 The phrase "collaboration software" was at the peripheries of business tech discussions only a few years ago, with a handful of players like HyperOffice, and recently introduced Google Apps. But since then, the collaboration space has exploded with such a force, that even those who saw this as a wave of the future, couldn't have anticipated the extent. Apart from numerous studies indicating at the growing adoption of collaboration technology within businesses, the number of big names making a beeline to enter this market gives you an idea of how hot the market is. The last year has seen the following mega players enter the market - Microsoft BPOS (Microsoft), Lotus Live (IBM), Acrobat.com (Adobe), Google Wave (Google). Apart from the fact that these solutions serve the universal and growing business need of "collaboration" it is hard to compare them, such is the variance of approaching the collaboration problem. A recent article on ebizQ called the "collaboration continuum" attempts to place all of these solutions in a single concetual framework. And if that wasnt enough, the last week itself saw three new players plunge into the collaboration market! These are WebEx Mail (Cisco), Chatter (Salesforce) and Pulse (Novell). Boy it surely is getting crowded in here!Â
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