Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008 - Page 2
Wordpress
This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.
Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.
This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.
But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.
MindTouch Deki
This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.
We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.
Force.com (Salesforce)
This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.
Zoho
Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.
Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!
This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.
We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.
We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.
Comments
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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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