Forrester Report on Collaboration Trends 2005: Microsoft emerges as an early collaboration platform leader.
Forrester Research originally published its Trends 2005: Collaboration analyst report in December, 2004, which provided a succinct and objective assessment of the key trends in collaboration as the technology “enters the realm of the strategic.” Two of the nine trends identified in the report are excerpted below. You can read the rest of the trends by downloading the report, which is now freely distributable by Microsoft.
- Microsoft emerges as an early collaboration platform leader. Trends in messaging server and broader collaboration platform deployments favored Microsoft in 2004. Microsoft has also begun to establish a lead as a collaboration platform provider to ISVs. PLM vendor UGS and collaboration software vendor CorasWorks built the current generation of their collaboration products (UGS Teamcenter Community and CorasWorks Workplace Suite, respectively) on top of Microsoft WSS. System integrator Capgemini developed a healthcare portal solution on top of WSS and SharePoint Portal Server. Additionally, vendors like Groove Networks and SAP support WSS as a document repository. These ISVs have chosen wisely; within two or three years, SharePoint will be virtually everywhere — it will be used, at least in experiments or pilot mode, by most organizations that have rolled out Windows Server 2003.
- IBM and Oracle expend great energy trying to keep up with Microsoft. IBM continues to flesh out the Lotus Workplace platform, with a major version (3.0) due out in mid-2005. IBM is tasked with integrating its Lotus Notes/Domino platform and applications into the Lotus Workplace environment and providing a clear upgrade path for existing customers. Oracle has not achieved penetration anywhere near that of IBM with Lotus Notes/Domino, or Microsoft with Outlook/Exchange. But Oracle will turn heads with OCS 10g Version 3, due out in the first half of 2005. This version will feature an EIM server based on the Jabber engine and will be core to Oracle’s next generation enterprise content management (ECM) platform, code-named “Tsunami,” which is due out in the same time frame.
These two trends have certainly proven to be true for my customers given that during the past 6 months, I’ve gone head-to-head with IBM in 3 separate “bake-off” situations and ultimately won all of them. I haven’t run into Oracle at all because my customers still view them as no more than a database vendor.
