ReadWriteWeb

We covered the emerging trend of gamification - the application of game mechanics outside of games - in November. A few enterprise vendors, such as Moxie and Rypple, are starting to incorporate elements of gamification into products. Constellation Research analyst and co-founder R "Ray" Wang has identified five engagement factors for gamification in the enterprise: intrigue, reward, status, community and challenge. But aren't these common elements of a good workplace, with or without the idea of "gamification"?

Oracle is taking such lengths to control Java's future that companies need to start looking at alternatives such as .NET, Platform-as-a-Service and the Open Web.

In a report issued today, John R. Rymer and Jeffrey S. Hammond of Forrester Research write that Oracle is controlling Java to such an extent that even the Open JDK has little autonomy:

Last week as part of the HP ISS Tech Day I had a chance to talk to Bill Haggard, director of enterprise infrastructure for the Dallas Cowboys Football Club about why the Cowboys chose HP to power its data centers. It may not seem like a professional football team would need a data center, but consider this: in addition to powering all of the 665 point-of-sales (POS) terminals for concession stands and the 82 POS terminals for retail merchandise shops within the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, the Cowboys' data center must support all the merchandise shops across the country. The company owns several other subsidiary businesses as well, and the data center at the Cowboys Stadium is the primary location for all the businesses' IT infrastructure.

Whether you call it "enterprise 2.0" or "social business," one thing is for certain: you're going to need at least some tools to implement it. SaaS delivery models are all the rage for enterprise social media companies, but not every organization is ready to store its data in the public cloud. Several vendors offer its products as on-premise, installable software or virtual appliances. Others take a different route: a managed appliance. Blogtronix, Socialtext and Yakabod all offer on-premise, physical appliances that can be dropped into a rack and used right away. The goal is to combine the convenience of SaaS with the security of an on-premise solution.

Last month Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting. The report positioned AT&T, Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and Verizon as the leaders. Controversially, Amazon.com didn't make the cut as a leader partially because it doesn't offer certain features such as managed hosting or options for hybrid clouds. Amazon.com and many of the other providers ranked are focused on developers and on providing web services, not hosting virtualized enterprise applications such as ERP.

Today Apple sent out a promotional email titled "Mac in the Enterprise," marking the company's official return to the enterprise marketplace. This should come as no surprise to those that read our article on Apple poaching enterprise sales people from RIM. However, Apple's enterprise strategy has been a mystery for the past couple years. As InfoWorld reports, Apple's VP of enterprise sales left the company in 2008 and was never replaced. Apple also recently announced it will shut down Xserve at the end of this month.

Last week we profiled five enterprise startups to watch in 2011. Each startup is one that we think has great potential and hasn't received much, or any, coverage from ReadWriteWeb in the past. The five were: DokDok, Jama, Erply, SnapLogic and Podio. Which of these five do you think will be most successful in the new year?

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few enterprise startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteEnterprise.

Podio is a highly customizable Web-based enterprise collaboration application. Like Huddle it emphasizes external collaboration as well as internal collaboration. Podio's distinguishing features are its large internal app store and its app builder. End-users can easily add or modify existing apps from the more than 2,000 apps available in the app store, or build new ones using a point and click interface.

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few enterprise startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteEnterprise.

DokDok wants to bring document management into your email. Unlike Mainsoft's harmon.ie (which we covered here), DokDok doesn't seek to eliminate email attachments. The DokDok team accepts that attachments aren't going away, so instead they're trying to make attachments work. DokDok currently offers a Google Apps gadget and a Chrome extension that displays attachment version history in Gmail. The Chrome extension also offers API-based integration between Gmail and Highrise.

This week Gartner issued forecasts for both the enterprise SaaS market and the enterprise social software market. Both are predicted to finish 2010 with strong growth and see even more growth next year. Revenue growth in enterprise SaaS and social software is evidence of three of the five biggest enterprise trends of the year: cloud, consumerization and social (the others are analytics and mobile). But some of Gartner's findings are surprising.