This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking “how?” instead of “why?” Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features.
We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the space as a whole and improvement over last year. Each of these products either changed the game, or won it.
Sponsor
New product of the year: Chatter
Salesforce.com‘s Chatter wasn’t the most innovative new product of the year, but it was one of the most successful. With 60,000 of Salesforce.com’s 87,200 customers already using the platform, the company is calling Chatter its most successful new product launch. It’s being deployed enterprise-wide at Dell, and is even being adopted by new customers like Nokia that don’t use Salesforce.com for CRM. It’s also enabling Salesforce.com’s social CRM offerings Service Cloud 2.0 and Sales Cloud 2.0, and will likely power future features of the Salesforce.com platform.
Although it brought nothing new to the table not already available from competitors like Blogtronix and Socialtext, Chatter made a big splash and is rapidly improving. Version 1.0 officially launched in June, and version 2.0 was released in September. Salesforce.com will reportedly announce a new, stripped-down free version of the product this week at Dreamforce.
Why, with so many more innovative (and cheaper) vendors to choose from, would a company choose Chatter? Salesforce.com’s biggest differentiator in this commodified market is its decade-long track record of providing a solid Software-as-a-Service. It’s that reputation for reliability and scalability that made Facebook chose Sales Cloud as its CRM service this year, and it will likely be those selling points that drive Chatter subscriptions in the future.
Honorable Mention: SimplyBox SimplyBox, which relaunched as an enterprise product earlier this year, wasn’t the most talked about enterprise product of the year. But was one of the most innovative. R “Ray” Wang of Constellation Research called SimplyBox a disruptive technology. We covered its innovative features here and here. SimplyBox has partnerships in place with Oracle and SAP and plans to license its technology to other vendors in the future. It’s certainly one to watch in 2011.
E-Mail Product of the Year: Google Apps
Despite a misstep with the City of Los Angles this year, Google has established itself as a serious challenger to Microsoft‘s dominance in e-mail. The launch of Google Apps for Government and its Federal Information Security Management Act certification gives it the ability to go head-to-head with Microsoft in government. Google beat out Microsoft for the contract to provide e-mail and document management for the 17,000 employees of the U.S. General Services Administration. Meanwhile, it has continued to rack up private clients as well. Google now boasts over 30 million users.
Microsoft has finally settled on a cohesive strategy for its own cloud offering: Office 365. But while Microsoft has been working on its cloud strategy, Google has established a strong foothold. If Google can address its customer service and performance concerns, it could eventually usurp Microsoft’s e-mail throne.
Honorable mention: Xobni Xobni brings new life into Microsoft Outlook with its social network integration and advanced search capabilities. This year, Xobni raised more money, added integration with Huddle and launched a platform for porting Gmail gadgets to Outlook.
Mobile product of the year: iOS
We noticed an interesting trend this year: enterprise vendors are often releasing iOS versions of mobile applications before releasing a BlackBerry version. Thanks to the success of the iPad and meteoric growth of the iPhone in the enterprise, many vendors seem to view iOS as the most important platform for enterprise development.
The rise of iOS in the enterprise is the result of several factors: employees bringing their own devices to work, third-party device management systems, improved enterprise support from Apple and a better selection of consumer applications. Not to mention the new use-cases that the iPad enables. There were certainly some big security issues this year, from encryption failures to PDF viewer vulnerabilities. But IT has shown a willingness to live with these issues.
Android saw progress this year as well, and RIM still has the biggest piece of the enterprise pie. But iOS was clearly the success story of the year in enterprise mobility.
Honorable mention: Good for Enterprise Apple and Good Technology have a synergistic relationship in the enterprise. The increase in employee-owned devices is driving adoption of third-party device management tools, but third-party device management tools are enabling employee-owned devices. There are many vendors in this space that can compete with Good on features and price, but Good stands out as one of the most venerable and successful. It boasts 40 of the Fortune 100 as customers, as well as government clients like DARPA.
Development tool of year: JackBe
JackBe didn’t generate a lot of buzz this year, but products like Presto App Maker and Presto Mashboard generate some of the most value. JackBe takes pressure off IT departments by giving end-users the tools they need to create their own data mashups and lightweight applications based on those mashups. The applications have enterprise-level security controls baked-in and can run anywhere – the browser, the desktop or on mobile devices. Users can then share their creations in an enterprise app store. JackBe has clients such as GE, Random House and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
This year JackBe launched its app store feature and an interface for building mashups from Microsoft’s Azure DataMarket.
Honorable mention: Rhodes Rhodes from RhoMobile is a mobile application framework that enables users to build cross-platform applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Unlike consumer-focused frameworks from Titanium and PhoneGap, RhoMobile offers a metadata framework that supports applications with changing underlying schemas and an MVC.
Database product of the year: Hadoop
Apache‘s Hadoop has seen rapid adoption for enterprise big data uses. Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo are notable users. IBM‘s InfoSphere BigInsights product is based on Hadoop, as are Cloudera‘s competing products.
This year, Microsoft announced Hadoop support for its Azure product, Adobe and Yahoo both released new open-source tools for working with Hadoop, and Cloudera closed another round of funding. All of these events increase the corporate support for Hadoop.
Yahoo also expanded its use of Hadoop. For instance, it is now using it in spam detection. The company also used Hadoop to reach a new milestone in the calculation of Pi.
Honarable Mention: CouchDB NoSQL hype may have peaked this year, and CouchDB is now distancing itself from that label. But NoSQL and big data were important concepts driving enterprise technology in 2010, and CouchDB was one of the most important. This year, CouchDB reached the 1.0 milestone, gained some prominent users (ranging from CERN to the Better Health Outcomes Through Mentoring and Assessments project in Africa) and got people thinking about developing applications in new ways.
Next: the social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS products of the year.
Pages: 1 2
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.