Thoughts on Sponsored Research, Feb 23

Earlier this week, Foldera, Inc. released a sponsored white paper (PDF) I wrote under commission for them (see press release). Mike sent me this note today in reference to the paper:

Sorry, couldn't resist chiming in on this one. You obviously know your stuff and I can certainly understand that a guy needs a payday now and again, but the Foldera piece seemed to be more a paid cheer-leading assignment than an objective overview of a "new" service. I say "new" because it isn't, not in concept, interface or functionality, all they offer and more has been around for a while...seems more like a PR and financial engineering exercise cloaked in Web 2.0 guise if you ask me. If this sounds like sour grapes...it is, I am getting a little tired of these "new" services claiming "never before" and "AJAX" enabled...and, oh yeah...my favourite, "coming soon" under beta. Whatever.

As I said in my response to Mike, I appreciated him taking the time to share his thoughts and views on what I'd written and about Foldera and the industry in general. Since others are likely to have the same reaction, I wanted to share my view on accepting sponsored research and white paper projects. My rules for doing so are:

1. The paper has to align with my previously published research views. If I've previously written "X" about a product or category in an independent Shared Spaces paper, I can't turn around and write "Y" merely because it is a sponsored white paper. For example, when EMC commissioned me to write a comparative white paper of eRoom and SharePoint, it was easy to do so because of previous publications that I authored that were entirely consistent with the final report to EMC. In the same way, the Foldera white paper reflects clear alignment with my published work on collaboration software clients, the need for collaborative workspace products to make life easier, not more difficult, for the end user, and some of the items in the 7 Pillars series about dashboarding and consolidation across spaces.


2. The paper has to help my ultimate customer ... the organizational decision maker. The purpose of Shared Spaces ... the core reason why I do what I do ... is to help organizations select, deploy and roll-out collaboration tools to drive productivity, process compliance, efficiency and effectiveness. If the proposed white paper project helps with those, I'll take it. If not, I'll steer clear. As I say to my organizational consulting clients, I truly don't care which vendor wins in the market ... what I'm 100% passionate about is that the organization makes the right choice in light of their requirements.


3. There needs to be some substance to the product, and not a "just done this week" thing. Foldera has been in development since 2001. I've spoken with Richard Lusk, the CEO, on-and-off for the past 18 months. I spent a day in Huntington Beach with Richard and his team in early December. So, sure, while Foldera is playing off the current hype around "Web 2.0", the product is more mature and has a well-thought out lineage that pre-dates the hype.


4. The conclusion and recommendation has to be consistent with the facts. Once you've read the white paper, you'll note that my recommendation is "if you fit the profile, try it out". Not, "drop everything you're doing and only do work via Foldera for the next 10 years". As an independent analyst, I would have no credibility to say the latter, unless the facts were extremely strong. You'll note, too, that there is no mention of the enterprise market in the paper. That market has different needs and requirements, and as a hosted / outsourced service, Foldera will find it more difficult to play there. If they deliver an onsite solution, it gets a bit easier. Time will tell.

My four points may make no difference to Mike's reading of my white paper, or his reaction thereof, but "dem da facts".

Happy to discuss further ...

Comments

[Martin Edic]

Haven't read the whitepaper yet but a red flag went up when I looked at their site- they claim 99.999 uptime before they are even in beta. They need to be careful here. A public claim of a number like this which, in my experience, is not attainable in a large scale deployment, could be perceived as a guarantee. As anyone who has watched Salesforce.com's serious reliability issues knows, this can be a very detrimental issue.