Ektron takes Enterprise 2.0 back to the portal

June 30, 2010 — 7:29am ET | By Ron Miller

Tools

Tags
Web Content Management
Sharepoint
Ektron
Intranet
Kathleen Reidy

Ektron announced a new product recently called eIntranet, a tool that takes Enterprise 2.0 functionality and packages it inside a portal framework. The package includes standard Enterprise 2.0 tools such as micro-blogging, Facebook-style timelines and Wikis for collaboration. The portal comes into play with analytics, widgets and integration with back-end enterprise applications.

Kathleen Reidy of the 451 Group thinks that Ektron is targeting Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) SharePoint customers with this offering, but they are also going after what she see as a soft, underserved area of the market. She writes in her report, Ektron steps into SharePoint's crosshairs with new eIntranet app:

"Ektron sees Intranets as an underserved opportunity (about one-third of Ektron's business today comes from Intranets and extranets). It is hard to argue with the point that most organizations have Intranets that are static and in need of a revamp. So Ektron may well get some traction with this new app, particularly since so few of its competitors focus on this use case."

Reidy could be right, but I'm not so sure people want a portal framework. The idea is to move away from the larger system like this, but if she's right and this is a place where some customers are more comfortable implementing this technology, than perhaps Ektron can exploit a market need. As Reidy points out, most of the other pure web content management players are concentrating on marketing aspects of the tools.

If, however, as Reidy says, they are competing directly with Microsoft, I'm not sure they can be successful because SharePoint has too much pull in this area. Ektron believes it has found an area where it can find some traction, but if it tries to take on Microsoft, it will be very hard to win.

For more information:
- see the Ektron press release

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