Online Storage Optimization

Here’s a sign of the times. While on a conference call to interview Wikibon’s co-founder Dave Vellante this morning, he, several others on the call, and I were all tweeting about the experience in real time. Welcome to today’s socially networked, version 3.0 of business life.

Wikibon is founded on a new and some might say highly disruptive concept: make IT research free and open source, rather than charging the usual $30K per piece or a subscription, the way analyst firms such as IDC, Gartner, and the rest have always done.

Wikibon is at a .org site, but it’s a for-profit company. Vellante says they initially thought of making it nonprofit and quickly changed their minds. They wanted a business. At the same time, it’s modeled on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia, and in many respects is very similar, though with the added benefit of being a social network. Vellante says he believes his company is the only open source, GNU licensed research and advisory model out there. This means that virtually all the materials posted on the site can be edited, adapted and used for whatever usage participants choose–including their own for-profit ventures. It’s also one of a handful of specifically IT-related social networks (although one could argue that many social networks are appealing to that very crowd, esp. Twitter and Friendfeed).

Wikibon focuses on the following areas: storage, virtualization, information management (i.e. email archiving, discovery), mobile enterprise, and sustainability. A security portal is also in the works. Information is gathered for the site’s content in a variety of ways. One key method they use are open conference calls to discuss specific topics of interest, followed by a meeting of a core group of analysts to distill the results. The notes are then published to the site, where they can be read and edited by anyone who happens by. They’re also sent out as part of an email newsletter to the group’s membership.

This type of open and collaborative approach is the secret sauce the Wikibon folks say they’re bottling.

“When we started we had all been involved with research companies ourselves, such as IDC and Gartner,” Vellante explains. “The processes were onerous. Documents are circulated, go to editing, then production, and so on. It was just terrible. You could never have gotten six pieces out in 24 hours that were collaborative in nature.”

Is Wikibon a game changer for an industry that treats its white papers and other research as propreitary, and is accustomed to charging a great deal for the materials it generates? Vellante’s answer to this is an emphatic “yes.” After all, his is a business in which they’re happy to see others not only use their materials, but even resell them at a profit–something he says he “welcomes” because it’s one more way that Wikibon is using the power of virality to spread its message.

“I think the existing players are going to have to respond to this,” says Vellante.

Another difference, says Vellante, is that Wikibon doesn’t do “pay for play” white papers. That is, if a vendor comes to Wikibon offering to pay for a favorable piece, they’ll be told that this isn’t how Wikibon works. They may do a paper about a company, he says, but the content will be determined by the collaborative process. They may also suggest doing a case study on a customer instead, although they normally don’t accept payment for that either.

How does Wikibon make money? Well, there are “underwriters”- companies sponsor the site a la NPR. So in essence, vendors are supporting the business. However, says Vellante, they always tell their proposed sponsor that the goal is to ensure that materials are helpful to CIOs.

The overhead seems reasonably low. The company does have a brick and mortar office in Marlboro, MA, but only two three paid employees, Vellante, resident CTO David Floyer and David Butler (updated 5/1). The rest of the core group are using Wikibon as a way of increasing their visibility for their own analyst firms. Vellante says a big selling point for Wikibon is its high calibre core staff, many of whom are former analysts with the big firms like Gartner and IDC, and who are now independents. This includes: Dennis Martin (Demartek), Nick Allen (The Tod Point Group), Bill Mottram (Verdictus), Fred Moore (Horison Information Strategies) and Gary MacFadden.

The Wikibon-ers are taking social media and running with it. At SNW this year, they continually tweeted about briefings they were conducting, and their tweets got a lot of attention, even garnering some business right on the spot. (They also got the attention of this blogger.)

It remains to be seen whether this experiment in open source research/analysis will truly disrupt the existing order of things, or simply add a new dimension to it. Either way, it’s worth signing onto the site, which has a treasure trove of materials to choose from, lots of collaboration, and a real sense of possibility.