In the knowledge era, collaboration in business is like ecology in
politics: it should not be the theme of a specific party but part of
the programs of all of them! Collaboration should be a major component
of any business activity, not an application by itself.
Similarly, collaboration software should not be a specific
application, but a feature available in all business applications. Even
further: it should be the glue between business applications. Just as a
recent Forrester Study (see our recent article)
showed that the future of collaboration lied in corporate IT’s capacity
to link the way people communicate every day with the projects they are
doing for their company, the future of collaboration platforms lied in
the capacity of software makers to tie together the business
applications they use through common collaboration features that
transcend these applications and even their vendors.
This sounds like middleware, doesn’t it?
Could collaboration platforms
become the ultimate middleware the industry has been seeking for 15
years now, able to finally connect heterogeneous applications after the
disappointments of CORBA, Web Services, SOA and Mash-Ups?
To become so, collaboration platforms need to exit their niche market
of collaboration, portal or social networking applications to become
infrastructure: the hub of all business applications and communications
in the enterprise. But infrastructure software is much harder to sell
to entreprise IT because it is much more critical than business
applications. That is why it is so hard for smaller vendors to compete
against the big three (Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus and Google
Apps), even with products that show superior usability or
functionality. This is because IT professionals anticipate that their
collaboration platform will stop being dedicated to collaboration
applications to become the communication hub between all their business
applications.
Although this trend can be seen in the intranet, it’s even more visible
when it comes to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms, that I
personally call PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) such as Azure, Force.com,
Lotus Live, Google Apps, etc. These platforms offer an interface with
their applications at a much higher level than Operating Systems or
even Application Servers.
And much of the additional functionality is
about providing way to manage users and their interactions, in short,
collaboration.
In the future, only a few “Business Application Platforms” (BAPs) will
prevail, and I expect all of them to be available both on-premise and
as-a-Service. Only the bigger vendors who can reassure their customers
on the reliability, stability, security and future of their platforms
will survive. Smaller vendors will have to specialize on vertical
business applications that can be plugged into these platforms or on
extensions that provide improvements to these platforms.
