Forrester’s Ted Schadier, with Matthew Brown and Sara Burnes, adds to the discussion on why enterprise collaboration tool use will grow in his report, Distributed Teams Need Real-Time Collaboration Tools. He summaries the report as follows, “To get work done, distributed and B2B teams need real-time collaboration tools that replicate the power and experience of face-to-face meetings and support "pervasive" interactions. Fortunately, real-time tools are getting better. Presence shows team members' context; instant messaging (IM) moves the dialog to mobile devices; Web conferencing allows video and document sharing; and telepresence delivers face-time quality.”
In this report, Ted writes that real-time collaboration technologies are getting better. I would certainly agree. He says that five dynamics that will shape the real-time future: B2B teams will become more important, presence will slowly become federated, cloud-based collaboration platforms will emerge, technology populism will fuel cool tool adoption, and process and data widgets will show up in collaboration tools.
On the last point see my posts on Bringing Micro-messaging to Enterprise 2.0 - Qik.com and Qtask Offers Integrated Collaboration Capabilities in One Application. Both of these very different collaboration tools, like many others, reply heavily on widgets. I have also seen that most of enterprise 2.0 vendors are offering cloud platforms. A few offer behind the firewall solutions but these options are the less popular ones.
The report also looks at how Cisco, Google, IBM and Microsoft are operating in the real-time collaboration market and where each is headed over the next two years:
Cisco will expand WebEx and extend TelePresence with service partners – see my post on Cisco and WebEx Combine Strengths to Launch New Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform.
Google will raise the visibility of its shared documents and managed data centers.
IBM Lotus will lead with Sametime and launch a cloud-based collaboration platform – see my post on Looking Closely at Lotus Connections
Microsoft will extend its Online Service and push Groove to support B2B scenarios – for an historical note see my post on Groove on location in Albania.
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