Workgroup and Enterprise Collaboration

The culture of the organisation therefore needs to be supportive of collaboration, in terms of identifying where, why, and how collaboration can yield business benefits.

Technology Issues

There is a trend towards asynchronous, and more lately synchronous technologies to be embedded within applications in order to increase their effectiveness. The collaboration market has also experienced increased demand to support virtual meetings, as organisations cut back on non-essential business travel. The same holds true for e-Learning, with its ability to obviate travel to a physical classroom.

The most important trend, from a technology point of view, is that of a continual maturing of the stack. IBM and Microsoft's domineering force on the messaging and infrastructure layer is essentially rendering this layer a commodity - albeit a resource-intensive one. Consequently, there is no value in other vendors developing their own e-mail clients, as the barriers to entry can no longer be scaled.

There are two important conclusions to be drawn from this. When it comes to the convergence of asynchronous and synchronous communications, e-mail and IM, these two behemoths hold all of the cards. Our opinion is that the likes of AOL and Yahoo! will not get a foothold in the corporate messaging market. We anticipate fully unified messaging solutions within the next 18 months, which will completely revolutionise the way we handle information on a personal basis. Interfaces will seamlessly integrate different communication mechanisms, allowing users to communicate with one another depending on the context, not the availability of a string of disparate tools.

Secondly, the market needs to move to a higher battleground in order to find opportunities for clear differentiation. It is clear to us that this new battleground is centred on the role of the enterprise portal. The portal holds the key to bringing all of the elements of collaboration together. It provides a technical platform to support the creation of collaboration solutions that can be deployed modularly and controlled centrally. In particular, the combination of an application server and relational database can act as a powerful collaboration platform. Furthermore, extending the native collaborative capabilities of many off-the-shelf portal solutions leverages the investment that will have been made.