What is interesting is that the report includes only those companies that have native applications on multiple mobile operating systems and have some sort of cloud-based solution.  Naturally this criteria is going to leave some companies out, like Apple, Microsoft, and RIM who target apps for one mobile OS.

The applications included in this Wave are somewhat of a melting pot.  Adobe’s Connect application is a leader and delivers web-based conferencing.  Comparing that application to Yammer, also a leader but more of a corporate-friendly Facebook, is kind of hard.  Box.com is a file sharing and synchronizing application which is completely different than Connect or Yammer.

Still, the collaboration space is a very broad market consisting of a variety of application types.  It is good to see an evaluation of these different companies not based just on the product they deliver, but on many other factors, such as strategy and market presence.

Forrester rates the leaders in these categories as follows:

• Current Offerings: Box, IBM, and Yammer
• Strategy: Skype, Box, Cisco, and Yammer
• Market Presence: Skype, Cisco, and Google

If you don’t have access to Forrester.com, you can read a quick review of this Wave on CMS Wire here.

• Organizations are demanding better user experiences in their portals.
• They see consumerization driving other products and want it for their portals.
• Mobile devices and the need for context-awareness are being demanded by users

What about cloud-based portals – is that in our future?  It certainly is!   Many vendors are starting to offer cloud-based portal systems. But beware!  The very nature of the portal is that it typically connects to a whole bunch of other systems in your organization behind your firewall.  So for a cloud-based portal to be effective, you will need to open up your internal systems to the cloud vendor and have some serious networking pipes. On the other hand, a cloud-based portal would be ideal to integrate your other cloud-based applications.

2015 is still a long way away, so what is happening between now and that future?  Here are the seven things that Gartner sees trending in the portal market over the next few years.

• Analytics need to be implemented to help gauge the effectiveness of the portal.  There has been a recent flurry of acquisitions in the Web Analytics market by traditional and newer portal vendors
• Portal-less Portals – there are several vendors beginning to offer portal type systems without claiming to be true portals.  Backbase is considered one of those vendors.  Adobe’s CQ5 could also qualify.
• Portal ubiquity – portals will become more ubiquitous as unbind their services
• Exploit context across more user attributes (aka enhanced personalization)
• Widgets are becoming more important and portlets less-so
• Mobile is becoming a key first consideration
• The User Experience Platform begins to emerge as a set of cohesive, pre-integrated, highly user interactive services rather than a bunch of products loosely coupled together.

Finally, in terms of vendors, we have basically three major portal vendors today:  IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.  Close behind are our open source friends Liferay and JBoss. As the market begins to move toward this UXP concept, we are going to see lots of other vendors emerge with UXP offerings.  Firms from the content management space are beginning to move toward UXP, as are firms in the Social Software, Mashups, Portal-less Portals and other Markets.

Here are some vendors to keep your eye on over the next few years:

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Liferay, Redhat JBoss, Backbase, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Apple, United Planet, JackBe, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Fatwire, Extron, Automony, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Jive, Atlassian, Telligent, SocialText.

What is driving the cloud?  It’s all coming out of web 2.0.  Web 2.o continues to improve and mature.  Technology like REST and Ajax help it.  The user or community based paradigms get better.

Portal and the Cloud

• The portal is aggregation friendly. Good for the cloud.
• It includes cloud capabilities.  Consuming web services is easy for them for example.
• It embraces WOA/REST.  You see this in RESTful services, widget support, mashups, etc.
• It supports MyPortal
• Social Software functions are critical and integrating these things.

Vendor Cloud Offerings

There are a number of major offerings by key vendors in the marketplace.

Microsoft

• Office Live
• Windows Live
• XBOX Live
• Exchange Online
• Sharepoint Online
• Office Communications Online
• Office Live Meeting
• Windows Azure – just launched 5 weeks ago.
• BPOS

There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of pieces. It’s hard to put it all together.  With MSFT, you have low level services like Azure up to middle and top tiers like Sharepoint Online.  This is a very broad strategy.   You can deploy most of this on premises, have MSFT deploy them for you in a hosted model, and then have the actual shared model like BPOS.

IBM

IBM has a number of offerings.

• Web Conferencing in Lotus Live
• Collaboration with Engage and connections
• Amazon EC2 to spin up portal, content, etc.
• He went through this really fast.  IBM offers a little more than he mentioned.

Google

Google calls it GAPE or Google Apps Premier Edition.  They want to make money with this offering. It comes from the consumer side. They want to make people use the web more and thus use MSFT less and less. Google makes more money when people are online.

• Gmail and Google Calendar
• Google Docs and Google Sites
• Google Video
• 25 GB account for mail. 10 gb + 500 mb for storage
• 99.9% uptime guarantee

Is it ready for prime time?  Gartner asks if the enterprise is ready for Google with it’s quick and nimble approach.  However, Google continues to enhance it’s product offerings:

• Postini acquisition for mail security and archive capability
• Migration support
• however, they had multiple outages last year.
• Not a huge amount are taking the plunge.
• iGoogle and Sites are out there. (Sites is the old Jotspot)
• Google Wave is interesting.   It’s not integrated with existing products though.  Gartner considers it a good proof of concept

Covisint

They are really one of the only ones who are pure play cloud.  They focus on a couple key industries.  They have horizontal offerings as well.

Adobe

Their key asset is their client site internet technologies like Flash, Flex, and PDF.  They are starting to offer cloud based services like acrobat and photoshop.com.  Jim Murphy sees them fleshing out collaboration and leveraging the analytics firm Omniture  to help the whole user experience.  (Note: Omniture isin my hometown of Orem Utah)

Models in the cloud

1. Cloud Friendly: I consume cloud services
2. Cloud based portal as a service: Portal in the cloud either hosted or like BPOS from MSFT or LotusLive from IBM
3. Public Cloud Deployable: this is spin up portal on Amazon EC2
4. Private Cloud for internal use: Create your own private cloud and spin it up.
5. Private Cloud for external use: Same thing but different constituents.

Life Beyond the Titans

It’s not just IBM and Microsoft

• Cisco is entering
• Jive has been here a while
• Oracle has some offerings
• Force.com
• Amazon
• AT&T
• Yahoo!
• Facebook
• and a bunch more