http://dashes.com/anil/Report: Enterprise 2.0 Apps Will Dramatically Fall in Price
Richard, thanks as always for an astute analysis. I agree wholeheartedly with the trends that Forrester is identifying, but as you might expect, I would argue strenously with the effect you're describing for Six Apart.Put simply, the downward pressure on Enterprise 2.0 platform pricing is something that we're aggressively driving at Six Apart, especially with Movable Type, and as a result, I think we'll be the biggest beneficiaries.For example, the social features on top of the Movable Type platform were previously available as a higher end solution called the Community Solution. With our last release, we folded them all into MT Pro, which starts with simple commercial pricing and only ramps up if a client wants to purchase an Enterprise license for additional management features. That's a model we've followed for years, with innovative features falling down the price curve from the high end to the standard commercial license and then eventually into free or open source offerings.At the same time, as you've outlined, we're providing deeper and deeper integration. Oracle's blogging community, for example, is powered by Movable Type because it offers integration with key platform pieces like Oracle's database layer. That's something unique among serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms and again drives adoption versus the less complete, more expense, more complicated Enterprise 2.0 suites offered by traditional enterprise vendors.And that, perhaps is the biggest thing missing from your comparison of the factors driving down adoption costs for this tech: We can do this because Six Apart is a smaller company with less overhead than the traditional tech vendors, who are optimized for suite sales that cost millions of dollars for software licenses, and millions more for integration and deployment. Our typical engagements are a fraction of that cost, even when you factor in the increasing popularity of our professional services.So we think it's fantastic news if the cost-per-seat for enterprise blogging software is dropping -- that's happening in large part because Movable Type dominates this space and lets you power an unlimited number of blogs. And it does so at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to build even a portion of this capability on, for example Sharepoint.Finally, I'd argue that, with all due respect, Automattic and WordPress are almost entirely irrelevant to the conversation about Enterprise 2.0. Popular as they may be for tech geeks or individual bloggers, no serious enterprise would consider that platform. WordPress is consistently insecure, meaning an average of a constant two to three week upgrade cycle just for maintenance, without adding any new features. Worse, the vaunted partnership that you'd mentioned as "taking on Six Apart" less than two years ago has completely collapsed. Despite Automattic's own founder and CEO assuring your readers of their interest in this market, and despite KnowNow being the sole provider of enterprise support for WordPress, KnowNow has gone completely out of business and their site doesn't even redirect to any other options. Frankly, I don't fault Automattic for focusing on other markets, as the enterprise is a tough market to break into if you're not serious about it. But I think it's pretty clear that enterprises would never choose a platform with that kind of track record.The good news is, there is still plenty of great competition in the enterprise 2.0 space, and nobody's further ahead in creating a great social publishing platform than we are at Six Apart. In a tough economy when businesses are running very tight budgets, we think that strongly favors Movable Type as the platform of choice for driving down the costs of collaboration.
- Name
- Anil Dash
- Web
- www.anildash.com