Google Wave’s Impact on the Enterprise Content Management Space

 Google Wave has the potential to dramatically alter the Collaboration and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market spaces. Traditional ECM vendors may end up offering Google Wave plug-in’s to make collaboration more effective. Also, vendors who have been thriving on providing excellent collaboration tools are likely to feel a strong threat from a product that comes free and backed by the Google brand.

 

Google is probably one of the most innovative companies of this decade. Over the years the search giant has rarely made mistakes with the concepts it chose to mass market.  Google Wave is the new blockbuster on the charts and it is a new real-time, collaborative communication system, which capitalizes squarely on Google's depth of expertise in the collaboration space. Originally named "Walkabout", Lars and Jens Rasmussen describe Google Wave as “what email would look like if it were invented today.”

 Google Wave has the potential to blunt the success of Microsoft's SharePoint. While Google does not seem to position Google Wave as a SharePoint competitor, in most of the Wave demonstrations world over, Google seems to be highlighting Wave's openness as something lacking in SharePoint. Probably in the next couple of years, enterprises considering SharePoint, but worried about vendor lock-in, and the cost associated with it, may have an attractive lightweight and cost-effective alternative.

 

The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Market today is primarily dominated by two types of vendors -- (1) Content Management vendors like Documentum,  and (2) Collaboration Solution vendors like Microsoft Share Point. Most corporates today have some content management tool already deployed in their premises which is well-integrated with their core systems. Today collaboration is on top of every CIO’s wish list -- so new projects are emerging more on the collaboration front, where corporates are looking to enable Web 2.0 (i.e. social computing) features for their corporate and commercial requirements. The demand for collaboration tools is being driven further by the fresh recruits in the industry who know how to use social computing sites (e.g. Facebook, Linked-In, etc.) to their advantage and look forward to using similar tools in the corporate environment.

 

Microsoft has grabbed this opportunity well; today Microsoft SharePoint has captured most of the collaboration market and is known to be the de facto product offering collaboration solutions, while simultaneously providing content management capabilities. However, due to its focus on collaboration, some of the core requirements of a content management system like Document Management, Records Management and Digital Asset Management are not as mature as in the competing products. Hence, corporates perceive Sharepoint as more of a collaboration tool than a content management system.

 If Google Wave succeeds with mass adoption in collaboration space, it is likely to seriously dent the Microsoft SharePoint market. It has got a product in the market that directly competes, and in some cases exceeds, with the SharePoint features. Most importantly it is free for implementation and is backed by the brand Google.

 

This could also create a big opportunity for the traditional content management product vendors who have been struggling to maintain their market share in the face of advances from SharePoint in the collaboration space, where they are losing out on customers due to the lack of such sophisticated out-of-the-box collaboration functionalities. We should not be surprised if traditional content management vendors start offering Google Wave plug-in to bring collaborative experience to its already established customer base, thereby renewing the war for a grab on the content management and collaboration market space.

Comments

[aarju]

hi that is just GREAT

[NOUS]

Yes i have heard about Google wave. But we cant able to sign in with Google account for that we need a invitation from Google?

Very clear explanation about Google Wave

[Software Development]

Google Wave has the potential to dent Microsofts Sharepoint.