Large enterprise vendors, pure-play start ups, or open-source? This was the question driving a lot of debate in Boston last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. With capable offerings from all three camps how should a company decide which path to take?

The answer isn't easy and in some cases the right choice might be a combination, or even  all three.

Enterprise Vendors go head-to-head

Day one started off with a head-to-head between IBM (Lotus Connections) and Microsoft (SharePoint). Suzanne Minassian stepped up first to present a comprehensive and polished demo of Lotus Connections. She covered a lot of ground, ticking all of the right Enterprise 2.0 boxes showing people profiles, wiki integration, tagging, bookmarking, search and more, all within a seamless and clean user interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Lawrence Liu struggled to win over the crowd with his PowerPoint slides and clunky SharePoint examples. Comments, analysis and opinion flooded in. Susan Scrupski found Microsoft's demo "uninspiring" but felt that IBM "clearly 'got it" she also noted IBM had "a terrific UI, more 2.0 features than I could even keep up".

An in depth analysis can be found at CIO.com where C.G. Lynch concludes that "SharePoint needs work with its social computing features" and conducts a follow-up interview with Rob Curry, Microsoft's director of SharePoint. David Hobbie has also reported on the session providing a detailed summary.

Microsoft didn't gain many new fans in Boston, missing the social focus that attendees were expecting. However, it is important to frame these products correctly: SharePoint is a platform that provides an underlying infrastructure to build upon. Two of the most popular end-user case studies presented (Wachovia and Lockheed Martin) both used SharePoint as the foundation for their Enterprise 2.0 deployments. Like most Microsoft platforms, it's the independent 3rd party vendors (ISVs) that bring it to life through add-on applications and/or custom development.

A vendor leading in the SharePoint space is Newsgator with their Social Sites solution. Look out for a significant SharePoint/Social-Sites case study coming from Microsoft soon.

Pure Players

As the Enterprise 2.0 market continues to evolve specialist vendors emerge to fill the gaps left by traditional enterprise software companies. Two of the most prominent 'pure-play' vendors at the conference, each of a similar size and age, were Atlassian and Jive. Both were highly visible with Jeffrey Walker and Sam Lawrence each presenting sessions or participating in panel discussions. As focussed specialists they have the advantage of agility over large enterprise vendors such as IBM and Microsoft, furthermore they are delivering what their customers want (and need) today. Solutions from these pure-play vendors promise an 'out-of-the-box' Enterprise 2.0 experience.

Michael Krigsman (ZDNet) discussed the importance of the 'Enterprise' part of Enterprise 2.0 in a follow-up interview with Jive's Sam Lawrence. Sam reinforced the need for smaller vendors to understand the complex environments that make up enterprise IT and that enterprises "need to see the business value, and it needs to fit into what they're building". Matt Asay profiled both Atlassian and Jive earlier this year in his CNET article debating 'The future of enterprise software'.

Other specialist vendors present in Boston were Socialtext (Enterprise Wiki), ThoughtFarmer (focussed around Intranets), Trampoline (bringing social networking to the enterprise), and Attensa (an enterprise RSS platform).

Open Source

Open-Source software is empowering - If you come across something you don't like, you can fix it yourself. This was a key factor for Sony's Ned Lerner who used open source extensively in his Enterprise 2.0 implementation, he said "Open-Source is like a safety-net, if it's not quite right we can fix it". For Sony, the Open-Source approach provided integration opportunities that closed-source commercial software never could. Another Open-Source example was from the CIA where MediaWiki (the engine behind Wikipedia) provided the foundation for their Intellipedia project. Bill Ives provides a summary and more links.

More and more commercial companies are forming to provide commercial services based around open-source software, examples are Alfresco, SugarCRM and Acquia. This model can provide the best of both worlds - an open, customisable code-base along with commercial support and services. A hybrid model is also beginning to emerge - Atlassian and Jive are just two examples of commercial software companies that include access to their source code when you buy their products, clearly seeing the advantage this brings to their customers.

Final Thoughts

Large enterprises have complex IT infrastructure. Systems have often evolved over a number of years and consist of many applications running on a diverse mix of vendor platforms. This brings significant challenges around integration, security and management.

As open standards around data-portability and integration become more common some of these challenges will become easier to overcome. Adherence to standards should be high on the assessment check-list for any new product or solution - not just Enterprise 2.0. Key questions to ask are "How do I integrate with my existing systems?", "How do I integrate with my existing data-sources?", and "How do I get my data out if it all goes wrong?".

Were you in Boston? Let us know your thoughts on this topic in our comments section.

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