Oracle's introduction of the
Beehive enterprise collaboration platform last week promises to
give IT departments the ability to collaborate with customers and
suppliers more effectively.
The product will allow companies to share data between their
ERP systems and e-mail, voicemail, instant messaging
systems.
Companies can use information in these documents to
automatically trigger business processes in their ERP software. For
example, Beehive could allow a company to automatically capture
e-mails from a customer in its customer relationship management
system, or capture address details to automatically update a
shipping address.
Beehive puts Oracle in a similar position to Google, which is
attempting to offer end-users an
alternative to Microsoft desktop software.
Oracle is not the only company forging links between ERP and
groupware software.
SAP has developed Duet, which bolts on to Outlook to allow
staff to use their Outlook contact address book database for CRM
and HR tasks.
Oracle, rather than bolt on its ERP business processes to an
existing e-mail platform such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus
Domino, is positioning Beehive as replacement for these
products.
This means IT directors will need to assess whether the benefits
of Beehive justify discarding their existing e-mail systems. Unlike
rival platforms such as Duet, or the integration features in
Exchange and Domino, Beehive is built using a
service oriented architecture (SOA). This should minimise the
programming effort required to integrate telephone and e-mail
correspondence with enterprise software.
"Beehive can be integrated and embedded into many different
elements of a corporate architecture, rather than being a
standalone collaboration software island," says David Mitchell,
senior vice-president at analyst firm Ovum.
Ray Wang, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester
Research, says, "Companies with existing collaboration and
e-mail-based approaches might consider limited deployments of
Beehive."
However, Wang believes Beehive may find a niche in newer
companies that have not standardised on Exchange or Domino.
People may not be ready to discard their investment in Exchange,
but Beehive's built-in security and ability to integrate with
enterprise applications using a SOA may convince some IT
directors.