Lockheed Martin, the nation's
largest defense contractor, has launched a new open-source project for
enterprise social networking called Eureka
Streams.
The Eureka Streams technology, which looks and behaves much like existing commercial
social networking software, is aimed at helping what Lockheed Martin refers to
as knowledge workers make informed decisions by finding relevant colleagues and
groups, following their streams of activity, and engaging in conversation.
Lockheed Martin is making the technology available to developers and
inviting their feedback on Eureka Streams. Developers can learn more about the
technology at www.eurekastreams.org.
Eureka Streams represents a new communication experience for knowledge
workers, empowering them to pick and choose the channels of news, information
and conversation that add the most value to their day-to-day work, Lockheed
Martin officials said.
"Lockheed Martin drives social media adoption by finding innovative
ways to integrate a social dimension into our existing processes and
tools," said Monica McManus, vice president and chief information officer
for Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions, which recently
deployed Eureka Streams to more than 36,000 employees.
Indeed, over the past four years, Lockheed Martin has developed and deployed
proprietary social media solutions across its own enterprise based on
commercial off-the-shelf software, the company said in a July 26 press release
about the new project. These solutions have enabled its employees to
collaboratively develop and share content through such tools as blogs and
wikis. Eureka Streams complements content-focused tools by providing a simple
and fast communication experience knowledge workers are accustomed to outside
the workplace, Lockheed Martin said. With Eureka Streams, enterprises can
provide this experience to their employees in a secure environment.
Lockheed Martin has released Eureka Streams as an open-source project—the
Eureka Streams Community Edition is licensed to developers under the Apache 2.0
open-source license. However, in the future, Lockheed Martin plans to offer
editions of Eureka Streams for use by enterprise customers, the company said in
its release.
According to an independent Forrester Research report titled "Harnessing
Social Networking to Drive Transformation" dated November 2009,
"Smart organizations are looking to tap into the full power of the
enterprise and beyond to drive better and faster decisions and to foster
innovation that will keep them at the forefront of the changing economy. One
approach that's top of mind for business technology leaders is the use of
social networks to drive communities that span traditional organizational
structures."
Lockheed Martin initially announced its interest in delivering a social
media tool in June 2009 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference
in Boston. Later, in a July
2009 press release, Lockheed Martin further described what became Eureka
Streams.
"Lockheed Martin has placed an emphasis on social media adoption by
finding innovative ways to integrate a social dimension into our existing
process and tools while reducing total cost of ownership," said Linda
Gooden, executive vice president for Lockheed Martin's Information Systems
& Global Services business area, in a statement from that press release. "We
are excited to now share our investment back to the open-source community to
help other organizations meet their knowledge sharing challenges."
In a post to a Google group on OpenSocial, also from last July, Steve
Terlecki, a Lockheed Martin software engineer based in King
of Prussia, Pa., said:
"My team and I at Lockheed Martin Corporation have been working to
create a social media framework using the Shindig OpenSocial container. After
several months of development we are excited to announce that we have been
granted final approval to create an open source project and offer it back to
the community [our efforts]. Our framework is written in Java and is based on
open source projects such as GWT, Hibernate, Spring, and Lucene, to name a few."
Among the open-source technologies Terlecki mentioned, Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container
that helps developers begin hosting OpenSocial applications quickly by
providing the code to render gadgets, proxy requests, and handle
Representational State Transfer (REST) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
requests.
Meanwhile, more evidence of some serious enterprise social media
efforts occurring at Lockheed Martin came in the form of an October 2009 blog
post by Adina
Levin, vice president of products and co-founder of Socialtext. Describing
a meeting about Enterprise OpenSocial at Google headquarters in Mountain
View, Calif., Levin said:
"In a room full of vendors, the most interesting presentation was Shawn
Dahlen and Chris Keohane at Lockheed Martin, about how they were actually
rolling out OpenSocial as part of Enterprise
2.0 initiatives in their organization."
Eureka Streams provides an open platform to support agile decision making
and innovation, Lockheed Martin officials said.
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