In This Report
Economic pressures have businesses focused on doing more with less, forcing corporate marketing departments to innovate the way their employees and other constituents search for, create, target, and personalize content and media. Adding to the complexity and market confusion is that much of the day-to-day information sought by today's knowledge workers exists outside of corporate IT firewalls. "Googling it" is a knee-jerk reaction for almost every query and users are emboldened at addressing business needs with tools and solutions that do not involve corporate IT.
This behavior brings transparency to the workplace and shows how consumerism is influencing the growth of collaboration solutions. These influences include design, adoption, and usage patterns modeled after sites like eBay, Amazon and Yahoo, the likes of which most traditional enterprise applications have never seen. With collaboration solutions virally spreading into businesses of all sizes, some are concerned that best practices are seldom addressed, data is not uniformly indexed, and content is not always shared.
Amid these considerations, even the casual industry observer may call into question how legacy applications like email and web conferencing will look in five years. This is accentuated as internal and external workgroups and their activities are tied in new ways and with new business models.
As an investment bank, TripleTree is concerned that users may become numb to real collaboration solutions. Daily information flow is huge, too many options exist for information access, and standards are not prevalent. All realities lead to the likelihood that content is not being well received, much less understood. To that end, TripleTree predicts considerable vendor consolidation over the next several quarters as best-in-class collaboration platforms quickly mature. Thus, TripleTree's over-arching message to "next generation" application providers is clear: if you are not engineering collaborative capabilities into your solution, you are telling the world you have decided to remain a legacy application vendor.