Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The web 2.0 way of IT resource management .... er what?

When I first came across Paglo, I was initially surprised about it being labeled web 2.0. Though Paglo is SaaS, it shows how the term web 2.0 is becoming increasingly used as more of a marker of transition rather than imparting some characteristics. Since, I prefer to talk more about the underlying processes that are occurring, such a marker is useful to me. However I can see why it must cause ever greater confusion for those who want it to mean something specific.

In any case I did take a look at the concepts behind Paglo and there are some things I like.

It's a web based SaaS for IT resource management based upon search concepts. On the surface there appear to be no real community or collaborative aspects other than sharing queries. They are however looking for a product manager to "work with cutting-edge search, collaboration, and social networking technologies at the same time" - so it'll be interesting to see how this develops.

Paglo does seem to offer a way of managing IT resources for SMBs. With an estimated 8.3 million small and mid-sized US-based businesses, there is some potential here. I'd have to question how this plays out in the long term with the development of XaaS, how much resources SMBs have and why they have them. Still for the time being it's a big enough problem that it is worth attention.

They also discuss their "open enterprise" philosophy and say that they are "committed to open source software and we hope that users and developers like you will use these tools, improve them, and adapt them".

Whilst they are open sourcing the crawler (the bit which collects data on your systems and pumps it back to the Paglo servers for indexing), the server side elements which do all the indexing and collating remain closed. However the data will be available through open APIs, and they seem committed to the idea that "users and businesses own their data – companies do not". Good.

They identify a number of essential characteristics in their "open enterprise". Such ideas are quite common, but it is worth repeating their words.

  • Be human
  • Open conversations
  • Publish everything
  • Remove barriers to product use
  • Promote collaboration
  • Enable third parties to add immediate value

Interesting company. I wonder how long it will be before someone makes a P2P equivalent. Still Paglo is something worth watching and I hope they do well.