On Message with Ben Gross

The Radicati Group, Inc.'s latest study, "Enterprise Collaboration Suites, 2006-2010," puts market for collaboration suites ("Web-based portal solutions that provide a full suite of collaborative functionality") at $1.6 billion this year, and predicts it will grow at 10 percent annually to become a $2.3 billion market in 2010.

Radicati explains: "These suites represent the next generation of corporate communications and information sharing. They provide users with a more efficient way to work and faster access to other users, content, business applications, and more. In addition, collaboration suites allow vendors to position themselves more solidly within an organization, leaving customers more deeply invested in their technology."

Radicati frames it as something of a two horse race, noting "Microsoft is the current market leader according to installed base, mostly because the company offers its Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) solution free with Windows Server 2003. In terms of revenues, however, IBM leads all vendors with approximately 25% market share."

If anything, Radicati is being very conservative in describing the likely growth of these tools, but the lack of attention to open source approaches is surprising. Back when it became clear that browsers were not going to directly generate revenue, Netscape’s executives argued that the real market was in enterprise web servers. That market came to be dominated by Apache.

A similar dynamic is already happening with collaboration suites; WebDAV folders and a wiki already offer a solution that is better for most groups than Sharepoint. Perhaps collaborative apps will be best developed by groups of users rather than enterprise software companies, or rather, the successful software companies in this market will be those that most quickly refine the innovative kludges developed by user groups.

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