Portals, Content & Collaboration Software Goes Social

Today I am at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in Orlando.

I am currently sitting in on a BEA presentation regarding the next generation of enterprise portals. To quote: "popular consumer-based Web technologies will transform enterprise IT." They are announcing a product called Builder that is a wiki-like product for building situational applications. Kind of like what I have heard described as an "appliki" with components that can be connected to databases/spreadsheets/web service/etc. Looks kind of cool.

However, they are by no means unique in their positioning. Virtually every analyst, presenter and vendor are talking heavily about Web 2.0 and social software for the enterprise. All of the big vendors appear to be weaving social software features into their overall pitch. They are calling it the "consumerization of the enterprise". I guess that is why we are hearing cool new brand names like Quickr, Graffiti, Runner and so on.

Given the emphasis on these topics I would not be surprised that next year Gartner might rename the conference to the Social Software Summit. May be they will even give it a cool glassy-style logo?

Another observation is that multiple presenters have talked of "rouge user applications such as blogs, wikis and SharePoint". The contention between emergent usage of social software in teams and the desire to control/manage social software infrastructure at the enterprise level is quite clear. I have described this top-down, bottoms-up contention before... it's a natural thing that goes in cycles.

Cox Communications are up discussing exactly this situation where they had dozens of separate intranets that they consolidated onto a single portal. They still let departments/locations manage the content applications, but they wanted to provide a common managed infrastructure.

An interesting factoid is that there appears to be very few new solution providers pushing these ideas here. Social software capabilities are being positioned as +1 features to existing platforms from SAP, IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Vignette, etc. I suspect that this has got more to do with the chosen route-to-markets and average selling price of start-ups in this space (web marketing, affordable) vs. these existing players (face-to-face sales, expensive).

One last quote from the presenter: "we know self-service content creation and categorization is not as easy as it could be." Well... it is good Ephox has a mission!

 

Technorati tags: gartner, bea, social software, enterprise 2.0

Comments

[Andrei Filimonov]

My impression was that despite of all that inspired talk about Web 2.0 we don't have a coherent story to sell. Based on Social Software roundatable and some hall conversations most companies have pretty vage idea about benefits they can get investing into these this technology.

[Andrew Roberts]

Hi Andrei,

I agree - right now Web 2.0 is really just a reason to re-focus on the workplace productivity argument that most PCC software has been 'selling' for a long time.

I think there are some trends such as an increasingly dispersed workforce, an ever increasing flood of email and the need for an increased pace of innovation which are helping drive things as well, but overall it is just "2.0" of the same old same old :)

Cheers,
Andrew