2009: Enterprise 2.0 - Innovate Through Acquisition?

I thought this was an interesting clip from a CIO magazine article...

The Connections Blog

This is a great quote to start the year - from an article by CG Lynch in CIO magazine "Web 2.0, Social Networks in '09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation":

IBM, for its part, has more aggressively shown willingness to move forward with Lotus Connections, which right now has a better design than the social software features in SharePoint, which is largely still a document management system.

Sounds about right!

The Connections Blog

But it's important that readers look at the broader context of the quote than what appears on the Connections blog. The CIO article goes on to say:

Web 2.0, Social Networks in '09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation - CIO - Blogs and Discussion

But both companies are further removed from innovation than the enterprise 2.0 vendors. While enterprise 2.0 vendors mimic what they see in the consumer market, thus keeping them a degree of separation away from where the innovation actually occurs, the incumbents are even further removed; they simply copy the enterprise 2.0 vendors.

This isn't a sustainable model for innovation in the enterprise Web 2.0 market. With shrinking access to venture capital, there's reason to believe some of the enterprise 2.0 start-ups will fail or struggle to make money in 2009. When this happens, they'll either fold or be purchased by IBM or Microsoft.

Web 2.0, Social Networks in '09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation - CIO - Blogs and Discussion

Which I find to "sound about right". Sure, Connections is ahead of SharePoint when it comes to some of the key aspects of social software - but I find "Enterprise 2.0 vendors" to be ahead of Microsoft and IBM when it comes to certain technical capabilities or user experience aspects. Sometimes I think that Microsoft and IBM are so intent on stealing away the install base of the other, that they are not paying attention to other market signals regarding what customers are looking for in social platforms. Still, the economic downturn will make it difficult for smaller vendors to survive so IT strategists should expect some vendors to fail and others to be acquired (which really is not anything terribly insightful based on past downturns and bubble bursts).

In my mind, some of the acquisition possibilities that might be interesting if they were to come to pass are listed below (in alphabetical order). Vendors that might benefit from acquiring any of these "Enterprise 2.0 vendors" are listed alongside:

• Attensa (Cisco, EMC/Documentum; both vendors need a feed syndication platform direction)
• Jive Software (Cisco, EMC/Documentum; Oracle - hosted play helps Cisco/WebEx Connect, EMC - social platform compliments its content management infrastructure, Oracle - social network/community destination site compliments its portal-centric message and also gives Oracle a SaaS play)
• MindTouch (IBM, Oracle; strong underlying services-based architecture compliments efforts from both vendors - don't think of MindTouch as a wiki vendor BTW)
• NewsGator (Microsoft - relevant for its consumer, business application and enterprise collaboration/social computing efforts)
• Traction Software (Oracle - compliments its Beehive effort, strong hypertext engine)

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