Another Endorsement for Enterprise 2.0 Vendors
by Bill Ives
I have been writing about a number of enterprise 2.0 vendors on this blog, as have my co-contributors. I am sure that many of them were pleased by, Web 2.0 Pure Plays Might be the Right Answer for Your Organization, a new Forrester report by Rob Koplowitz. These vendors mentioned must be especially pleased but reports like this also help to validate the entire market. In summary, “pure plays differentiate on their ability to serve the multifaceted needs of an enterprise, such as using Web 2.0 technology in public-facing situations, across secure connections with customers and partners, and internally. These vendors implement and customize offerings for each of these use cases. Large traditional vendors – such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP – tend to focus on internally facing solutions that leverage their existing offerings and technology footprint.”
In other words, you might get more value for your money quicker with one of the smaller vendors that are not burdened by existing technology structure and are designed for rapid implementation, often as SaaS. I am especially impressed with what I refer to as the second generation of enterprise 2.0 software suppliers like a number of those named in the Forrester report (e.g., Awareness, Jive, Traction), as well as our sponsor, QuickBase. Forrester refers to these as workspace vendors. These firms go beyond first generation tools such as blogs and wikis to create hybrid solutions that promote collaboration within work processes. At the same time, these workspace tools bring along the transparency and ease of user generated content that marked blogs and wikis.
The Forrester report provides a nice summary of the issues and what to look for in the pure play vendors.
I am not sure if the people who have wrote the report even use these tools themselves nowadays. Before, when another Forrester analyst was in charge of this , they only did a short web demo and that was it. I can not recommend a tool to a friend not to mention a client or a whole industry before I know how to use it and if it works and do ton of testing on top. Maybe Forrester knows better. And as far as the big vendors, their tools are so behind the curve that I don’t want to even start. Most of them are in beta and it may take them a few more years before they bring to the market. 
Thought...
