For PROF GEGEE

Strategies for

Successful Enterprise

Collaboration: Balancing people, process and

technology

By David Coleman Table of Contents

2 Executive Summary

2 Setting the Context

4 Benefits of Collaboration 2.0

6 Collaboration is Holistic

8 The Challenges of Collaboration

9 People Challenges

9 Process Challenges

10 People Solutions

11 Process Solutions

11 Technology Solutions

13 Summary

3 What is Collaboration?

8 Collaborative Leverage

14 Resources

10 Technology Challenges

10 Collaborative Solutions

2

Collaboration in the enterprise requires a triumvirate of people, process

and technology to be successful. With the plethora of collaboration

applications available today, both IT professionals and collaboration

business users alike need to take a holistic approach to be successful with

collaboration. This paper lets you know about some of the common pitfalls

and how to avoid them. Over the last decade the trend towards external

collaboration with the value chain has been increasing and soon

collaboration outside the firewall will exceed collaboration with colleagues

in the enterprise.

As collaboration technologies have evolved from smoke signals to today’s

social networks, both IT and business users face a variety of challenges:

QoS (quality of service); accessibility, safety and security, cost, and

performance, to mention a few. A specific challenge for IT is in

understanding what is happening to the network and applications outside

the firewall, to make sure their current infrastructure (inside and outside

the firewall) will support effective delivery of the collaborative applications

to users anywhere in the world.

The benefits of collaboration are many; everything from reduced travel

costs to shorter cycle times and a better bottom line. Greater transparency,

support for multimedia and user generated content, extended enterprise

access, along with policy and compliance features, make collaboration the

killer application of this decade. Collaboration enables people to connect

with content as well as each other through these social technologies.

However, there are also some challenges to overcome; both the benefits

and challenges of collaboration are presented through the people, process

and technology model, with various examples showing how managed

application delivery services, like those provided by Akamai Technologies,

can solve some of these problems and provide a secure external

infrastructure for delivering critical collaborative applications over the

Internet. Many of the salient points in the paper are enhanced by

summarizations of the rules from the book 42 Rules for Successful

Collaboration.

Collaboration is all the rage in today’s online “social” environment. In a

recent Gartner report, the forecasted growth in collaboration tools to be

18.5% CAGR from 2008-2013 (Web Conferencing and Collaboration

Software revenues). It is clear that collaboration can also help contribute to

the bottom line if done correctly. This white paper looks at a number of

factors that can make you more successful with collaboration in your

enterprise.

Common collaboration software found in the enterprise may include:

Microsoft SharePoint; Lotus Notes/Domino, LotusLive and Quickr; Oracle

Beehive; Jive – online community, Live chat (IM/SMS) or micro-blogging

Executive

Summary

Setting the

Context

3

tools like Twitter; Some type of social network or online community, VoIP

applications like Skype; Audio/Video/Data conferencing – WebEx, or GoToMeeting.

A definition from Collaborative Strategies is “Online Collaboration occurs anytime

you have two or more people sharing complex information via the computer on an

ongoing basis for a specific purpose or goal 1 .”

For this paper we are clarifying this general definition by looking at collaboration in terms of systems where people work together on goal-based business processes,

going far beyond just chat or messaging. This leads us to consider how we can drive

adoption and leverage a wider range of applications across a wider geographic area than ever before.

Today we’ve gone beyond face-to-face (F2F) collaboration, the standard for the last

7,000 years, to collaborate over time and space using technology. In this last century collaboration (sometimes just communication and coordination) was done

mainly through phone, fax and e-mail (which are still the most popular

collaboration tools…at least with Boomers (born after 1945) and Seniors (born after 1925)).

E-mail is still the most popular collaboration tool today. However, the Web browser has ushered in the age of the visual web. Coupled with new and powerful search

engines, browsers enabled people to take documents from their desktop and publish

them on static web sites and search for specific content across the Internet. The

browser made it easier to connect to content which was the first use of these technologies.

Figure 1: The Evolution of Collaboration Technologies

In 2005 people began connecting to other people online beginning Collaboration

2.0.

New Collaboration 2.0 technologies focus more on connecting people to people,

leading to the rise of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking products. These tools were quickly adopted by Gen Y (born after 1982),

and are increasingly being adopted in the workplace. Collaboration 2.0 is not only a

set of technologies but a philosophy focused around transparency and participation.

In Collaboration 2.0 information finds you (through collaborative filtering) rather

What is

Collaboration?

Rule 20: Know the objective before defining the tools:

Knowing the business objectives

for collaboration and defining

the details so an organization’s tools, technology and organiza-

tional culture are designed to

support collaborative behavior.

From 42 Rules for Successful

Collaboration

Phone Fax Email Virtual

Team Space

Web-based

collaboration

tools

Social networks

and social com-

puting

1900s 1980s 1990s 1995-2000 2000-2005 2005-2010

1: Collaboration 2.0 2008 by

David Coleman and Stewart Le-

vine, pages 17-18 definitions of

collaboration

2: 2010 Study on the state of collaboration by allcollabora-

tion.com

4

than you looking for it (Collaboration 1.0) and web pages are more dynamic and

interactive. Some of the benefits of Collaboration 2.0 are:

• Connect Global Teams - Collaboration enables global teams, both inside and

outside the enterprise, to coordinate on tasks, communicate more effectively,

and maintain relationships with team members they have never met (and may

never meet). These tools allow us to extend trust over the Internet, whether it is referential trust (your colleague trusts them, so you trust them), or direct trust, it

is critical for project completion in today’s complex global environment.

• Reduce Travel Costs - Air travel can be expensive and unnecessary, given the advances in collaboration tools. With many companies limiting travel,

collaboration helps solve challenges created by more limited F2F interactions.

Newer Collaboration 2.0 technologies like Telepresence, web conferencing, and augmented reality provide a reasonable substitute. Often these Collaboration 2.0

interactions are higher bandwidth interactions. They are great for learning and

sharing content, but also support the more social aspects of interaction.

• Multimedia - Collaboration 2.0 encourages the use of multi-media, and has

given rise to the YouTube, Photobucket, and Flickr social networks for sharing

video and photos. These interactions often require not only increased

bandwidth, but a higher QoS (quality of service).

• Local Context - Trust is critical for global teams, but often not enough. The

idea of “local context” includes not only the trust of your teammates but knowledge of their work, corporate role, and personal life. This knowledge may

be cross gender, cross cultural, cross company culture, cross country culture as

well as personal perspectives. Geographically distributed team members can get to know each other through virtual social interactions, extensive profiles, and

establishing rapport while working together on business tasks. Think of this

“local context” as the grease that makes the wheels move on online

interpersonal interactions.

• Transparency - Greater transparency is changing the way customers interact

with the enterprise, and the amount of information the enterprise chooses to make available. More enterprises are treating their customers like partners,

getting input on new products, sales strategies and communication methods.

Today the interaction starts before a sale is even made and flows through the buying process, into product and service roadmaps.

• Expertise Discovery and Serendipity – Today’s social tools let you search for

an expert based on a keyword, topic, or network referral. With like minded people filtering the tidal wave of information on the Internet, you are more

likely to see not only relevant content, but content you did not even know to

look for. A good example of this is Twitter, a social tool which I avoided for years. However, once I started using it and following people in my field, I was

getting referred to critical information that I did not even know to look for

(serendipity).

Benefits of

Collaboration 2.0 :

Rule 5- Actively include each

person on a global team. When we can’t see each other

F2F, and there are many cultures

represented on the team, we may

lose one or more team members

contribution, but we also lose

their critical perspective.

From- 42 Rules for Successful

Collaboration

5

• Extended Enterprise Access - Today much of the work of the enterprises extends outside the firewall. In addition to partnering with customers,

interactions extend to the entire value network (suppliers, regulatory agencies,

and professional services like PR, legal, and accounting). Collaboration 2.0

technologies enable rich, ongoing relationships with these entities, resulting in a level of productivity never seen before. But value from these technologies is not

only found outside the enterprise. Social networks can be used by the enterprise

to tap into its employees’ networks for recruiting, sales, marketing, beta distributions, and many other critical functions.

• Reduced Process Cycle Time – Interpersonal communication often represents the most time- consuming aspect of a task or project. An e-mail coordinating

project tasks can sit in someone's inbox for days. If we moved to synchronous

technologies (like IM, Twitter, etc.), cycle times for projects can be cut by up

to 80% 3 .

• Security - The ability to share data, documents, etc. in a secure, common

environment ensures that everyone with proper authorization has access to the most up-to-date version of a document. This is critical, because in other

processes, like e-mail, multiple versions of that document may be floating

around. In the case of a “deal room,” two companies are in the process of a merger. A secure virtual space allows both parties to track who has entered and

left the room, what they accessed, and still support SEC regulations for a

“quiet period” prior to the merger announcement.

• Governance, Accountability and Initiative Coordination - It is hard to hide

in a Collaboration 2.0 environment, so higher levels of participation are

guaranteed, and non-performance is now visible to everyone. This ability to have a view into these interpersonal interactions and teams also enables

compliance officers to make sure that corporate behavior is compliant with

both company policies and external regulations.

Collaboration 2.0 is not the end; it is just where we are today. But we are evolving

towards a Collaboration 3.0 environment.

• Collaboration 1.0 connected people to content

• Collaboration 2.0 connected people to people

• Collaboration 3.0 connects content to people.

Collaboration 3.0 might also be seen as a specific form of expertise discovery (part

of Collaboration 2.0), but it is more than that. It requires some normalization of

people data to find the appropriate expert through content. The expert discovery process in IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 (figure 2) not only connects people together

in a corporate social network, but when you look for an expert in a given topic, it

can recommend people based on keywords in their profiles. Keywords or tags might be enough to find AN expert, but might not be enough for you to find the expert

YOU need. IBM/Lotus Connections goes further and allows you to see any public

“work product” (e-mails, documents, online discussion, etc.) that is authorized and 3: From research by

Collaborative Strategies in 2007

6

linked to the profile. In the Collaboration 3.0 world it is not enough to just search on keywords. Context and interpersonal connections are also critical.

To be successful with collaboration technologies, you also have to deal with the

people, process, and technology issues (Figure 3). This paper explores these important collaboration issues with a special focus on the technology aspects of

collaboration, which may not be as obvious to collaboration practitioners.

Figure 2: Sample Screen shot of Lotus Connections 2.5

These people can be local or distributed around the globe, and they need to have

a set of collaboration tools that work well, allowing them to maximize their productivity and driving them to adopt the tool and associated processes.

• People – Inside the company and out: They are employees with different business functions and roles, customers, design partners, sales partners, PR

firms, regulatory agencies, suppliers, and the rest of the value network.

• Process – Critical processes for the enterprise: Sharing best practices, working on proposals, designing products, gathering data on customers and

partners, balancing supply and demand decisions, and other services vital to

the success of the business.

• Technology – The advances in collaboration would not be possible without

the underlying technologies, what we call “the collaborative infrastructure.” Having software (technology) in place does you no good if it can’t be

delivered to users across the globe, with good performance. No matter how

good the collaboration technology, it does little good unless everyone (or

almost everyone) in the enterprise is willing to adopt and use it.

Collaboration is

Holistic

7

Figure 3: The Three Pillars of Collaboration

Collaborative Strategies’ concept of “collaborative leverage 4 ” looks at the

appropriate application of collaboration technologies to specific processes for remarkable gains. These gains are not only in efficiency and productivity but also

can increase the level of innovation and quality of the product or service, provide

better access to expertise, or a decrease in cycle time for tasks, projects and processes.

Collaborative leverage can only be realized when the challenges to people, process,

and technology have been met. Keeping the process safe, fast and reliable are critical components for collaboration success, as we will illustrate in some examples

later in this paper.

Collaborative Strategies has identified six critical process examples of

collaborative leverage:

• Proposal Development (Sales & Marketing): Three sales people on three

different continents getting together virtually to create a response to a particularity large and difficult RFP.

• Exception Handling (Customer Service/Support): A customer presents a

service representative with a difficult problem and the rep has to collaborate

with other reps, or maybe experts, to solve it.

• New Product Development (Product Management): Collaboration on new product ideas, online surveys, product discussion forums, or virtual

brainstorming tools are used to capture the best ideas.

• Value Network Management (Supply Chain, Customer Relationship, or

Partner Management): Tracking problem interactions while identifying and

solving logistics issues and creating corroborating documents.

Rule 30- Focus on People and

Process first – Technology is still

the most tangible part of col-

laboration. People and process

benefits are intangible, and

much harder to measure. The

tangibility of technology in this

instance is a trap that many or-

ganizations fall into. Focus on

the problem, organizational

goals and challenges between

people first before looking for a

technology solution.

From – 42 Rules for Successful

Collaboration

4: “Collaborative Leverage” first

mentioned in Social Networks and

Collaboration in Today's Enterprise

Webinar by David Coleman

4/21/2009

8

• Training (internal and external): More and more collaborative tools are being

used for eLearning and blended learning. They support a mobile workforce, and a changing shift from the presenter to the student.

• Decision support/crisis management (tiger team): Management reacting to a

situation that they weren’t prepared for, requiring assembly of a team of experts

from across the globe in a matter of hours.

With businesses becoming more global, the ability to collaborate across time and

space is even more critical. The challenges of collaboration cross into the people,

process and technology categories. Many people naturally resist change, making

adoption of new collaborative technologies a challenge. Adoption of collaboration

technologies is also subject to generational differences in how people collaborate,

what they are used to, and how well they adapt to new technologies. Processes often

need to be updated, streamlined, and optimized prior to applying them to a new

technology, in order to ensure maximum workflow efficiency and ROI. The final

factor, technology, also poses challenges for IT organizations trying to deploy

solutions to a global base of users outside their firewall, as latency, availability issues,

and security threats all work against the successful global introduction of

collaboration tools.

One of the biggest “people” challenges in collaboration is driving adoption. Often

with the introduction of a new technology you get resistance. People may be

embarrassed because they don’t know how to use the new technology, they’re

technophobic, or even technically adept, but feel they know better.

A second challenge is a generational one. Gen Y has grown up digital. They have very different views of privacy and transparency. They even extend trust over the

internet in different ways. Talking about everything (just look at some Myspace

pages) online is “natural” for them and they expect it from others. They also expect others to be willing to discuss most anything (even conflict) openly and as part of the

community or social network. I have often seen Gen Y’s in conflict, put the question

to the group and ask for advice. Figure 4 looks at how generation ties to social digital

competence.

Gen Y is the Twitter generation, the micro-bloggers, and they are willing to let their

peers know where they are (location based applications) and what they are doing.

This level of transparency would be anathema to a senior and probably to most

Boomers. These two older generations believe that conflict is a private issue, and

most often resolve their conflicts either F2F, on the phone or with e-Mail.

The challenge here is how do you please everybody? With all four generations in the

workplace with different styles of collaboration, how can collaboration technologies

And infrastructure still make it easy for them to work with each other? This is

definitely a “people” issue.

Collaborative

Leverage

The Challenges of

Collaboration

9

Figure 4: Gen Y’s are unconsciously competent with new digital

technologies

Most people think of security as a technical challenge, but there are also people

and process issues around security dealing with workflows, authorizations and

access. Technology security challenges involve protecting the enterprise from

hackers, worms or viruses (usually from outside the firewall). The people side of

security deals with security policies. People leave work every night with critical

information on their laptops, or they share it with someone they shouldn’t.

Although you should trust those you hire, employees are often the biggest security

threat to the enterprise.

Process challenges often relate to policies or workflow. Are the processes in your

company old or inefficient? Automating a less than optimal process can lead to immediate issues. Even if you optimize the process before rolling out new

collaboration tools, getting people to change their mental models and incorporating

a new tool to make the process more productive is the greatest challenge. You must also consider people outside your enterprise. What is the process by which you

integrate your value network through a collaboration technology? What process

best deals with regulatory requirements?

Collaboration brings the promise of productivity gains from faster interactions,

removing some typical communication lags. But the processes and technology

must be adopted to fully realize the benefit. Because collaboration is supported by technologies, the challenges are often seen as technology challenges. In reality,

applying collaboration technologies to a poor process can be the bigger issue.

People Challenges

Process Challenges

10

With globalization, some of IT’s biggest challenges are to effectively deliver collaboration technologies for global employees, partners, and customers, while

ensuring high performance and availability and avoiding unnecessary costs such as

adding data centers or increasing bandwidth.

Today’s IT organizations have control and insight into what is happening internally

with performance, bandwidth, availability, and security. However, with Collaboration

2.0 environments, a large share of collaboration takes place outside of the firewall

with employees in small and home offices or on the road, along with entities in the

value network. IT departments need similar levels of control for information

delivered over the public Internet.

Performance and Availability: Applications usually perform well for users close to the data center. However, as users get farther away, performance deteriorates rapidly. In

fact, Web application response times for distant users can often exceed 10 times that

for those nearby—making the application experience very poor or downright unusable. Application users experience latency through slow responses from other

users, slow screen painting, or slow application response, leading to poor user

experience and low adoption.

Add to this; congestion, networking peering issues, packet loss, or even extreme

outages caused by cable cuts and natural disasters, and the application performance

and availability cannot be guaranteed. While IT departments may claim that Internet issues are not their problem, end users simply know that the application is slow or

inaccessible, reducing the chance that they will attempt to use the application. If a

collaboration application is not empowering, users fall back to former behaviors that are inefficient and often expensive (such as emailing, phoning, or faxing information).

Not only can this be more time consuming for both sender and recipient, it also

eliminates the ability to easily track and refer back to communications. This is a

complex problem involving people, process and technology.

Security: In looking at the Security section of Akamai’s Q3 2009 State of the Internet

Report, you can see that attack traffic is continually growing. Internet threats are unpredictable, but one thing is certain, cyber attacks are constantly threatening

businesses and capable of bringing business applications and websites down. There’s

also the threat of people hacking into your collaboration tools and accessing your IP, employee information, critical interactions, non-public information, and key

competitive details.

In looking at the challenges of deploying collaboration tools, it is clear that there are behavioral solutions and process improvement efforts required to address some of

these challenges. Technology itself may be an obvious solution for technology

challenges, but it can play an import-ant roll in addressing people and process challenges as well. In this section, we take a closer look at solutions addressing

people, process, and technology challenges.

Collaborative applications need to be “empowering” to both first- time users and

experts. This means that applications need to respond rapidly. Users left waiting by

Technology Challenges

Collaborative Solutions:

People Solutions:

11

poor application response time, or lack of availability, could lower use and adoption. Technology helps to address some of the people challenges by

maximizing the collaborative experience. This not only cuts cycle times for

processes, but increases the level of adoption of collaborative technology delivered

over the Internet.

Often an Organizational Development (OD) approach to change management is also needed, along with good internal PR to generate excitement for the project. Brown

bag lunches, a project newsletter, blogs or wikis can all be ways to increase

excitement and drive adoption.

It is not enough to have technology available. People must learn best practices and

which technology to use. Adoption of technologies and mental models for

Collaboration occurs one person at a time; it is a people and process challenge that

often does not have a technology solution. By ensuring all stakeholders are involved in process definition and optimization before being integrated into your

collaborative technology, you can avoid carrying over inefficient or unnecessary

process steps. This not only helps solve process issues, but also addresses people issues, by simplifying and optimizing how they interact with the tool and each

other, so they prefer using it over the old ways.

Having an Internet application delivery strategy in place is vital to ensure

application performance is acceptable and the collaboration tool is available for all

users attempting to connect over the Internet.

Performance and Availability:

Performance and availability are critically important. A managed application delivery service, such as Akamai’s, minimizes Internet bottlenecks to speed

performance and route traffic around trouble spots to ensure applications are

available to users anywhere, anytime. Akamai’s global network of servers constantly measure Internet routes, looking for the fastest path over the Internet.

This not only improves performance, but avoids the Internet bottlenecks mentioned

in the Challenges section, to ensure the application is always accessible. Akamai

Rule 25: Collaboration can make

projects more successful. If a pro-

ject is over budget or late, it is

easiest to blame the project tools

or technology that you used be-

cause they are the most tangible.

From- 42 Rules for Successful

Collaboration

A good example of how performance issues can be eliminated occurred for a leading phar-

maceutical firm using Microsoft SharePoint as a portal to provide news and information,

helpful tools, member forums, and other valuable reference information for medical commu-

nities. The challenge was the ability to deliver SharePoint to a group of doctors in Japan,

very far away from their North American data center. Although the application worked well in the U.S., they were worried about the cost of building a new data center in Japan to de-

liver acceptable SharePoint performance. They found a lower cost solution by keeping their

current data center in the U.S. and using Akamai’s Managed Application Delivery services.

This helped performance challenges in Japan, where a 7-step test scenario took 180% less

time than before, dropping from almost 30 seconds to under 11. Globally, Akamai lowered

average performance from 24 seconds down to 8.9, making the portal much more useable

and driving adoption across users, regardless of where or when they chose to access it.

International

SharePoint

Example:

Process Solutions:

Technology Solutions:

12

TCP/IP is one of the core Internet protocols that allows data to move between computers on the Web. It requires computers sharing data to do a handshake

for identification and data sequencing and slowly increases the amount of

information transmitted until it reaches the maximum level. This takes time

and slows data throughput. Akamai alters the way data is transmitted by modifying the standard Internet protocols and maximizing the amount of data

sent with each packet, minimizing the round trips needed to load a page. In

addition, Akamai offloads cacheable content to the Internet’s edge, close to end users, for fast delivery. Akamai also pre-fetches HTML components and

objects by parsing through requested pages and bringing components to the

Internet’s edge, before the browser requests them.

The above optimizations, collectively called the Akamai Protocol, make

collaborative applications much more responsive, friendly and useful, driving

efficiency and adoption. The optimizations also help lower IT costs by

reducing the number of servers required and dramatically decreasing

bandwidth from the data center. This is a key ingredient in demonstrating the

benefit and getting the IT organization’s buy-in for the application delivery

strategy.

Security:

Technology solutions can help deal with hacker attacks or malware at the data

center and in the cloud. Akamai’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides

cloud based security at the Internet’s edge, eliminating many of the security threats discussed earlier, before they reach your data center infrastructure.

WAF helps detect and deflect threats in HTTP and HTTPS traffic, issuing

alerts or blocking attack traffic near its source. Akamai WAF can be deployed

either as a primary application firewall or to augment an existing security ecosystem that includes data center appliances.

There are a number of challenges and solutions connected to collaboration

success from a people, process, and technology perspective. By addressing

all three pillars in your collaborative strategy, you can maximize your chances

of successfully defining, deploying, and getting adoption of your solutions.

The summary on the next page lists the most salient points in this paper.

Global Jive

Example:

Rule 31- Collaboration tools

should be easy. One of the best

things to look for in a collabora-

tion tool is ease of use. I define

that as the ability to do anything

(in the application) with one or

two clicks.

From- 42 Rules for Successful

Collaboration

A leading IT services company uses Jive communities to communicate be- tween many thousands of employees and partners across the globe. Jive is

used for identifying and locating expertise as well as finding specific infor-

mation and getting new employees “on boarded” quickly. Jive is also the

repository for best practices and intellectual property. The company used the Akamai Network to increase network performance by 600%. As a result,

this organization increased revenues, remained as thought leaders, and was

able to pass along their hard won knowledge to the next generation of work- ers.

13

• Collaboration can affect the bottom line and have positive impact. However, when

done poorly the collaboration technology can make things worse. As corporations

become more distributed and global, and the costs of travel rise, F2F meetings are

often expensive and inefficient, but until the last century, the only option. Today

virtual meetings, virtual working and virtual interpersonal interactions are more

efficient and much less costly.

• The IT challenge is to see beyond the firewall onto the Internet and ensure the

availability, performance and security of critical collaborative applications in this

environment without incurring the cost of building additional data centers to

service more distant users.

• Collaboration has a great number of benefits including: Transparency, giving

global teams the ability to work together, understanding “local context” of other

team members, supporting multimedia, increasing the enterprise access, reducing

both cycle time and travel costs, providing increased oversight and policy

enforcement, expertise discovery, and increasing transparency and participation,

allowing the enterprise to get the most out of its employees.

• Collaboration is holistic and requires a simultaneous focus on people, process and

technology.

• Collaboration, when applied to the right process at the right time, provides great

collaborative leverage, resulting in improved interpersonal efficiency and

productivity. Examples of critical processes with the greatest collaborative

leverage include: proposal development in sales and marketing, exception

handling in supply chain and support, virtual training that reaches more

employees at a lower cost, increased creativity in new product development, and

the ability to be agile and react to situations quickly and with expertise.

• Collaboration applications, if slow or unavailable, will not be adopted and used.

• The advent of the browser and search technologies did a lot to make early

(Collaboration 1.0) possible and helped to connect people to content.

• The social aspects of Collaboration 2.0 have been increasingly important since

2004 and are often driven by Gen Y moving into the workforce.

• The IT department may be able to solve internal performance problems behind the firewall, but they can’t see or affect the performance of collaborative applications

outside the firewall.

• Technology challenges around security, performance and availability can be

lessened or alleviated by several Akamai technologies including Akamai

Application Performance Solutions, and Akamai Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Summary

14

With all the collaborative applications available today, it is important to realize that the application delivery strategy is an important component of successful adoption of

these critical solutions.

You can learn more about Akamai and collaboration on the Akamai micro-site

www.akamai.com/aps . If you want to see more complete data visualizations of latency and packet loss on the public Internet vs. Akamai, please go to

www.akamai.com/dv2.

Akamai® provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the

content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai’s services have been adopted by the

world’s most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai’s global network of tens of thousands of

distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for

businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable

place to inform, entertain, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit

http://www.akamai.com .

David Coleman is the Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies (CS)

(www.collaborate.com), a San Francisco-based Industry analyst and advisory

services firm, and is the author of “the collaboration blog” which is an outlet for his

opinions on collaboration based on his 20 years of experience. David and CS

collaborate with several other expert groups in partnerships that include:

LaunchFish, Collaboratory, HPCSM, AllCollaboration.com, and others.

David is the author of 4 books on collaboration, the latest two being: “Collaboration

2.0” and “42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.” He is a frequent speaker, webinar

and workshop leader, and often does the research and industry analysis that often

ends up in reports, the most recent being “Social Networks in the Enterprise” (2009).

David can be reached at: 415-282-9197, [email protected], or @dcoleman100

on Twitter.

This White Paper was Sponsored by

Akamai Technologies

The Akamai

Difference

About

Collaborative

Strategies