intelligent.information.integration

Businesses: Start Revving Your Enterprise 2.0 Engines

I ran into this piece after bookmarking it a couple of months back, while working on a SharePoint project here at i3. Nice to see SharePoint steamrolling away:

“To date, acquisitions of Web or enterprise 2.0 technologies and vendors by businesses have been modest at best. Forrester expects this trend to continue.

Specifically, Young said power vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will grow organically. However, he allowed that nouveau wildcards such as Google and Salesforce.com could acquire Web 2.0 vendors in the SAAS (software as a service) market. That story could change three years out, when maturing vendors struggle to flourish amid the steep competition.

Coke and Pepsi. Crest and Colgate. It’s hard to unseat an entrenched incumbent in any market and Young said Microsoft’s SharePoint “will continue to steamroll the market.”

He said that while challengers will be quick to denigrate the quality of SharePoint’s wiki, blog and social networking functionality, Microsoft will still get a lot of traction with its collaboration suite in 2008. Another thing: Because so many knowledge workers already use SharePoint, it is likely smaller Web 2.0 vendors will look to partner with Microsoft.”

via Businesses: Start Revving Your Enterprise 2.0 Engines