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SocialBusinessCaseStudy:EnterasysNetworks
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Social Business Case Study: Enterasys Networks
 
Krishnan Subramanian
Researcher & Analyst, Krishworld.comEditor, CloudAve.com
Abstract
 
Social Business is playing a leading role in reshaping the Enterprise IT, disrupting the businessprocesses and changing the way organizations collaborate internally as well as externally withpartners and customers. There are various Social Business Tools available in the market andSalesforce Chatter is one of them. In this case study, we analyze how Enterasys Networks isusing Chatter and gain some valuable insights from their use.
Table of Contents
 
1) Introduction 2) Enterasys Networks and their IT 3) Enterasys Networks’ move to Social Business 4) Lessons learned from the Chatter rollout5) Conclusion 
Introduction
 
Social Business is a hot topic these days in the enterprise market. We are seeing innovative newproducts coming out regularly and we are also seeing some consolidation in this space,indicating strong currents in the Social Business marketplace. In this report we discuss how anenterprise is using Salesforce Chatter inside their organization. Even though the focus of thestudy is on Salesforce Chatter, there are many generic Social Business lessons we can learnfrom this research.This study was conducted through interviews with Dan Petlon, CIO and Vala Afshar, VicePresident,Technical Services & Operations of Enterasys Networks. I would classify them as amodern enterprise to distinguish them from organizations not ready to try new age tools.
Enterasys Networks
 
and their IT
 
 
2[SOCIALBUSINESSCASESTUDY:ENTERASYSNETWORKS]
 
Enterasys Networks is a global provider of networking infrastructure and security systems.They provide wired and wireless infrastructure that enables organizations to drive down ITcosts while improving business productivity and efficiency through a unique combination of automation, visibility and control capabilities. They are a fairly large organization with morethan 1000 employees and 5000 enterprise customers from 70 countries. In October 2008, theycombined with Siemens Enterprise Communications to become a larger entity and become partof a 3 Billion dollar company with 10K employees.Their IT today comprises of a mixture of cloud based applications with legacy applications likeSAP ERP system. They are using Salesforce from 2003-04 onwards and they are one of the firstSalesforce customers to deploy the product company wide. All their employees have license toSalesforce and they use it to manage Sales, Services, Supply Chain, Professional Services andEducation. In fact, for Enterasys Networks, Salesforce is the single pane of glass to anythingthat touches their customers. Salesforce is also deeply integrated with their backend systemsthat include SAP ERP systems, other legacy systems and even some cloud based applications.They are a fairly progressive organization with a modern outlook towards technology. Theyhave been using cloud applications (SaaS, before the cloud moniker became wildly popular) for the past 8 years and are comfortable with them from both the cultural point of view and securitypoint of view. They require SAS 70 Type 2 and ISO 27001 (in some cases) certifications. Theyfeel that it is sufficient to satisfy the needs of their auditors and to have a comfort level with thecloud security. In fact, they have also made a tour of one of Salesforce’s datacenters to satisfythemselves of the security practices inside the DC (This is one of the best practices tip I offer tomy clients when they consider moving their data to the clouds).
Enterasys Networks’ move to Social Business
 
Let us now take a brief tour of their thought process as they adopted Social Business in their organization. Before they started using social business tools, email was their primary tool for collaboration. They had some Sharepoint implementations for sharing documents amongvarious groups but they didn’t have an organization wide strategy.For them, the “Social Awakening” came immediately after the Dreamforce in which Chatter was announced. Their CIO was at Dreamforce but he didn’t really get the idea of Chatter in thefirst place. A week after the event, during one of their internal meetings, their sales enablementteam suggested that they integrate social tools to better equip the sales team. Since Chatter wasfresh out of the oven, they decided to try it out when it was in private beta. Around the sametime, their CIO was reading an article that questioned the relevancy of CIOs if the CEOs aregoing to learn about the Facebook phenomena from their kids. These events kickstarted their push to use social tools inside the organization leading to an organization wide SalesforceChatter implementation.
 
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SocialBusinessCaseStudy:EnterasysNetworks
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When they first fully rolled out Chatter inside their organization, Dan Petlon, their CIO, sent anemail to all the employees announcing the rollout and with links to videos on Salesforce.com’ssite about how they can use Chatter. The only advice they gave was to keep the “chatting”business related. In the initial days, there was some push by IT for more adoption but now it ishappening on its own without any prodding. The adoption trend initially followed the Gartner Hype Cycle curve, with the adoption hitting a peak, then falling off rapidly and finally hitting aplateau. Later it broke off from the curve and they saw very rapid adoption with increasingusage all around the organization.Even though I didn’t verify from the Yammer side, they told me that they also tried outYammer but the traction was not up to their expectations. They told me that the adoption of Chatter was much better because it is part of the Salesforce dashboard, which 60% of their employees were already using. The standalone nature of Yammer and the need to use another application seems to be the reason why many employees didn’t embrace it when they test droveit inside their organization. However, this may be unique to an organization reliant heavily onSalesforce and Yammer may be a better fit elsewhere.Being a long time Salesforce customer, they have savvy developers who are familiar withSalesforce APIs. So they are doing more development around Chatter API to make other business applications Chatter enabled. Hence, they will bring social to be around all of their organizational data.
Lessons learned from the Chatter rollout
 
From my discussions with the Enterasys Networks IT management team, I squeezed out someinteresting lessons. Even though these are drawn from the Chatter usage, some of them areuniversally true for any Social Business tool.
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Any modern enterprise will have little cultural difficulty in embracing social tools.
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There is an interesting trend that happens inside the organizations once they adopt thesocial and collaboration tools. Once the business leaders see the Facebook type of impactinside the organizations, like people following them to learn about how they navigate thebusiness in a competitive environment, to learn about the best practices, etc., there seemsto be a gravitational pull that motivates these business leaders to make sure that they arefully entrenched in the social process. This adds additional responsibility on the businessleaders to share best practices, acknowledge wins, do post-mortem on losses, etc.. Thesame phenomena, which we see in the social networks on the consumer side, enter theenterprises too.
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A flat organization in terms of communication is crucial in any Social Business adoption.When I say flat organization, I mean that everyone from CEO to the last employee should
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