Check out this solid read on social media and the enterprise Gia Lyons’ Connected blog. Interesting stuff.

Social Media is from Mars, Enterprise 2.0 is from Venus

Happy Monday.

Very excited that my alma mater, Michigan, beat Notre Dame yesterday. Great game.

Just got an invite to a webinar co-hosted by Cast Iron Systems and Amazon AWS. I have been intrigued by Cast Iron’s integration offering for the enterprise for sometime. Their initial concept of an integration appliance has played well in the market and they now offer full cloud based services as well. Most enterprises are finding the real challenge of “going cloud” to be the integration points inside their firewall. The Cast Iron appliance does a real nice job of bridging that gap. Their Salesforce.com solution is rock solid. The next logical step is to bridge that gap to Salesforce.com partner and leading utility cloud player Amazon AWS. The webinar should be interesting and worth checking out.

You can register for the webinar here.

Disclosure: The wife is employed by Amazon, but she steadfastly refuses to read my blog.

Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation blog is a must read for marketing, branding and social media. Check his What’s In Your Bag? post for some an interesting take on Amazon Widgets.

I took a turn creating my own widget about some of the coffee related products I have blogged about and a few that are essential. This is a very cool way to talk about the things you love and generate word of mouth.

Disclosure: The wife is employed by Amazon, but she does not read my blog or drink coffee.

Over the long weekend, I had a conversation with a friend and former colleague on the state of the enterprise. The common theme centered on the advances in technology and that projects still fail at an alarming rate. This made me recall an earlier post on project success.

Many many moons ago, I had two clients. Both were large enterprise software companies. Both partnered and competed in various markets. Both were deploying the same CRM product to increase efficiencies in their customer service centers. It is the ideal situation to illustrate project success and failure.

The first company had ambitious plans to deploy across multiple product lines, across multiple service teams and integrate with multiple CRM systems. The plans were big and bold. “We will be your most successful and reference-able customer,” the executive sponsor boasted in the kickoff meeting.

The second company had calculated and negotiated their purchase price based on a cost per call metric. They had a simple goal. We have 18 months to get to positive ROI.

Which company succeeded? It was not the first company.

Great time of year for the smoker. I always make sure to get at least two salmon smoked in the late summer. Less fuel needed and better fish. There are many different recipes and methods. For example, the flower pot smoker as a DIY project. Check out the link on Dave Naffziger’s blog.

Happy Labor Day!

Dave Naffziger’s Blog: The Alton Brown Flower Pot Smoker

Great Friday read on the power of blogging. Have a happy and safe holiday weekend.

How blogs can work for recruiters (and you!)

Great read today over at the Cloudscaling Blog on Cloud Standards. Check it out.

Cloudscaling: VMware’s vCloud API Forces Cloud Standards

Interesting read and follow up to My $0.02 post yesterday on Read Write Web about SaaS provider Zoho and VMWare partnering to provide on-site versions of Zoho’s SaaS suite. Go where the market takes you. Smart move.

Read Write Web: Zoho Partners with VMware for Collaboration Behind the Firewall