Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft's SharePoint product with Atlassian's wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called 'NewsGator Social Sites', a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and "social computing" capabilities (Microsoft's term for 'web 2.0', according to this page on Microsoft's website).
The aim of the partnerships is to add more "social computing platform" capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an "enterprise productivity platform". In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.
I sat down with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday in San Francisco, to discuss their partnership with Microsoft. Essentially it involves Atlassian integrating Confluence, their enterprise wiki, into Microsoft SharePoint (and vice versa). According to Cannon-Brookes, their customers frequently ask them how Confluence can be used alongside SharePoint - e.g. how content can be shared or searched between the two products. It's important to point out that SharePoint already has wiki and blog functionality, but they are generally considered to be rather basic compared to more sophisticated enterprise wiki solutions such as Atlassian's Confluence or SocialText.
SharePoint has a huge user base, so it's easy to see the attraction of this partnership for Atlassian. Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers.
A new Forrester report analyzes how the big IT vendors are utilizing Web 2.0 products in the enterprise. As with most Forrester reports, it overlooks the many innovative startups in the 'Web Office' space - focusing instead of the big fish such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle. However there is a new report coming soon that will address what Forrester calls "pure play" vendors. And it must be said that the big vendors are the ones many enterprises look to for their IT solutions, including web 2.0 technology. So let's check out this report and see what it has to say.
The crux of the report is that each of the biggest IT vendors Forrester looked at - Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP and BEA - has a unique perspective on the market. States Forrester:
- BEA, through acquisitions and new 2.0 products, now has numerous enterprise Web 2.0 capabilities, including blogs, wikis, communities, tagging, tag clouds, and a framework for building mash-up applications;
- IBM melds the world of application development with user experience with its WebSphere product family. It is a dominant player in the collaboration space and will deliver enterprise Web 2.0 functionality as part of its upcoming Lotus Quickr and Connections offerings;
- Microsoft's entry into the market is clear: if you want enterprise Web 2.0, you get it in Sharepoint;
- Oracle is a relevant infrastructure vendor and a thought leader in enterprise applications by offering Web 2.0 capabilities;
- SAP is looking to create end-to-end processes.
Web Office suite vendor Zoho is continuing its rapid pace of new product releases, with an online database and reports app called Zoho DB. Zoho is making a habit of one-upping their competition, because as of now none of Google, Microsoft Office Live, or ThinkFree offer a comparable online database product. The closest competitor to Zoho DB is the startup DabbleDB, which is an impressive "part spreadsheet, part database, part collaboration app" that I reviewed when it launched in June 2006 (see also my May '06 post).
Some of the main features in Zoho DB are:
Zoho DB
Microsoft has today announced a new online office service called Office Live Workspace, plus re-named its Office Live service to Office Live Small Business. Both moves are attempts to complement Microsoft Office, its dominant desktop office suite - rather than replace functionality present in MS Office.
Office Live Workspace will allow users to store, access and share 1,000+ documents in an online workspace. It will also synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook. The service is free and is being marketed as an "online companion to Microsoft Office". It's basically a storage solution with sharing features, intended to allow people to have one central place to store their Microsoft Office files. Certainly there is still no sign of an online version of Microsoft Word (or Excel or Powerpoint for that matter). In that respect, this doesn't challenge Google Apps. Indeed Office Live Workspace reminds me more of services such as Egnyte, which combine online storage with sharing functionality. This is something the many online storage services are also increasingly offering.
We cover the trend of Web Office closely here on Read/WriteWeb. Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra - these are some of the leading vendors of web-based office software. And last week came the big news that Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for $350M (read our analysis of why), so the market for this software is hot.
Another company that has been quietly, but effectively, doing business in this segment has been WebEx. They even managed to snag the perfect name for their product: WebOffice. WebEx WebOffice has 2,000,000 registered users and 27,000 businesses rely on it. The main focus of the product is to enable collaboration amongst its users - although as we'll see in this post, it isn't really competing in the same field as Google Apps or even Zimbra.
Last week I spoke to Derek Peplau, senior product manager for WebOffice, to find out more about the product. In particular I wanted to find out how WebEx WebOffice compared to the likes of Google Apps, Zoho and Zimbra. During the demo I discovered that WebEx's product has more in common with Salesforce.com, in that it's an on-demand service and doesn't offer standalone word processing, spreadsheet or presentations. So let's get this out of the way right now: WebEx WebOffice, despite the name, isn't an office suite package like Google Apps, Zoho, ThinkFree and others. Despite this, WebEx WebOffice seems to be a very good solution for small businesses - and even in parts of the enterprise (e.g. as a solution for individual teams or projects).
This week Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for a staggering $350M. It seems like only yesterday that Zimbra was the buzz of the 2005 Web Conference. But in two years, Zimbra has grown from a small 'cool features' startup to a company worth $350M. But why did Yahoo buy a Web Office collaboration suite? Last time I checked, Yahoo was a consumer-focused Internet company - not an enterprise or business one. How can Zimbra be used by Yahoo's target audience, or integrated within Yahoo's current product line-up? This post tries to answer those questions.
A little history about Zimbra - it is an email and collaboration suite that uses Ajax and mashups on the front-end to achieve a slick new form of collaborative email and calendering. When it was unveiled in October 2005, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite was described as an "open source messaging server and client " and it aimed to "fundamentally change the way people interact with e-mail". Some people said it was an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. In 2005 they were big dreams - and it certainly captured the imagination of the Web 2.0 Conference attendees and bloggers.
We reported earlier today about Microsoft's 10-point list on why Google Apps isn't ready for the enterprise. Now Zimbra, an innovative Web Office startup focused on messaging and collaboration, has added to the anti-Google Apps chorus - specifically citing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues. Zimbra says that since all Google docs and files are stored on Google's servers, public companies would face big Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues if they deployed Google Apps. [Update: Bob Warfield points out that "there is no requirement by SOX that data has to be on a company’s own servers, just that the data be carefully controlled and audited."] The solution? You guessed, it: deploy Zimbra instead.
Up till now, Microsoft has been very quiet about the nascent Web Office threat from Google. But today, in response to the news that IT systems consultancy CapGemini has partnered with Google to sell Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) to enterprises, Microsoft issued an email listing 10 "top questions that enterprises should ask when considering the switch to GAPE." The questions read more like reasons why enterprises shouldn't choose Google Apps. This list was first published by Mary Jo Foley, who says it was an unsolicited email from a Microsoft "corporate spokesperson".
The 10 reasons make for fascinating reading - and show just how concerned Microsoft really is about not only Google Apps, but Web Office in general. Here is a copy of the email list:
UK newspaper The Guardian is reporting that Google has partnered with major IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini, to sell Google Apps to enterprises. CapGemini, which is also a partner of Microsoft and IBM, will keep the $50 per user fee that Google charges for Google Apps Premier Edition. They will also make money off services. CapGemini currently manages about a million desktops for corporate clients.
Interestingly, CapGemini's strategy is to "mix and match" Microsoft and Google office products - so it seems Google Apps will be a complement, moreso than a replacement, for Microsoft Office. Google too seems to be pushing the complement line. Robert Whiteside, Google enterprise manager for UK and Ireland, is quoted as saying: "If you look at the traditional desktop it is very focused on personal productivity. What Google Apps brings is team productivity."
ShareMethods is announcing two new apps to its open standards Web Office suite, ShareOffice, at the Office 2.0 conference today. We reviewed ShareOffice back in May when it launched, noting that it's the world's first open standards online office suite. The two new apps are an online calendar from Jotlet and real-time meeting from Persony. They join the existing ShareOffice apps - online word processing from iNetWord, spreadsheet from EditGrid, and presentation app from Preezo.
ShareMethods is also announcing today iPhone support for its on-demand document management service. This will target business users with a need for mobile access to their documents.
