Look around at social and collaborative computing and what do you see? A complete hotch potch of different systems, some of which run safely behind the firewall, others which sit out there on someone else's servers. You hop from Flickr to Outlook to Skype to Facebook to discussion groups, or whatever. Each has its own approach and, often, integration is only possible through hyperlinks or copy/paste.

Add to this the fact that you're working on different devices, laptop, desktop, internet café terminal, mobile phone, Blackberry and so on and what have you got? A lot of time wasting, a lack of security and data distributed all over the show.

It can't last. To move forward we need to get to a point where all we're concerned about is doing stuff with our information and other people while the systems themselves move towards invisibility.

Of course we're going to have to get from where we are now to where we'd like to be then. One issue is integration. Another is multiplatform. And a third is security. I'm sure there are others, but they'll do for now.

We need common interfaces, the ability to surface our information to whatever device we happen to be using and to do it in a way that doesn't expose us or our organisation to risk.

Enter stage left an organisation called Outblaze*. I had some minor contact with its CEO, Yat Siu, in 2005 and I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about his company name. His tale about internet connection speeds in the Far East is what stunned me at the time. He was talking about 100 megs being common, with up to a gig being possible, if you were prepared to pay $215/month at the time. He now has a 1 gig connection to his home.

This means that using the internet is a totally different experience over there. And the software and user interfaces that have evolved are highly visual and engaging—you feel more as if you're in a virtual cartoon world than working a computer.

Outblaze sits quietly in the background providing ‘white label’ messaging and social computing services to a wide range of clients. Try MSN, AOL and Yahoo! for size. It's big. It has 76 million users tied to 480,000 web domains. Its clients offer Outblaze services as if they were their own. Outblaze picks up a monthly fee per user based on which particular services are picked from the company's long menu. At a broad level, it provides messaging, security, collaboration, community/social networking, digital identity, compliance and gaming facilities. Each heading contains, on average, half a dozen or so sub categories.

If you took the community/social networking stack, for example, it contains: social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, bookmarks sharing, blogs, wiki, chat, forums/message boards and dating/friend matching. It supports devices from mobile phones to desktop PCs and anything that can use the web.

The company is already hugely successful around the world and it is now extending its reach into the enterprise and, at the same time, it wants to increase its European presence, where it (vaguely) claims to have between five and ten million users. It thinks that Europe is more ready for its approach than the USA.

Richard Bye is the company's vp of sales and corporate development for EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), so he's the guy in the hot seat for this initiative. He believes, and he's probably right, that enterprises want their own social networks but they can't do it in-house and they don't really trust the public services. Nor do they want the capital expenditure or the disruption associated with such an initiative.

It's obvious where this is heading. With a solid base of experience of running enterprise-class hosted and integrated systems, Outblaze's system appears to check all the boxes. No doubt it will try and get its leverage from working through the third parties that already serve these prospects. Potentially, it's a straightforward value-add for them and huge leverage for Outblaze.

It will come into conflict with some presently outsourced services. Messagelabs springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

And, who knows, perhaps we can learn to relax a bit and allow a little of the Far Eastern culture to penetrate our rather stolid computer interfaces. All we need is a bit more bandwidth.

PS At the Lotusphere conference in Florida on Monday, IBM/Lotus announced the beta of its own social/collaboration hosted service called Bluehouse.

*Outblaze's new website should be online by the end of January. Having looked at the old one on Wayback Machine, I can't blame the company for hiding it.