When I first met Carlin Wiegner and Ross Fubini, the cofounders of CubeTree, it was late 2007. My good friend and former Trinity EIR, Nick Mehta, introduced Carlin and Ross to me as fellow Symantec executives who were starting to brainstorm about a new company.  Over the past two and a half years since that first meeting, I have watched these two exceptional leaders build a world class team of ~20 outstanding individuals and evolve CubeTree into the leading SaaS startup in the burgeoning social software for business category.  Before I jump to the Happy 100th Release aspect of this post, some CubeTree history may be helpful, so here goes:

To begin with, while “Facebook for Business” is considered more commonplace today as a trend within the enterprise thanks in part to visionaries like Marc Benioff talking about the Facebook Imperative, it was quite a nascent customer market back in late 2007.  This was true despite the prescient category call by my former professor and now Enterprise 2.0 super star, Andrew McAfee, who highlighted the underlying trends in March 2006.   Carlin and Ross’ conviction in late 2007 stemmed from their disenchantment with the collaboration products they used within their former employer, Symantec.  They realized that there was a growing gap of unmet user needs in the market of intranet portals and knowledge management solutions.  My own market diligence led me to also have strong conviction that there was going to be significant customer demand for a solution like CubeTree.  One tell tale sign I kept hearing about was the repeated yet unsuccessful attempt by IT departments to control and lock down internal employee usage of Facebook.  Finally, my Trinity partner, Gus Tai, brought his uncanny insight into consumer web trends and end user behaviors (hone via investments like PhotoBucket) to the conversation. 

This joint market and product conviction among the four of us led Gus and me to fund Carlin and Ross in Spring 2008 to go forth and disrupt.  It also helped 18 months later to attract the highly connected Bruce Cleveland at InterWest Partners to lead the Series B.  And it certainly resonated with collaboration luminary and founder of Lotus, Mitch Kapor, such that he got involved as an angel investor and advisor.

Fast forward, two years and 100 product releases later, CubeTree is executing on their social software vision extremely well.  Today, it is a world class, multi tenant SaaS collaboration suite that incorporates an activity feed, employee profiles, wikis and third party integrations. 

But, hold on a minute…  “100 releases”?  Over just two years?  Consumer web startups are notorious for fast iteration, especially when following the intersection of product development philosophies of agile software development with customer development as summarized nicely here.  But a multi tenant, enterprise grade SaaS app? 

Here is a perfect example of the axiom “startups are 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration”.  Carlin, Ross and the entire CubeTree team have executed admirably well and have literally shipped a new release of their product once a week for the past two years straight.  I thought this milestone is worth highlighting and Carlin and the CubeTree head of engineering, Justin Rowe, talk in depth in a recent CubeTree blog post found here about the opportunities that this nimble, high speed development cycle has created for the company to partner with, and ultimately delight, customers.  To me, this underscores the power of the business fundamental of active listening to customers coupled with a lean, nimble and high performing software engineering team and process.  It also underscores the early stage venture capital fundamental of investing in great entrepreneurs who know how to execute like surgeons against a compelling and exciting market vision. 

Carlin and Justin’s interview on their lessons learned is well worth a read and I congratulate them and the entire CubeTree team on shipping their 100th product release last week.  Well done!

The term “Enterprise 2.0” was coined back in April 2006 when Andrew MacAfee wrote this Sloan Management Review Article.  Since, then MacAfee has become almost synonymous with the term Enterprise 2.0 and is even coming out with a new book on the topic to be published in late November 2009.  His blog is one of the most respected on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 and he tweets regularly.  I took Andrew’s very first graduate school class he taught in a class called Technology, Operations and Research back at HBS Spring of 2000 and I always thought he had a knack for sensing early technology trends.

One of my favorite posts of his includes his response to a ZDNet post that states  Enterprise 2.0 is a crock.   I like it as it paints six specific use cases around real world examples of well known companies using various facets of enterprise 2.0 to solve customer pain points.

Another favorite of mine is this post where he describes ten criteria for a successful enterprise 2.0 initiative.  This strikes me as a practical and useful framework for how and why some companies are succeeding with enterprise 2.0 solutions. 

I mention all of this as I intend to cover some trends on this category in my blog here because I’m a real believer in the disruptive potential enterprise 2.0 has.  It really can change the way each of us communicates and works every day, much like how email, broadband internet and IM did.  The above set of links provides a starting point on what enterprise 2.0 is all about and you can check out many other links on MacAfee’s blog for other resources.   For a more hands on interaction, you may want to also check out one of the innovators in the enterprise 2.0 cateogory, CubeTree.  My colleague, Gus Tai, and I led a Series A investment in CubeTree on the behalf of Trinity Ventures back in March of 2008.  CubeTree is focused on disrupting the static (and typically useless) corporate intranet with a next generation social business software suite that is people centric (vs. document centric like SharePoint) and is comprised of an activity feed (similar to what you’d see on your Facebook activity feed), wikis, profiles and other features.   You can get a sample of what real enterprise 2.0 innovation looks like by signing up for a free CubeTree account here.  You can also hear more about it via SAP, one of CubeTree’s reference customers.

I’m interested to hear what readers think 2010 will hold for enterprise 2.0.  I personally think we will see some interesting events occur that help the enterprise 2.0 category accelerate faster than what Gartner may believe in their July 2009 hype cycle report.  This is based not only on what I’m seeing at CubeTree from a board member vantage point, but also extrapolating from the following macro tailwind trends to peer into my crystal ball for some Enterprise 2.0 in 2010 predictions:

1. Twitter continues to grow like a weed.  This perpetuates the value of microblogging, status updating and real time ambient awareness.  Their recent $100m financing at a valuation of a billion dollars should help a bit.   My 2010 prediction is that Twitter figures out their revenue model which further perpetuates their success and, as a derivative effect, enterprise 2.0 adoption.
2. Tens of millions of marketing dollars (if not more) will be spent around promotion of SharePoint 2010  and Google Wave.  Both of these products talk a lot about the various value proposition tenants of enterprise 2.0 including aspects of collaboration and real time.   These marketing dollars will continue to imprint broader enterprise 2.0 awareness upon customers.  My 2010 prediction is that these products will be substantive and innovative but yet still fall short as they remain either too professional services intensive (SharePoint) or too techno centric (Wave) for companies looking for practical, scaleable collaboration solutions delivered in a flexible and cost effective manner.
3. Facebook continues to skyrocket and perpetuate the value of social networking.   My 2010 prediction is that we see Facebook file their S1 and get public.  I also predict we’ll soon see this social networking giant reach half a billion users globally next year after hitting a quarter billion this summer (note, there were one billion web users in the world as of Dec 2008).   Nothing like a hot Facebook IPO and ~40% global penetration (assuming continued growth of the overall global web user base to 1.25 billion in 2010) to continue real gale force like tailwinds for enterprise 2.0.

What do you think?  Other predictions for enterprise 2.0 in 2010?