Five Predictions on Collaborative Computing in 2010

2010 will be another year of growth for the industry. Companies like Microsoft, SalesForce.com, Cisco, and others begin rolling out their collaboration solutions, accelerating the already quickly growing collaboration market. Consolidation will begin in 2010 as the convergence of VoIP, desktop sharing, video conferencing, and other more traditional technologies are consolidated into integrated collaboration solutions. Industry consolidation will truly occur in 2011.

Engagement analytics will replace Web analytics. Despite Adobe's $1.5 billion purchase of Omniture, the analytics market still has a lot of maturing to do. The tools and technologies used to run large social communities have outpaced the analytics tools used to measure those investments. With the rise of social analytics, we will see demand for tools to help businesses clearly articulate the ROI from an engagement metric, not just a page view metric. Engagement gives much more in-depth insight about customers -- including the sentiment (positive or negative association) of their comments and how influential they are.

Platform, not application. Probably the biggest struggle that the large enterprise software companies will have in this fast-growing market (besides faster iterations for getting their product to the market) will be overcoming the natural instinct to build isolated information silos. Now more than ever it is important to connect and integrate a company's collaboration investment across all its investments -- from CRM to financial reporting. Because today's organizations don?t have a single technology vendor, they must build and integrate with a collaboration platform, as opposed to cobbling together a number of disconnected applications.

Collaboration will replace social. The word social has too much baggage associated with it to appropriately describe the market. Unfortunately, most people unfamiliar with the industry strongly associate social with Facebook and other non-business-related activities. Collaboration is a much more encompassing word to describe the current -- and future -- market. Collaboration includes the tools most strongly associated with social -- blogs , forums, wikis, user profiles -- and also includes more traditional collaboration tools like desktop sharing and video conferencing. Social media tends to be a type of activity, while collaboration is an activity with a purpose.

Enterprise search technology will grow. The most neglected aspect within organizations is enterprise search. With the workplace more easily digitizing all of its content through collaboration technology, and with better analytics helping to determine what is truly important, enterprise search technologies will become even more critical. Organizations need to wade through massive amounts of information to pick out the proverbial needle in-the-haystack. Using analytics, enterprise search can become much more intelligent about how valuable certain data is relative to other data, as opposed to the current common method of using graph analysis and word count/ location to determine relevance.