Mid-Market Getting the Taste of Some Emerging Technologies
P.J. Jakovljevic - February 20, 2004

Looking at Emerging Technologies

Some still emerging and evolving enterprise software categories that the upper-end of the market has been modestly adopting have also very recently been embraced by vendors that cater to the lower-end of the market. One such technology is the suites that envelop a notable combination of technologies, such as document management (including basic document library functionality with version control and check-in and check-out abilities etc.), content management (for example, web content to be published), real-time collaborative team support (groupware, e-mail, instant messenger, calendaring, etc.), a portal framework, and information retrieval. Rather than being typical enterprise applications that "crunch" transactions using a relational database, these systems would go a mile further to support longstanding processes within and outside an enterprise that also entail real-time collaboration, expertise identification, location and management, knowledge management, community technology, business process management (BPM), and multi-channel access. These kind of suites may indicate an emergence of a new category of software that tackles enterprise relationship management (ERM), groupware or workplace collaboration management, and so on. Analysts at Gartner have suggested these be named as the nascent smart enterprise suite (SES) category...