Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
Enterprise adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and social media (whatever you want to call it) is accelerating. This is a healthy market, in which vendors are doing well in a tough economy. As we near the end of a year that will go down in history with the words "meltdown," "panic," "crisis," and "depression" attached, it is time to celebrate the winners in this market, enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and poised for even greater success in 2009. And if these products excite you, we invite you to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise Channel.
This is the sixth in our series of top products of 2008:
- Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
- Top 10 International Products of 2008
- Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
- Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
- Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
Our Criteria
In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:
- Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
- Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
- Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.
The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.
Drum Roll... and the List
Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.
Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.
Basecamp
37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.
Confluence (Atlassian)
We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.
It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.
DimDim
This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.
Google Apps
Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.
The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.
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Maybe I'm missing something here, but the title said "Enerprise". What of these tools have been readily embraced by let alone changed any enterprise?
If (as it might appear) that you're 'projecting' the potential for these tools, then shouldn't they be noted as the predicted top tools for 2009?
I'm always very flattered when MindTouch is honored in this manner; however, it is especially sweet when it's done by RWW, which imo is likely the most critical, discerning and intelligent of pubs in the tech space. I hope that doesn't sound terribly ass-kissy because it is true. Thanks very much for the honor. :-)
Rotkapchen, many of these tools are making a strong impact: Force.com, Google Apps, Zoho, Atlassian, et al. But the very nature of this market means no one tool has yet grown to the dominance of Microsoft Office or even Oracle. It's a maturing market. But let me flip the question back to you: have we missed any web tools for enterprise that you think should be on the list instead of one of the above?
Document management is pretty important in the Enterprise. Several vendors have SaaS options:- KTDMS and O3Spaces. Jabber via openfire isn't SaaS, but I'd say is useful in the Enterprise.
Cheers! We're honoured to have Confluence mentioned alongside such incredible products.
With respect to "MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads", I have to disagree, as these are different products going after different market segments. MindTouch is compiled code, scales to tens of millions in traffic (http://wiki.developer.mozilla), sports an enterprise search engine (built on Apache Lucene), enables business automation, enterprise mashups, has a Web Oriented Architecture, has Millions of users, hundreds of thousands of installs and more in daily distribution than most competitors see in months. MindTouch is also being used as a specialized app server for writing collaborative and social apps. See http://www.Shelfari.com, which has large parts built on MindTouch services. Most importantly for us is the effort which Mindtouch puts forth in connecting to other silos of data both inside and outside of the organization though their extensions.
Socialtext on the other hand, feels more like an early beta. It is written entirely in Perl, has no enterprise search (SQL queries), only supports a 10 year old web server (Apache 1) and is incapable of performing any kind of business automation or mashups without writing Perl code. It's kind of hard to take seriously a product like that inside the enterprise.
In enterprise decision-making, we have to choose products which we feel are "enterprise ready" and will grow with us as we add capabilities. As a consumer, using beta products is a great way to stay on the "cutting edge", in enterprise environment however, we have to be more prudent in our choices. I think you made the right call in going with Mindtouch, as they have addressed a great deal of concerns of an enterprise environment, and it shows in their roster of existing clients.
I'm not sure I would characterize *any* of these as "enterprise".
Atlassian kicks ass in so many ways. Confluence is just one of them :)
A few people are commenting about these not looking like "enterprise". That is really the whole point of the consumerization of software and the key to "enterprise 2.0". These services come into enterprises via users and small teams. They gain adoption one click at a time, just like consumer services. At some stage in the adoption, IT gets involved to either prevent further adoption or accelerate it. None of these sell through enterprise sales teams banging on the CIO door. So they don't have the trappings of an enterprise vendor. But saying that they won't impact the enterprise is like what people said about PCs in the early days of the PC market.
Four background posts have developed this a bit more:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/enterprise_20_nature_of_the_firm.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/11_things_to_know_about_enterprise_20.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cio_social_media_thinking.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/saas_traditional_enterprise_it_vendors.php
It is an honor to be listed among these other great firms. For our part we promise to continue to innovate in the unified collaboration space while we enable the world to meet freely. We hope to become your easy, open and affordable web conferencing solution and we thank you for the vote of confidence. We won't let you down.
These aren't enterprise software products? Bullshit. Just because they don't carry a six figure price tag doesn't preclude their wide spread use in enterprise sized companies. I would wager every Fortune 500 has a Wordpress install, uses LinkedIn heavily and has either an Atlassian Confluence or MindTouch installation. In some cases both.
As for MindTouch. Our focus on biz automation and integration (web-service orchestration, etc) is finding solid purchase in large enterprise sized companies and government agencies. Each and every one of these vendors will surely echo a similar story relevant to the value they deliver to the enterprise.
Good job Bernard (although, I am biased). The only criticism I will echo is that #6 dude above. :-) teehee...
Bernard-
Thank you for including Dimdim on your Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008. What a great list!
We're constantly working to improve Dimdim. Our recent 4.5 release introduced new functionality, and more importantly, improvements based on customer feedback. If there are ways you think we should improve, please let me know.
Thanks again!
-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing / www.dimdim.com
e: kevin@dimdim.com / twitter: @meetdimdim
Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/dimdimFB
Aaron, good to see that one thing that has not changed in the enterprise space is a good old fashioned knock down drag 'em out fight. Wow you guys and SocialText are all just loveyduvey arn't you? :-)
I wouldn't categorize Google Apps as Enterprise Ready. Wonder how it got there!
@DemoGeek, not sure if you were joking, but Google has been seriously selling Apps into the enterprise since at least Sept 07:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_apps_goes_after_enterprise_market_capgemini.php
Thanks for another great list. Of these ten, I've only personally used four of the products, BaseCamp, WordPress, Google Apps, and LinkedIn.
I'm looking forward to checking out the other six enterprise web products you recommend. I can only speak to the four I know, but each of these are extremely robust tools.
For our business, we use BaseCamp for project management, and WordPress for our blog. I'm also quite intriqued by your description of LinkedIn as being part of the next generation of Customer Resource Management, and the comment that enterprises don't care about being social (although I don't think some would like to admit it.) I think you're quite right that LinkedIn is a great contact networking tool, and it'll be interesting to see how more companies adopt it to do just that. And as far as Google Apps goes,I agree that it's a wonderful resource. It's quite amazing how much you can do with it (to name but a few--slideshows, surveys, basic spreadsheets and docs)
Thanks again for helping to narrow down the never-ending world of possibilities to explore!
Best,
Debbie Hemley
www.impressionsthroughmedia.com
I couldn't agree more with Amazon Web Services being #1. They are well thought out, and are being enhanced at a rapid rate. And for anyone who says it's not an Enterprise product, I have switched our sales demo capabilities to running of on-demand EC2 server instances. Highly recommended.
Congratulations to Jason and his team at 37signals making the Top 10 list! They did a great job bringing project management as a much needed new discipline to lots of small companies.
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Did I take the wrong freeway exit? I am an educator who wants to use the right blogging platform in a classroom, is Word Press the way to go? Is Google's Blogger "old news"?
I've heard a lot about DimDim in educator circles and want to share the best resources out there for those "aging" teachers just getting on board the internet highway in their classrooms.
grumble grumble....u missed out my favorite - HyperOffice. it brings many unique capabilities, and is pretty well known as well. with the release of its HyperMeeting HyperMeeting web conferencing tool, it is the only seamlessly integrated messaging, collaboration and conferencing tools out there (business productivity suite is NOT seamlessly integrated). and with release of new solutions for small businesses - HyperBase (online databases), HyperCampaign (email marketing), it is bringing and ever wider range of solutions to small businesses for 2009.
I thought the only project that can qualify as enterprise is LinkedIn but you're not even sure about that: there is business networking and there is social networking
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Very Informative content. Thanks for sharing.