http://tinyurl.com/237pqg

The challenge for enterprises remains the same - do they go in for niche vendors or the incumbent ones. I don’t think features alone determine the leader - Trampoline holds great promise though!!

I still believe that we have not even scratched the surface as to what can be achieved in using the full potential of The Enterprise Cloud.
I only wish I could find some like-minded developers or Companies based in London, with whom I could share my vision.

“BEA’s social computing platform … also automatically tracks users’ workplace activities from tagging documents, to completing tasks and connecting with colleagues”

BEA’s “automatic tracking” only covers manually asserted data such as tags and task status. This is in no way equivalent to the sophisticated analysis of email, documents, wikis and blogs that SONAR does. SONAR is the *only* enterprise social network that automatically picks up what people are working on and which contacts they’re collaborating with.

“the BEA solution is also built for true enterprise requirements such as sophisticated security and pre-built integration with existing systems.”

You imply that SONAR is not built for true enterprise requirements. On the contrary, it was rigorously designed to meet enterprise security and inter-operability requirements from the outset. SONAR works with a full range of mainstream enterprise systems, unlike certain competitors which are tied to a single vendor’s stack. A sign of how seriously Trampoline takes security is that our VP Development is none other than Peter Biddle, the former Microsoft executive responsible for BitLocker (the single most important security innovation in Windows Vista).

“While Trampoline seems to have some neat visualization technology, a lot their “big brother” packet sniffing seems to be another version of Visual Path”

Of course there’s no packet sniffing in SONAR. It’s depressing to see (much larger) competitors stoop to scare tactics of this kind. Meanwhile on the privacy front SONAR has a straightforward opt-in privacy model so every user is completely in control of what’s shared and what is kept private. Not exactly “big brother”.

Is BEA by any chance feeling rattled because a London start-up has come up with a product that makes AquaLogic seem somewhat stale by comparison? We’re flattered!

The Global 1000 market for Enterprise 2.0 is still highly segmented between companies just exploring and companies ready to take the plunge, check out this just released assessment tool that provides companies with best practices, tips and case studies around their Enterprise 2.0 needs: http://getsocial.bea.com.

While Trampoline seems to have some neat visualization technology, a lot their “big brother” packet sniffing seems to be another version of Visual Path which did not succeed in the enterprise.

Systems that mine email traffic (but not content) and other activities to passively determine relationships can be used to answer the “who knows X” question. You can read about some of these systems, including Contact Networks, Visible Path, and BranchIT, in my blog at http://tinyurl.com/53payk

Social networking in the law firm is also important. Lawyers consume a lot of media, mainly in the form of practice area journals and news. Social networking can allow lawyers to “follow” each other. For example, if I see that a senior partner in my group is subscribed to (and maybe has even commented on) a particular resource, chances are it’s important. And if it is important to the senior partner, then the junior associates should be interested in it also. You can read about some of this in my blog, too. Here: http://tinyurl.com/3k3qm6
-LawyerKM

Bring it to the States, tho, along with Pret a Manger and snooker.