When Social Software Vendors Start Talking about Architecture, Something Is Changing

By Jeffrey Man Gartner Blog Network

I talk with a fair number of vendors every month about their collaboration and social software offerings. Usually, these briefings have a familiar pattern (the easiest to use, the most experienced management team, growing ecosystem of partners, logo slide with lots of customers…), but I’ve noticed something new starting to creep in. Rather than talking about the features and what customers have done with them, more vendors are talking about how they built their products.

I recently spoke separately with two vendors with newish offerings (Oracle with Beehive and Day Software with CQ5 Social Collaboration) who emphasize that rather than pulling together different products or evolving an existing offering, they started over and designed a new product on top of a solid repository. A clean technical architecture has not typically been a high priority from vendors in this space, who either leverage technology from a variety of sources, including open source, or have legacy products which they need to build upon. Rather than making a point of their long history or leveraging of proven technology from elsewhere, Oracle and Day emphasized the “clean sheet of paper” design approach.

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