Stephen O'Grady has a nice post clarifying his position on the telemetry opportunity in the enterprise, for open source vendors especially. "Telemetry" being here the practice of contracting with customers to send data back to the vendor, which the vendor then uses to provide some value add the to the customer. This value might take the form of better software, optimization tips tailored to the customer, or metrics comparing the customer to the full pool of customers.

Oddly enough, this might be one of those places where the enterprise is a bit ahead of the opensource world. Personally, I'm aware of SAP providing several telemetry-like services focuses on performance, maintenance, and bug/problem reporting.

It's also worth pointing out that SAP's traditional business model of partnering with customers to understand processes and develop business applications could be considered telemetry by some definitions. True, it's human-based telemetry rather than a technical system of reporting back to the vendor, but the point is the same: the customer transmits information about how they use or will use the software to the vendor while the vendor uses that information to provide a better experience to all customers.

In the open source space my impression is that we see telemetry (such as it is) focused primarily in the software quality space. Crash reporting is probably the primary place we see this, as in the ubiquitous Firefox beta crash reporter.

As O'Grady point out, software as a service companies have recognized this are as a great opportunity to develop competitive advantage. Google uses telemetry data extensively in its search product (suggestions, especially), as well as in other products like Analytics (benchmarking) to name an example in the enterprisey-er space.

In the consumer space, we're starting to see many tentative steps. Wasabe and Mint are both financial apps that allow the user to compare their activities against the aggregated activity of relevant slices of the apps' user bases. The idea is powerful, though I'm not particularly impressed by the utility of the implementations we're seeing outside of Google. It seems like apps are going to need to give up on trying to get the user to dig through this data goldmine and instead just deliver up specific nuggets, as Google does with its search suggestions.