Social Software In The Enterprise
Picking up on the continued exchange of perspectives on large platforms vs. more specialized solutions:
...One theme that comes up time and time again when I talk to business and IT decision makers can be summarized as "technology stewardship". IBM and Microsoft represent a large piece of the social software portfolio within large enterprises. The vendor that does the better job of building out the partner ecosystem will win over the long run. The core platform needs to be modular, loosely coupled, open APIs (e.g., REST), etc. Marc Andreessen in a 9/7/2007 post is a good point of reference. The vendor steward needs to allow their modules to be swapped out - for the data to be accessible, etc.
...
There's no clear right or wrong decision. As I pointed out in these posts - people need to define the decision criteria and make these investments in the context of a reference architecture. This problem is age-old: large vendor is already in-house - market disruption occurs - new vendors deliver faster - older vendors take longer and delivers initial solution that is not that great - new vendors get some market share - older vendors finally respond with "full force" and smaller vendors either are acquired, fail or a few actually break out by differentiating themselves, focusing on verticals or extending the larger platform in some way (from competitor to partner).
Comments