Last week I talked with Matt Chiste and John Pusey from Function1. The firm was started in January 2007 by Matt Chiste and Ashish Bhutiani after a combined 10 years working with Plumtree/BEA in the consulting division. They chose to go independent to continue to service AquaLogic (new name for Plumtree) customers and devote time to developing a third-party ecosystem of products to strengthen the AquaLogic product line. I was especially interested in what they are doing, as I served as the executive sponsor of the Plumtree relationship for a while when I was with a large consulting firm a few years ago.

I also liked the concept of developing products out of services. In my consulting experience these were always the most successful products as they addressed a recognized need and came out of a proven solution. The trick was to make something that other customers found value in. I think they have done this with the example I discuss here. In the past 18 months, Function1 has released 4 products that have been co-developed with customers, At the same time. they have worked with over 30 customers and partners to provide service offerings such as system Health Checks, upgrade services, and monitoring/support.

To provide a bit more context, Plumtree was acquired by BEA and rebranded AquaLogic. Then BEA was acquired by Oracle in the first half of 2008. Oracle has publically announced ongoing support and resources will be dedicated to most products in the AquaLogic line, which will be rebranded as WebCenter Interaction and merge with other technologies in their portfolio (part of their Enterprise 2.0 division). Function1 remains committed to this product line and will continue to contribute to the portal and E2.0 ecosystem of products and services. I am now going to discuss one of the products that have come out of their work.

Their first product was the Exchange Portlet Suite, and is a good example of the “Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0 -> Enterprise 2.0” evolution. Around 2000, Plumtree released an Exchange Portlet Suite that allowed end users to manage their email, contacts, and calendars within the context of the portal. The application has not been significantly upgraded since then, and is showing its age considerably. Users can’t easily scroll through messages, there’s no rich text composition, and every time an action is taken the entire portal page is refreshed, hindering the ability to quickly perform any action within the suite. Below is a screen shot of this portlet suite:

Matt views Web 1.0 as fundamentally about web sites that provided content to the masses, and Web 2.0 is about user-generated content. I would agree. Around the time of this evolution, new technologies such as AJAX started to be used more extensively, resulting in much richer and easy-to-use interfaces.

During our call, Matt talked about their Exchange portlets coming closer to “Web 2.0.” In this instance, the reference is less about “user-generated content” and more about the technologies commonly employed with Web 2.0. Below is a screen shot of their primary portlet. Features include dynamic folder and email/contact/calendar functionality, fast inline pagination, preview windows, and rich text editing. The user never has to leave the page or refresh anything to quickly access the important details of their inbox:

Now Matt pointed out that for all practical purposes (with the exception of the technology used), this is still a “Web 1.0” application because it doesn’t meet the primary criteria of “user-generated content”. However, they have been working on some integration points to truly capture the essence of “Web 2.0”, and by extension, “Enterprise 2.0”: assimilation of institutional knowledge into the “cloud”. Matt said that years ago, he gave a sales pitch on the virtues of Collaboration Server (a Plumtree/BEA product), and discussed how it allows knowledge workers to better collaborate and share institutional knowledge without it simply getting lost in email threads. The reality, though, is that email is still a deeply entrenched part of the work experience, and still easier to quickly share knowledge among coworkers.

Rather than resisting this momentum and providing more disruptive technologies, Funxction1 is planning on providing an evolutionary step to their offering: integration of email through the AquaLogic portal with other collaborative technologies that already exist, such as Publisher, Collaboration Server, Blogs, Wikis, or Activity Streams. That way, “information” can still be communicated via email, but once an email thread becomes relevant or informative to others, it can be “promoted” to “knowledge” by directly publishing that information into the cloud for others to collaborate or comment on.

Here’s a basic screen shot of their prototype showing the additional publish buttons in the Exchange Portlet 2.0 suite:

In my next post I will cover two more of the products that Function1 developed out of their client work