management and collaboration software  really do converge in the ether of personal interaction. At Liferay we've emphasized to our customers that portals are merely tools to make it easier to connect people with other people, with content, and with applications. That's why it's been natural for us to extend our product into the CMS, collaboration and social networking spaces. Of course there are hundreds of vendors that are approaching the same nexus from different points of origin, and each have different strengths and weaknesses. We're amazed at what some of the vendors out there are already successfully doing in this space.


I was reminded again that there's no substitute for meeting people face to face. We encountered a broad range of people this weekend, from the analysts that have been covering Liferay for several years, to long-term users of Liferay (known and unknown) whom we finally met for the first time, to those who were encountering Liferay for the first time and still have a lot of misunderstandings about open source. But having met them face to face, all of these folks now feel a lot more comfortable with Liferay as a company, and that's going to make a difference in how much and in what ways they invest in Liferay. And of course it also affects the way we'll invest in them individually.

Social computing enjoys the cachet it does precisely because people are social creatures. As we shed the last vestiges of the modernist, cogs-in-a-wheel approach to productivity we inherited from the 20th century, we are increasingly recognizing that intangible personal skills and relationships are central to the way business and work get done. We're trying to capture those intangibles in social software—essentially, we're evolving our business machinery to fit our humanity rather than the other way around.

Conferences like these take a lot of time, energy, and financial resources and can only happen a few times a year. The more we get social software right, the closer we'll be able to approximate the benefits we glean here in our virtual workspaces.