IBM Adds SocialText and Atlassian to Lotus

In the battle for dominance in the business Intranet market, Microsoft SharePoint has clearly pulled ahead. Companies no longer want to build an Intranet themselves, and are turning to pre-packaged solutions to provide enterprise search and content management as well as manage collaboration and forms.

IBM, however, still considers themselves in the game, regardless of the market share that SharePoint has amassed, and announced last week at Lotusphere that they would be partnering with both Atlassian and SocialText to extend their Lotus platform.

The announcement, which puts both major players squarely in the "Web 2.0 is good for business" camp, is interesting, because with IBM's announcement, they added two partners who were already working with Microsoft (who joined forces with Atlassian's Confluence and SocialText along with NewsGator's Social Sites back in October of last year).

IBM has actually been using Confluence for wikis on their corporate site, so the choice of adding functionality to Lotus Connections to allow it to work with Confluence makes good business sense. The announcement stated that they would be rolling out the new features internally before making it available to customers already using Lotus Notes, but it's obvious that IBM is racing to catch up with Microsoft in this space, and using the same vendors to try to close the gap. They also took advantage of one of the biggest features of Web 2.0 by announcing Lotus Mashups as well, allowing further extensibility of their platform.

The real issue for IBM at this point is how far behind they are. I've seen at least one local consulting house move almost exclusively to SharePoint consulting rather than using custom-built solutions for businesses, which is at least a hint of the hype surrounding SharePoint. IBM's addition of two established players certainly shows that they've done their research, but at this point, they may be too far behind.

It's obvious at this point, however, that social computing can play a huge role in managing your business, with companies clamoring to provide the solution for you. Whether any other players can join the space remains to be seen, however.

<i>Edited 27 January 2008 to correct typo</i>