Just when you thought consolidation in the web analytics industry was stabilizing, Yahoo! goes and purchases IndexTools’ Analytics Business. Additionally, this week, IndexTools’ COO Dennis Mortensen, announced IndexTools will be for free for partners and clients that accept the standard Yahoo! agreement. Dennis claims that IndexTools offers 80% of Omnitures functionality. Things are never boring in the content and collaboration space.

Eric Peterson has written a great post on how this acquistion and free offering affects the market. I’ll be sharing my own assessment as w

Posted by Marvin Pyles on 04/17 at 06:14 AM   Add to My Favorites •  Email Entry
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Last week’s announcement of Google’s release of Google Sites reminds me of a modern day Hatfield vs McCoy feud except (I hope) without all the bloodshed. Just a few months ago, Microsoft took a shot using their purchase of FAST. In the latest segment, Google fires off Google Sites to unseat Microsoft SharePoint 2007?

Google Sites allows user groups to easily create Web documents that include text, images, videos, spreadsheets and other types of documents. So does Microsoft SharePoint. The key difference other than SharePoint’s long list of features, Google Sites sits outside of the corporate firewall.

A member of the Google Apps family, Google is hoping that company groups and departments will adopt Google Sites as their collaborate tool.  On the product web site, Google uses five examples, three geared toward the enterprise--Company Intranet, Team project, and Employee profile.

In an interview with Techcrunch’s Mike Arringhton, Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a "Microsoft Sharepoint killer" because it’s allowing businesses to collaborate without all that expensive Microsoft software.

In my opinion, that might be slightly premature.

First, the features of Google Sites is limited compared to SharePoint. Additionally, corporations and their IT administrators are very finicky when it comes to letting company information live on servers outside of the firewall. Especially in large corporations, it rarely happens. Heck, I worked for a couple of corporations that won’t let you go to many popular web sites not even Gmail or Yahoo! mail.

For very small organizations, Google Sites might be the right application. But I think its more accurate that Google Sites is a competitor to Zoho, PBwiki, Confluence, SocialText, or Blogtronix. Over time that may change, just not today.

Around the Blogsphere

Dennis Howlette of Irregular Enterprise and Zdnet fame has two good posts here and here.

Posted by Marvin Pyles on 02/29 at 11:06 AM   Add to My Favorites •  Email Entry
Published in Blogs, Collaboration, Social Networking, Wikis • Published in ECM, WCM, Portals • Published in Open Source, SaaS •  Comments (0) • Permalink •

Microsoft’s purchase of the Norwegian enterprise search company, Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) raised a lot eye brows this week. I’ve encountered FAST on past vendor evaluations and must say Microsoft landed a strong enterprise search product.

A first glance, many see this deal as Microsoft’s continued battle with Google for search dominance. And in an interview with Zdnet’s Donna Bogatin, Group Product Manager for MOSS Jared Spataro confirms that "Sometimes it takes a lot to wake a sleeping giant.  But when he finally stirs, you’d better be ready for a fight."

However, I think the FAST purchase is just as or more important to Microsoft’s enterprise content management offering—MS SharePoint.  Don’t be naive, SharePoint is a real competitor in the ECM industry. Microsoft’s already proven that point when they announced sales of SharePoint Server generated revenue of more than $800 million in the fiscal year 2007-- a growth rate of more than 35 percent over fiscal year 2006.

The FAST acquisition is a coup. Companies have massive amounts of information and its just as important to quickly find that information as it is to manage information. Microsoft expressed their understanding of this when they released Search Server Express 2008. Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager of the SharePoint Business Group said ”Information workers waste as much as 9.5 hours each week on searches that don’t turn up the right information, which can add up to millions of dollars in lost productivity every year. ”

Many companies are already using SharePoint by default since its included free as a  built-in component of Windows Server 2003.  Now add the power of FAST’s search platform, and definitely the “giant” is ready for a battle.

Posted by Marvin Pyles on 01/10 at 09:54 AM   Add to My Favorites •  Email Entry
Published in ECM, WCM, Portals • Published in Search & Taxonomy •  Comments (0) • Permalink •