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Robert Scoble has a really good 10 minute demo video of Newsgator's Enterprise (RSS) Server that integrates directly with Microsoft Sharepoint. He supplements that with one of his 'long and boring' (20 minutes) discussions with Newsgator's Dave Keller, general manager, and Chris Echelmeier, enterprise sales rep for the company.
It's interesting to note that while small businesses like mine tend to use consumer style applications like Google Reader, development companies like Newsgator are taking consumer app principles and applying them to solve enterprise problems behind the firewall.
The only issue I have with Newsgator is that in their current business model, they're targeting Fortune 5,000 (Dave's words) companies. It is unclear to me the extent to which they will go down the food chain but I suspect that Microsoft will take them a lot lower than they currently target. That's because Microsoft is betting a lot of its future enterprise class business on Sharepoint. Enterprise in Microsoft's world doesn't necessarily mean the 10,000 person business but could easily mean the 100 person company.
Pricing is interesting. On the demo call, Chris said that for a company like Microsoft with some 65,000 users, Enterprise Server combined with Sharepoint integration would come out at around $500,000 + 25% for a one time license plus annual support. That's around $10 per user. Quite how Newsgator will price in the SME market is unknown but as .
You can argue that RSS is not business critical. You can do a lot with RSS that helps enhance your knowledge and understanding of what's going on in and around the business. Also, as Chris points out, Newsgator Enterprise Server can be integrated to other J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) based systems like SAP's business suite. This means that companies running complex information systems can still surface information for use within their portal environments, using RSS as the exposure mechanism.
The big question is how companies will use the information they gain from this delivery method to perhaps build applications upon which they can take solid decisions.
- Will they use widgets as a way of easily composing new, lightweight RSS based apps?
- Will they integrate data from business intelligence applications?
- Will they by-pass business intelligence apps and take Excel development down a different path?
These are intriguing questions.
The accounting profession should be considering how they might usefully deploy RSS technologies. Not just for themselves behind the firewall but as a way of sharing information with the wider community of clients and other business stakeholders. If you have say 100 staff and 5,000+ clients, Newsgator might make an excellent investment.
Technorati Tags: Newsgator, Sharepoint
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